Summer

By Bao Nguyen

When I was younger, on one of my trips back to Vietnam, my grandmother said to me, “You look so different. I’m old, but I haven’t forgotten how you looked when you were a child.” She was reclining in her hammock, floating side to side with a perpetual indifference to the summer heat. She was old, and light, and so were her words; and she said to me with a faint smile, “When you grow old, will you forget how I look?” The next summer, we caught word of her passing. They said it was peaceful; she smiled like she always did. But it meant nothing to me. I saw her once every so many years; she was a stranger and I did not shed a single tear for her.

The next summer, my fifteenth year, I started working at my first job. It was a food court restaurant in Waikiki’s International Marketplace that illegally paid $5.75 an hour to a fifteen year old without a work permit. There was a strange desire to start working. I wasn’t in any need for money, but somehow turning fifteen meant the road towards adulthood and at the time, perhaps, working was some sort of a manifestation for maturity.

The owner was a Vietnamese man who managed two of the restaurants there, one where my sister had previously worked and was able to get me the job. We sold Japanese noodles and rice dishes, as well as pizza and pasta. It was a repulsive combination, but what horrified me was the line of customers who would not question the quality of Italian and Japanese food served by Vietnamese people in a single restaurant. I did everything there, from making the pizza and pasta, to working the register, washing dishes, and taking out the trash. It was hard work from morning to evening. And all this I learned within the first week.

That first week, I also met the cook.
He was a gruff, old man, unshaven most days as if to make up for the lack of hair on his head which he concealed with an old University of Hawaii Rainbows cap. He coughed a lot, something I thought a cook should not be doing. When I met him, I immediately disliked him. Unlike everyone else, he did not introduce himself to me. In fact, I wasn’t sure for a while if he realized I was new. He would never tag the items he sent out from the kitchen with the respective receipt, despite my pleas for him to do so. “Just get used to it,” he said.
I hated him, I thought.

After about a month, I became accustomed to the way things worked. I even started to not hate so much the fact that the bus rides were always through congested Waikiki traffic. But one Saturday night, it was raining hard. Before I could ask for an umbrella, everyone had gone off to their cars and I found myself standing in back of the restaurant under a small covering, cold and wet from the rain that swept in with the wind. The bus stop was across the street at the end of the block, but in the dark of that night, with only a few lampposts illuminating the violent lines of water, it had seemed farther away than ever.
I took half a step, readying myself to run for it. Another step for the sprint, and then a horn shot out. The noise came from two shining beams of light that moved closer, revealing itself: a white Nissan minivan. And inside, an old man in a plastic raincoat rolled down his window yelling “Hurry and get in!”

My legs sped for the car door and a second later, I was on my way home, dripping water on the passenger seat of the cook’s minivan. He rolled up the windows, save for a small opening so the smoke from his cigarette would have some destination to reach before it wistfully parted this world. And as I watched the smoke hover around us, moving to song of the rain, I softly said thank you, to which he replied “Don’t get used to it.” His words sounded strange, like they were words I had never heard before.

I gave directions to my apartment and he began talking. The storm had brought on a car accident along the road, giving us time to kill. He talked, and to my surprise, he said a lot. He spoke about the terrible weather and weathermen, the dangers of teenage drivers, and how kids today are spoiled. I sat there listening, not saying anything more than “Yes” and “I see.” I really couldn’t say more. The man next to me was not the cook I had known, the cook I despised. As he carried on his own conversation, he would give occasional chuckles, eventually leading to rough laughter that would be cut off by rasp coughing. There was this indescribable loneliness in him that I could see in his eyes and his hands, that sadness that I remember seeing in old people in nursing homes who have been forgotten by their children and their children’s children. And it was not that I felt sorry for him, but his excitement to speak and converse, even if it was mostly with himself, gave me the notion that he had a reservoir of emotions with little outlet.

He said “Kids today are so spoiled; they don’t know how to work for anything. But you,” and he turned to me. “It’s good that you work now, you know? Good parents don’t work hard so that their kids have it easy. They work hard as an example, damn it.” He turned back to the wheel and sniffed, as if he was crying.
We were nearing my house and I decided to carry some of the conversation as thanks for the ride home. I asked him, “What about your kids?”
“Why do you think I have kids?”
“You have a van, don’t you?”
He was silent for a bit; quiet, as if he was delicately placing the response together in his head, a mess of a puzzle from his memories. And finally he said, “I had a kid.” We had arrived, but I sat there, waiting for him to continue. It felt wrong to ask a question and not wait for the full answer.

“I had a wife and a daughter, you know. Back in Vietnam. I came over here some years after the war, but I couldn’t take my family yet. No money, you know?” He spoke so softly and delicately, his words betraying the rough whiskers on his wrinkled face and the veins that lined his arms. “And I worked hard, so hard, you know? So I can make money to bring my wife and my kid. I bought this car for my daughter, you know? So we can all go out and I want to show her Ala Moana beach and Waikiki.” His voice was already breaking and I could see tears reflecting the streetlights as they shivered on the edge of his eyes, but never falling. He did not look at me, but stared out through the windshield, his eyes searching the streets for something, perhaps a fragment of a memory, or an explanation for things that I could not come close to understanding. “But then a flood, you know? A flood drowned them, my wife and my daughter.” He paused. “Life is so funny like that you know?”
No, I didn’t know. But I couldn’t tell him.

