Oanh Ngo Usadi - Sandwiches & Neighbors

 

We had just arrived in America. This small town in southeast Texas just a four-hour drive from here, called Port Arthur. It was 1984, and I was 12 years old. My family and I were immigrants from Vietnam. We were boat refugees. We moved into this rental house that belonged to our landlord, who lived just next door across the yard. Right after we moved in, before we even finished unpacking, my father said our whole family, the seven of us, me, my parents, my two older sisters, and my two older teenage brothers, should go over and introduce ourselves. 

 

We walked across the yard and saw our landlord out on his back porch. He was this heavyset, gruff-looking older man. He was sitting in a wheelchair, puffing on a cigarette while watching us. He did not look happy. My father had warned us, our landlord might be upset. My parents had been trying for weeks to find a place for a family to live with a very limited budget. And in the end, they had fudged the number of people in our family. Our landlord had expected only five, not seven of us. 

 

When we got closer, he abruptly turned away from us and shouted something through the screen door into his house. I had no idea what he said. His thick Texas drawl and his heavy, smokeless voice was nothing like the English I had been learning in a refugee camp just a few weeks earlier. The screen door opened and this really friendly woman stepped out. She didn’t seem upset at all and was really talkative. She introduced herself as Loretta, and her husband as Walter, Walter with an L.

 

I had been learning English for only a few months. I could barely make out that tiny L sound wedged in the middle of the name Walter. I was pretty sure my parents didn’t even hear it. So, the rest of us copied my father and called our landlord Mr. Water. [audience laughter] Mr., because it was unthinkable for any of us to refer to an adult without a title. And as for Loretta, her name was just too hard. So, we called her Mrs. Water. [audience laughter] Neither of them corrected us. 

 

After we moved in, I was somehow the go-between for our two families. My job was to deliver rent and home repair questions. I didn’t mind the rent deliveries, because I didn’t have to say very much. But I dreaded the home repair questions. I had to use my limited English to talk to Mr. Water. I couldn't understand a lot of what he said. And to be honest, Mr. Water terrified me. Everything about him scared me. And the more scared I got, the more my English sounded like Vietnamese with a lot of hand waving mixed in. [audience laughter] I kept thinking, who was going to lose it? He was going to explode. 

 

Like that time, he was in our backyard screaming at my brothers and me. My older brother had dumped leftover hot charcoal from a barbecue in different parts of our yard to kill fire ants. [audience laughter] Mr. Water yelled, “That in America, you don't burn grass, you cut it." [audience laughter] I thought, why so much yelling? It's just grass. It will grow back. 

 

Growing up in Vietnam, I didn't even know what a lawn was. I thought of grass only as weeds. In Vietnamese, grass and weeds are called the same thing. [audience chuckle] I used to wonder why people in America, this land of riches and wealth, would choose to live in homes surrounded by weeds. [audience laughter] But I got why Mr. Water was upset. I mean, our yard looked like some kind of lunar landscape, all these black patches. [audience laughter] But his anger just seemed so out of proportion, I just thought he hated us. I didn't know if his feelings would ever change or if we could ever feel at home in our new home. 

 

And in our new home, my parents decided to open a family business, a Vietnamese bánh mì sandwich shop. A bánh mì sandwich is a French baguette with a thin, crispy crust. Inside is spread with pâté, homemade mayonnaise, filled with roasted meat and topped with all kinds of vegetables. Pickled carrots, daikons, slices of cucumber, cilantro, fresh chili peppers and a few dashes of soy sauce. It's really delicious. [audience laughter] 

 

But back then, in our small town, few people had ever heard of, much less tasted, a bánh mì. But somehow, my father was convinced that he was going to give McDonald's a run for its money. [audience laughter] He named the sandwich shop, Budget Sandwiches. [audience laughter] He had seen the word budget on the side of some trucks [audience laughter] and thought it would make a great name for a food place. [audience laughter] We all thought it was a great idea too. [audience laughter] 

 

After the shop opened, my parents worked 12 hours a day, six and a half days a week. My siblings and I all helped out. After school, I often came to the shop to stay with my father, taking over my mother's shift, so she could go home and rest a little, because at night, there was still a lot more work to do at home. But despite these long hours, we barely scraped by. As it turned out, the McDonald's down the street had nothing to fear. [audience laughter] 

 

But came this beautiful spring afternoon, I was at the shop doing homework when the phone rang. My father picked it up. Right away, I could tell he was really excited. I heard my father repeat, asking in English if the customer wanted 50 bánh mì. 50? This was the biggest order we had ever had. But the fact that the order came from a customer who spoke English was even more amazing. Until then, most of our customers had come from the Vietnamese community. It looked like the American public had started to discover bánh mì. This was something my father had always hoped for. It felt like times were changing. Right away, we went to work.

