The Family Recipe

Chapter 8

CHAPTER 8

1980, Orange County, California

For the last four years, Huey and Duc were thick as thieves. Often mistaken for brothers, they bounced around New Orleans, Oklahoma City, back up to Philadelphia, even stopping for a brief stint out in San Jose before making their way down south to Orange County and settling there for a brief blip in time. But Orange County’s Little Saigon made them small fish in a big pond. In order for them to get to where they wanted in life, they had to be somewhere with less competition.

For money, sometimes they worked as deckhands on fishing boats, but the bulk of their income came from running small scams here and there, some of which came dangerously close to becoming big ones, big enough to get them noticed by local police. Huey and Duc weren’t proud when they ran scams on their own people, refugees who had just arrived and couldn’t speak a lick of English. But they chalked it up to surviving, and tried their best to absolve their guilt by going to temple more, lighting incense and praying to the Buddha to help them find peace one day. They reasoned that had their victims gotten the chance, they’d have scammed the hell out of them, too, for a little cash and some beer.

Anything goes after surviving war, right?

But after their last scam, which left an old Vietnamese grandmother penniless, they realized they had to change their ways. The woman even knew she was being scammed, and yet she forgave them, blaming herself for her stupidity. That was when Huey knew it was time to stop; he kept seeing his own mother’s face. He was never again going to see his mother, who had stayed back in Vietnam, nor would he see the old woman ever again. Instead both women’s faces haunted him at night.

On their last night in Orange County, Huey and Duc brown-bagged some 40 oz. and headed to the beach. They often went when no one else was around. Not once had they been able to see the Pacific Ocean during the day.

“We need to do something else for a living. It just doesn’t sit right with me anymore,” Huey said tentatively, taking a swig of beer—it tasted so cheap it nearly gagged him. It was worse than the Ba Ba Ba beer from back in Vietnam. God, how he missed Vietnam. Even the shit beer back there was better than the shit beer here. “Anh, we can’t keep stealing money, only to spend it on this shit. It’s not even worth it.”

Duc laughed and agreed, and the two men sat in silence for a bit. Huey watched as Duc grabbed fistfuls of sand, and let the grains slip through his fingers. The sand somehow formed musical notes in the air and flew gracefully east. Huey imagined the sands somehow landing on the shores of Da Nang, on the other side of the world, where home was. Where his mother was, and where the last remnants of his old life lay buried alongside the sea of dead soldiers. Huey wished he was musically inclined; he would have sent his mother her favorite song.

“Okay,” Duc agreed, after he was halfway through the bottle. Before he was even done with the first beer, he pulled out another from inside his jacket. Huey watched as he started it almost immediately, leaving the old one to sink into the sand. “I got a second cousin down in Texas. He said there’s work for us if we want it. We won’t make a lot, but it’s something. For now.”

“What kind of work?” Huey asked, but he was afraid of the answer. As much as he blindly followed Duc, he often wondered how far he was willing to go.

“There’s a job for us down near the Gulf. A few jobs. A crab factory, a crab restaurant. Or we can join my cousin’s shrimping boat,” Duc said. “Hell, maybe we can get our own boat one day, go off on our own, and start our own business.”

Huey thought about the first time he met Duc, back in Louisiana, on the rusty commercial fishing boat the Lady Freedom . They had experienced their first bout of casual racism together, and he remembered being in awe at how easily Duc brushed it off. Duc even promised that they’d become so rich one day, they’d buy that boat and fire everyone. There was strength in ignoring the outside world, strength in dreaming. How did he do it?

“What would our boat be called?”

Duc shrugged. “Is it too on the nose to call it The Yellow Submarine ?”

Huey let the joke sink in a little bit more, and he let out an uproarious laugh. “Not at all, anh, not at all. Which part of Texas are we heading to?”

“Seadrift.”

“Seadrift?” Huey asked. The name felt foreign but familiar, just like everything in America. It suddenly clicked, two puzzle pieces snapping into place. “Hold on a minute. Are you crazy? Isn’t that the place where those two Vietnamese fishermen brothers killed that white fisherman? Why the fuck would we head there? They hate us down there.”

Duc shrugged so casually again, Huey wanted to punch him. “Yeah, but they were acquitted. It was self-defense. What’s the big deal?”

“Who cares? It’s not safe for us to be there.”

“Is it safe for us to be anywhere in America?”

“You really think we can make good money down there?”

“They need people at the crab factory and there are jobs on boats,” Duc said. “Pick your poison. People are too scared to keep working there.”

Huey’s stomach dropped. Duc’s flippancy toward heading to a domestic battleground unnerved him. As if he didn’t care about his surroundings, the politics, or anything current that was happening. Texas was the last unexplored state they had on their proverbial list of states in America. But Huey wasn’t immune to what was happening down in Seadrift. Whispers, rumors, word of mouth, run-of-the-mill gossip, and regular tales being shared around the gambling table had told them of how the Vietnamese were being treated in Texas, especially the fishermen. Ever since the two brothers, Nguyen Van Sau and Nguyen Van Chinh, were acquitted of any charges after shooting and killing a white fisherman in self-defense, the town of Seadrift was wrought with racial tension between the Vietnamese fishermen and the locals.

But to head down to Seadrift in the middle of a local, domestic war—after just escaping from one—was madness, suicidal even. But Duc was Duc, and Huey knew he would follow Duc until the end. He was the only family Huey had.

Huey stared out into the pitch-black ocean. The light from the stars couldn’t shine enough to see anything. What creatures lurked beneath the waters?

“My father was a fisherman, you know,” Huey said, with sadness in his voice. “I remember him telling me he never wanted me to become a fisherman, either.”

“So was my father, anh,” Duc said, finally letting go of his toughness. “He said the same thing to me, too.”

The men lost themselves in the waves, crashing against one another, thunderous but gentle, until they brushed up against the shore and the sound crescendoed and fell. Huey listened and listened to the echoing of the waves, hoping to find his father’s voice hidden in there, giving him one more piece of advice. There was a nagging feeling about following Duc into hell, and Huey wondered what his father would think about Duc. But his father wasn’t here. Duc was. Huey knew he had no choice but to go back to the ocean. The money was running out, and they needed steady income. He just hoped Duc wasn’t a monster hiding beneath the surface.

“To Texas then,” Huey said, resigned.

The two of them clinked their beers and tried their best to enjoy their last night in California before heading out in the morning. Though they never talked about the old woman again, they couldn’t help but both wonder if she was still at her kitchen table, calling herself ngu ng?c over and over again, until the sun came up, and they began to wonder if they were ngu ng?c for heading to Seadrift and gambling their lives for just a little bit of coin. They’d left Vietnam without a second thought, tired of war, but now they had to prepare for a different kind of war.