The Family Recipe

Chapter 1

CHAPTER 1

No matter what, the Fresh Prince of Bellaire, Jude Tr?n, would be the first of the five Tr?n siblings to arrive at his father’s gated compound. Today was not the day to be unpunctual. His father, Duc Tr?n, had summoned all of his children home for the first time in a decade, which only meant that he finally finished his will. As the firstborn and only son, Jude would stand to inherit it all—the money, the mansion, and the family business, Duc’s Sandwiches.

Jude swerved his leased Audi convertible through the wide lanes of River Oaks, Houston’s leafiest and most luxurious zip code, which was protected by oil millionaire Texans on one side and unsavory state senators on the other. He knew the route to his father’s McMansion well, because when Jude was a child, his father would take him and his four sisters on long drives through the “nice part of town” in his clunky Oldsmobile. It reeked of cigarettes and there were yellow stains on the carpeted roof to match.

Whenever the children looked up at the roof, they imagined the amorphous stains to be topological maps, reminding them that they’d rather be anywhere in the world than stuck inside the stuffy car with their eccentric father. From behind the wheel, Duc would critique each mansion along the way, a stump of a cigarette precariously hanging from his lips, and proclaim that rich people had no taste. He left the windows rolled all the way down, accidentally ashing the children in the face from all angles. Squeezed together in the back, they swatted away the smoke plumes, unable to escape their father’s sermon of the day. Duc had sworn up and down that the moment he became rich, he’d offer an obscene amount of cash to one of these white homeowners, kick them out, and turn it into the prettiest house on the block.

And that was exactly what Duc did. Except their house became the gaudiest one.

Duc always had big, lofty, American, Texas-size dreams of achieving wealth. He made empty promises, which, crazily enough, turned into a harsh reality. He miraculously moved the family out of Jude’s childhood neighborhood of Bellaire—or the “Aire”—and into a new zip code that came with its own set of invisible, priggish rules, which none of them had been prepared for. Especially not their mother.

Jude felt a small shiver go down his spine as he allowed himself to think about his mother for the first time all year. He remembered how comically petite she was, how her hair always smelled like rotten eggs, always fresh off a new perm set, and the way she hugged them after they cried whenever they were forced to hug their father. Jude shook his head, kicked out the intrusive thoughts, and straightened the wheel in time, just as an oncoming car honked nervously at him while flashing its headlights. He nodded an apology at the passing driver, a middle-aged woman in a luxury car, face hidden behind sunglasses so large he couldn’t tell where her face began and ended. With all the southern hospitality she was raised on, the woman raised her left hand—despite being weighed down with a ring that was at least three carats—and, with a perfect French tip, flipped Jude off. She held the finger at half-mast, slowing down her car, just to wave her finger up and down, side to side, and even diagonally, to ensure he had eyes on it at all times.

He fought the urge to return the gesture, but he’d spent his teenage years attempting to fit into this zip code, so he pretended he didn’t see it. Unable to find a resolution with his emotions, and wanting to curb his rising anger, he just blamed his mother for all his troubles, as he usually did. He blamed his mother for making him think of her and distracting him in the moment. His mother’s absence made it easier to put all of the world’s troubles squarely on her shoulders. She certainly hadn’t thought about him in the past two decades since she walked away from the family, so it was only fair all his anger was aimed at her. But the moment the driver was out of sight, he raised his hand and flipped her right back, gesturing to no one but an empty road and his own reflection in the rearview mirror. His dark brown eyes seared back at him. His face was overly tanned from the summer rays with a fresh crop of the wrinkles that appeared when one turned thirty-four.

As Jude pressed down on the gas, his father’s mansion appeared quickly on the horizon, sticking out like a weed amid a sea of manicured lawns. It reeked of new money. You could take Duc out of the countryside of south Vietnam, but you couldn’t take the countryside of south Vietnam out of Duc. His mansion loomed over Jude as he whizzed past the pièce de résistance of Duc’s collection in the middle of the lawn: a replica statue of Michelangelo’s David , holding up both the American flag and the Vietnamese flag (the prewar version, of course).

Jude knew being on time was important to his father, who had only been late seven times in his life: when he missed out on the births of each of his five children, when he was late to his first wedding, and then to his second wedding. But other than those times, Duc had never been late.

Just as Jude pulled into the driveway, he felt sucker punched, and immediately his body began putting up defenses. He wasn’t the first of the Tr?n children to arrive after all. Standing in front of the arched wooden door were his four sisters, looking armed and ready for battle—whether against him or their patriarchal father, or both, Jude hadn’t a clue.

But there they were, the Four Horsewomen of the Apocalypse.