 

My father joked that McDonald's had no idea what was about to come. [audience chuckle] Finally, the sandwiches were done. We couldn't wait to see who this customer was. But then, half an hour passed, and then an hour, and then more time and no one showed up. I opened my notebook and started doing homework again. Then I saw the date in the margin, April 1st. [audience aww] April Fools. My heart sank. I didn't know where to begin explaining to my father this holiday that I didn't understand myself. More than that, I didn’t know if this heartless prank might just finally crush his spirit, the spirit that had been tested time and time again in a life filled with turbulence. 

 

In Vietnam, my father had been imprisoned by French forces occupying Vietnam for taking part in the resistance. Then later under communism, he had survived multiple attempts on his life before he finally organized our family's dangerous escape inside a small fishing boat across the South China Sea. In all these desperate situations, somehow, he stayed optimistic. It was the same optimism that made him open the sandwich shop. My siblings and I understood that the sandwich shop was my parents' last big gamble. It was a chance for him and my mother to experience a little bit of the American dream, instead of just living in the service of that dream for their children. 

 

When I explained April Fools to my father, he didn't say anything. He just stayed quiet for a long time. But I could tell he was disappointed. I could see disappointment in his eyes. We never found out who placed the order, but from the incident, we learned to take contact information anytime an order came over the phone. [audience laughter] And with each setback, our footing in America did become a little more steady. We learned to decorate and match the festivities of Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas. We learned to close our shop a little earlier on a certain Sunday in the dead of winter, because everyone was at home watching some football game on TV. [audience laughter] 

 

Even though our shop never did much better, it did provide us with a living, putting me and my siblings through school. And then, one by one, my siblings started leaving home for college or for their jobs. Seven years after we moved into Mr. Water's house, I was the only one left at home with my parents. By then, my English had improved a lot, to where I could easily pronounce the L in Walter. But we never stopped calling our landlord Mr. and Mrs. Water, because it was familiar and because it was who they were to us. 

 

One day, I was again delivering rent. I was a senior in high school and would soon also leave home for college. Mr. Water said he had something to tell my parents, but he wouldn't tell just me. Later, when I came back with my parents, I saw that Mrs. Water had set up this nice pitcher of pink lemonade with five glasses on a small table on their back porch. This was the first time our families had sat down for something to drink. 

 

After we had taken a sip of the lemonade, Mr. Water started to speak. Speaking really slowly, something I had never witnessed. He told us that he had recently found out that he was very sick. His doctor wouldn't say how much time he had left, but he suspected it wasn't very long. He said he wanted his wife to be near good folks after he passed. So, he offered to sell my parents the house we had been living in, his rental house, for what he had paid for it, minus all the rent my parents had paid him over the years. 

 

My parents were stunned and saddened, but they were especially sad because they couldn't grant Mr. Water his wish. It had always been their plan to retire to Houston to be near my oldest sister and her family when I finished high school. In fact, they had already been trying to find a buyer for the shop. 

 

Mr. Water died a few months later. And sometime after the funeral, my mom asked me to go check on Mrs. Water. I remember waiting by the screen door, only that time, I had no rent payment or home repair questions to ask. When Mrs. Water saw me, she hugged me for a long time, then invited me to come inside. I saw Mr. Water’s wheelchair folded and leaned against the wall. Mrs. Water talked about her life without her husband and how lonely she felt. She asked about me and my siblings. She said Mr. Water might have yelled at us sometimes, but he always thought we were good kids. He missed my brothers when they moved away to college. I never would have guessed that.

 

As I left, I couldn't help thinking that after all these years, the only thing that had really changed was our understanding of each other. It’s been almost 30 years since I left our small Texas town. Recently, I found myself thinking back to this time when I was in a Costco. [audience laughter] I was in line to buy a hot dog, when I looked up at the big menu board overhead and noticed a new item [audience laughter]. A salad topped with black beans and bánh mì ingredients. [audience laughter] A really strange combination for a salad, [audience laughter] But wow, bánh mì had made it into Costco. [audience laughter] I thought of my parents and of Mr. and Mrs. Water. It occurred to me that appreciation of anything unfamiliar, of a neighbor, of a sandwich, requires time and an open mind. Thank you.