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“Kids on bikes get hit by cars all the time in this town,” Yi-Yiing told Da
“Some kid was riding his bike at night?” Da
“He got hit on Dodge Street when it was still daylight, but he was in the ER all night,” Yi-Yiing said.
“Is he going to be all right?” Da
Yi-Yiing shook her head; she was making tea for herself in the kitchen of the second Court Street house, and a thin piece of toast dangled like a cigarette from her lower lip. Joe was home sick from school, and Da
“Okay,” Da
“What are you doing home?” Yi-Yiing asked him. “I’m here, aren’t I? I’m awake. You should go write in your office. I’m a nurse, Da
“Okay,” Da
Most nights, both the cook and his emergency-room nurse were working; either Da
The cook had disapproved of Da
“The Yokohamas,” as Da
The Yokohamas had at first maintained a distant respect for Yi-Yiing, whose ER schedule did not often allow her to coincide in the house with either Sao or Kaori. They were more likely to run into one another at Mao’s, where Yi-Yiing occasionally came late (and by herself) to di
One night, when Xiao Dee was the maître d’, he mistook Yi-Yiing for one of the waitresses who worked at Mao’s. “You’re late!” he told her.
“I’m a customer-I have a reservation,” Yi-Yiing told Little Brother.
“Oh, shit-you’re Tony’s nurse!” Xiao Dee said.
“Tony’s too young to need a nurse yet,” Yi-Yiing replied.
Later, the cook tried to defend Xiao Dee. (“He’s a good driver-he’s just a shitty maître d’.”) But Yi-Yiing was sensitive.
“The Americans think I’m Vietnamese, and some Shanghai clown from Queens thinks I’m a waitress!” she told Tony.
Unfortunately, one of the Japanese twins, who was a waitress-at this moment, she was also young Joe’s babysitter-overheard Yi-Yiing say this. “What’s so bad about being a waitress?” Sao or Kaori asked the nurse.
The Japanese twins had also been mistaken for Vietnamese war brides in Iowa City. Most people in their native San Francisco, either Sao or Kaori had explained to Da
“We’re all one happy family,” Da
Youn certainly did. She’d been a slave to an arranged marriage in Seoul -“virtually arranged,” was how she first described the marriage in the novel she was writing.
Da
Her skin was as pale as milk. Her black hair was cut short, with bangs, under which her big dark-brown eyes made her appear waifish, though Youn was over thirty-she was exactly Da
If you could believe either her actual story or her novel, the writer Da
“Well,” the cook had said to his son, after Da
But they were all hiding something, weren’t they? Certainly, the cook and his son were in hiding-they were fugitives. His dad’s Chinese nurse gave Da
There was no fault to be found with the Japanese babysitters, whose affection for young Joe was genuine, and whose fondness for the cook stemmed from the camaraderie of them all working together in the ambitious chaos of Asian and French cuisine at Mao’s.
Not that Yi-Yiing’s rapt attention to Joe was insincere; the ER nurse was a truly good soul. It was her relationship with the cook that amounted to a compromise, perhaps to them both. But Tony Angel had long been wary of women, and he was used to hedging his bets; it was Yi-Yiing who shouldn’t have tolerated Tony’s short-term flings with those traveling women he met at the Writers’ Workshop parties, but the nurse accepted even this from the cook. Yi-Yiing liked living with a young boy the same age as her missing daughter; she liked being a mother to someone. Being a part of the cook’s all-male family may also have struck Yi-Yiing as a bohemian adventure-one she might not find so easy to slip into once her daughter and parents finally joined her in America.