There was his oldest sister, Jane, who at thirty-one was still his forever archnemesis just as she had been when she was two years old. She stood protectively in front of his other sisters, always the pack lead, but ironically all bark and no bite. Then there was the second oldest at twenty-nine, Bingo, whom he was secretly afraid of, because her temper issues reminded him of their father. The third, at twenty-eight, Paulina, hovered above all the other sisters, clocking in at exactly 5′10″, looking as if she’d just recently hidden a body or two. And finally he was surprised to see the youngest and softest sister present, at twenty-two, Georgia—who perennially lived off the grid yet posted every day on her digital grid.

It was as if someone did CTRL + C on their mother, and then CTRL + V four times to create exact copies of one another: dark roots, strong jaws, big doe eyes, and heart-shaped faces spotted with birthmarks, a near replica of Cassiopeia. Though their faces slightly altered down the hierarchy, a matryoshka doll effect. It was only Jude who looked out of turn, unclear if he looked more like his mother or his father, or if someone attempted to do a CTRL + A and give him a mix of everything. He was stockier in nature and had the thinnest eyes out of them all, eyes set so far apart from each other, there was an immeasurable canyon between them.

Jude screeched the car to a stop in front of his sisters, and calmly got out to face the firing squad. They studied each other. After nearly a decade of coming and going from Houston, a mixture of failures, celebrations, and empty threats thrown at each other, all five Tr?ns were now in the same place again. The whole band was back together. Jude, Jane, Bingo, Paulina, and Georgia. But no one asked for the reunion tour.

Jude pressed down his gelled hair, adjusted his diamond-plated chain, and greeted his sisters. Despite the dense Houston summer humidity, he had on a matching track suit with knee-high socks and Nike slides. He couldn’t tell if the sweat was because of the heat or from the fact that his four sisters were here, ready to challenge his silver-spooned position.

Jane raised a hand, and wiggled her fingers at him like jellyfish tentacles, somehow managing to greet and taunt him at the same time.

“You’re late,” Jane said, a smirk forming on her lips. “How strange. I thought you’d be the first to arrive so you could permanently hot-glue your lips to our father’s ass.”

Jude raised an eyebrow. “And you’re unusually early for once. How strange indeed. I could have sworn you hated our father. Actually, if I remember the exact quote, you told him that you ‘will never take a dime from’ him because you’d be ‘entering into a Faustian pact’?”

“You said that?” Bingo turned to face her older sister and scrunched her nose in disapproval. “Why are lawyers so dramatic?”

“What does Faustian mean?” Georgia whispered to Bingo.

“No clue,” Bingo whispered back. “Just play along.”

“I think the quote was actually, ‘screw your draconian ways, I’m never coming back to Houston, just like our mother,’?” Paulina said, bored.

“I—just… forget what I said before,” Jane stuttered, a shade of red starting to settle on her high cheekbones, blending with her blush color. “It doesn’t matter. What matters is we all deserve a piece of the inheritance. We’re here to cash in on all the trauma that daddy dearest caused us.”

The repressed anger that Jude had subdued earlier began to rise again, separating itself from his logical side, and like oil from water, blood family from found family, and the DMZ line, Jude could see the divide between him and his sisters clearly.

“Shouldn’t you be saving your trauma speech for mother dearest instead?” he retorted. “At least Ba stayed to take care of us. Our mother abandoned us. Evelyn abandoned us.”

“Abandoned?” Jane said slowly, as if she was learning a new word. “Our mother didn’t abandon us. She set herself free and managed to finally crawl out from under our father’s thumb. Who can blame her for what she did?”

“What do you call leaving five children behind without a single goddamn note?” he retorted. “Self-care Sunday?”

“Here we go again, it hasn’t even been five minutes.” Bingo groaned. “You two are worse than feral cats.”

“I feel Jude has big ‘orchid child’ energy,” Paulina said. She curled a perfect, acrylic finger and pointed up and down at Jude. Her wrists were stacked with diamond tennis bracelets, and her palms remained uncal-loused. Everything about Paulina looked expensive. From the soft waves in her hair down to her logo-less leather handbag. Everyone knew how Paulina made her money, but nobody was willing to say it out loud. Just like how no one questioned how Duc got the money to start the family business. Shadiness ran in their genes.

“What the hell are you on, Paulina?” Jude asked, as he felt his sisters closing in on him, ganging up on him, just like old times. “Are you calling people flowers as an insult now?”

Georgia jumped in, attempting to mediate. “I think what Pauly is referring to is this study about kids who grew up in traumatic homes and how they respond to situations. They’re either dandelions or orchids—”

“I’m obviously a dandelion—” Jane interrupted.

“You don’t even know what the dandelion represents yet—” Bingo said, annoyed.

“—and how kids who are orchids tend to be well, more sensitive ,” Georgia cut back in.