I said goodbye to him and that I was sorry for his loss, as if I had brought on the waters that flooded his village, but for a moment, as I stepped out of the car, I wished that I had caused such a disaster, so as to give him someone to blame, and provide in audible words an apology that the heavens did not. That night, I could not sleep very well. I thought of my family, perhaps a flood or an earthquake, and I would lose everyone and be alone. I thought up silly but terrifying scenarios, and then I thought of the cook and what he was thinking of that night, as he lay in an empty room of an empty house, with only old pictures hung on fading walls to wake up to in the mornings.

The following week it continued to rain and the cook offered me a ride home every night. I was able to comfortably talk and joke with him. We spent our breaks in the back of the restaurant, squatting against the wall, watching tourists futilely make sense of Waikiki’s winding streets and alleyways. Sometimes I would see him smoking, the wind fluttering his apron, and his eyes fixed against the skies, narrowed like he was trying to make clear an image between the blue and white expansion above. And sometimes, the smoke of his cigarette hung still around him, the smoke that must have been so familiar to him by then; and he seemed so fragile, I feared that the wind might break him, like smoke dispersing with every gust. But he seemed lighter everyday, as if slowly he was lifting some kind of burden that had hunched him for the past few years.

As the new school year crept closer and the long summer days began to lose steam, I was faced with the decision whether or not I would stay at the restaurant. It was hard work, but enjoyable enough to make the decision a difficult one. However, a few weeks before school started, the cook began a streak of missing work. My boss would grumble every time, accusing him of laziness and fooling around with some whore. Apparently, as I came to learn, the cook had been known for sudden absences, but my boss had never fired him. Eventually, the cook came in, but only for one day. He coughed more than usual and I found him outside often, breathing heavily. The next day, he did not come in.

And then one week before school started, I learned the cook had died. Found dead in his apartment by his landlord, according to my boss’s wife as she gossiped over the phone at work. Cancer, she said. Or was it a tumor? Maybe his lungs, he smoked a lot. Always coughing. Good riddance, he was a lazy man anyways.

She was merciless.
And I, standing in the kitchen, I was nothing more than surprised. I washed the dishes that day and took the bus home early. I thought nothing of the man, how he died, how he was found. What was death to me then? Death was nothing more than news of my grandmother’s state thousands of miles away, each mile giving me reasons to not be involved. I had only known him for a summer anyways. And that night, I think I had slept well.

But the next day, as I came into work, I had a sudden impulse to turn towards the kitchen and greet the cook. He was not there. And then suddenly, I felt an emptiness hit hard, somewhere in my chest and making its way up to my throat. It was the sudden realization that I would not longer see the cook, that I could no longer yell at him for making the wrong dishes or hear him laughing hard behind the kitchen window when I would burn my hand on the pizza oven; I could never again watch him artfully light a cigarette in the back as the summer sun beamed against his eyes, making him squint and grin. And I will never have the chance to ask him what it is about smoking in the cool air that makes him smile or why he works so hard having lost so much. Throughout the day, I would turn, expecting to see him, hear him, speak to him. But the front area of the restaurant had never seemed so large and empty, and when I ate lunch, it was bitter and terrible and nothing like what the cook would make.

As I left that day, I told my boss I would no longer work when school starts. It started to drizzle and by the time I made it to the bus stop, it poured. In the midst of the humid evening air and the familiar cold of the rain, I sat there, wondering if the cook would see his family. I wondered if his daughter would look like how he remembered her, small and fragile, or if she would be older, older and more mature, able to understand the sweat and blood of her father who worked so hard for her. Mature, unlike me, the generation of the spoiled, who have no regard for the hardships of those before us. Until then, the dead and dying were only faces in movies and television, and when they died theatrically, no one would ever forget. But who will remember the cook’s death? Who will remember his life? Who will stand over his grave and assure everyone that despite his tough exterior, he once was and always will be of noble character and misunderstood passion? And it was then that my grandmother’s words came back to me. I had forgotten her, because I never knew her. But in the cold of that night, she appeared before me as clear as the day I stood next to her hammock in the searing heat of Vietnam’s summer. I could see her lying there, gently gliding like a pendulum just before it stops completely; her frail hands that brought a family through the war, her calloused feet that trekked the unforgiving soils of Vietnam, and her tired heart that will never experience the comfort of living I complain about everyday. But as she lay there before me, I could not remember her face. I could not tell if she was smiling. I tried hard, but I could not remember. And at that realization, I wept.

I was only fifteen then, and under the summer rain, I sat at the bus stop waiting for the bus, but expecting a white minivan.