“Sensitive?” Jude bellowed, his face turning bright red. “I’m not some fragile—”

“Dandelions are the resilient ones,” Paulina said, finishing Georgia’s explanation. “They can thrive in any condition.”

“See? Dandelion. I’m a dandelion,” Jane said, satisfied, to Bingo.

“I am definitely not a dandelion,” Bingo muttered under her breath. “I still don’t even know how to file taxes properly.”

“Basically, what I’m trying to say is that all of us are dandelions… except you,” Paulina said, looking at Jude.

Jude was gobsmacked. His anger had been hidden behind a dam, but now it couldn’t be contained anymore. He unleashed it all at his sisters. “Your little psychological warfare games aren’t going to work. You’re late by ten years if you’re trying to mess with the inheritance,” he hissed at them. “Everything is going to me. Serves you all right for siding with Evelyn and not with Duc for all these years. Our father stayed and took care of us while our mother ran off. You’ve been on the wrong side of history.”

All four sisters’ eyes seemed to have merged into one evil eye the longer they stared at him. The hair on Jude’s arms stood up and he could feel them all have a telepathic conversation with each other, plotting against him.

“You left!” he exclaimed again, still grasping for validation that his anger was justified. “You all LEFT Houston! I stayed behind and kept the old man company. That money is mine. I earned it. Do you know how many times I had to go to karaoke and sing Beatles songs, especially ‘Hey Jude,’ and drink Hennessy with him?”

“Earned?” Jane began to laugh maniacally. “You didn’t earn anything. None of us did. No one asked you to stay. Don’t pretend like you’re some altruistic saint. You stayed behind to make sure you curried favor so he would leave everything to you. But you forget not all that money is his.”

“ENOUGH!” Georgia cried. But no one took Georgia’s outburst seriously and soon a chorus of sonorous voices broke out. Whether it was three sisters against Jude, Jude against Jane, Bingo against Jane, or Georgia trying to keep the peace, the siblings began to argue with one another for the sake of arguing, their voices rising higher and higher until the whole neighborhood could hear them.

The front door cracked open, and a loud gong erupted from inside the house, shattering the siblings’ eardrums, rendering everyone immediately silent. From across the lawn, on the other side of the street, they could hear the neighbor telling them to shut up, reminding them that despite how far they had come, from Bellaire to River Oaks, they were still the crazy Asian family on the block.

“Now that’s dramatic.” Bingo whimpered as she cupped her ears. “Why the hell is there a gong in the house?”

An older man wearing an ill-fitting suit walked out, holding the mallet in his hand. The children immediately recognized their uncle, who wasn’t really their uncle, but they were forced to call him their uncle. It was their father’s best friend, confidant, business partner, and the family lawyer, Mr. Huey Ng?. The children didn*’t know much about Mr. Ng? on a personal level; they just knew random statements, trivia questions about him. Like how they knew he’d been single his entire life and that their father turned to him for everything and that he loved watching sports. Mr. Ng? came and went from their lives without much explanation. He was just always… there.

“The gong is an antique your father bought at some pawn shop in Vegas,” Mr. Ng? said, shrugging, waving the stick around. “He saw it on a reality TV show and made me go get it. Anyway, come inside, come inside. We have much to discuss.”

“Is the gong going in the will, too?” Bingo muttered, still rubbing her ears. “?’Cause I low-key kind of want it.”

“But why does it also feel kind of racist at the same time?” Paulina bemoaned, rubbing her ears as well.

With throbbing ears, one by one, in a single file line, the Tr?n children stepped inside the foyer, dragging suitcases and bags behind them. Just as Jane and Jude were about to enter the house, Jane turned to Jude and lowered her voice so only he could hear. “You know, you should be the one with daddy issues here, not us,” she said, her voice soft yet still cutting.

“And why is that?” he snapped back at her.

She revealed a low and slow grin, peeling back her mouth to reveal something ominous. “Come on, don’t make me say it out loud. You ever ask yourself why you don’t look anything like our father?” she said, laughing as she went in, leaving Jude alone outside.

His face instantly drained of color. Sweat glistened from his forehead. Those types of rumors had followed him throughout his childhood. But like shoes left at the door, nobody in the family was allowed to dredge up the rumors inside the house. Duc and Evelyn had always denied any verity to them, but something about the way Jane looked at him, it was as if she knew a secret he didn’t know.

Duc used to take them down to Galveston Island to catch crabs and throw them into old detergent buckets when they were kids, but he never taught them how to crab. He did it himself. Said that work was for tired men, and not for his kids. Jude used to love watching the crabs pile up, each one scrambling and clawing like hell to get out, fighting each other and themselves. This felt exactly like that moment. Except Jude was no longer staring down into the bucket—he was at the bottom, wondering if he was supposed to be fighting for scraps or if he should be trying to escape.