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“Eat something,” the cook told his grandson. “I already called the school and told them you were coming late.”
“It sounds like you may meet the little girl, yes,” Da
“The blue Mustang,” Joe answered, without hesitation.
“Smart boy,” his father said.
They were almost back at the Court Street house before the cook told his son, “Yi-Yiing and I decided that it should appear you two are a couple.”
“Why should Yi-Yiing and I be a couple?” Da
“Because you’re the same age. While the husband from Korea is around, you should just pretend that you’re together. Not even a Korean surgeon is going to suspect that I’m sleeping with his wife,” the cook said. “I’m too old.”
“How do we pretend?” Da
“Let Yi-Yiing do the pretending,” his father said.
In retrospect, the writer was thinking, the pretending hadn’t been the most difficult part of the impromptu deception. Yi-Yiing did a good job of acting as Da
Yes, he would definitely be in Iowa City through this academic year-he’d already asked the Writers’ Workshop if he could stay another year after that-but Da
The surgeon, who would be in Chicago for only a few days, kissed his wife and daughter good-bye. All the introductions and good-byes had happened in the Court Street kitchen, where the cook acted as if he owned the place, and Yi-Yiing had two or three times slipped behind Da
The daughter, Soo, was a little jewel. “She’s not wearing a diaper?” Da
“Girls are toilet-trained before boys, honey,” Yi-Yiing told him, with what struck the writer as an overacted emphasis on the honey word-but the cook had laughed, and so had Youn. Da
The days when the Korean doctor was in Chicago were easy enough, and Joe could see with his own eyes how i
The fragrant nightie under the pillow on Youn’s side of the bed turned out to be the beige one, and Da
“A two-year-old shouldn’t sleep unattended,” Youn had told Da
When Kyung came back from Chicago, and the doctor soon left again with his little girl-they went home to Seoul together-Youn wasted no time in finding a place of her own to live, and by the next semester she had transferred to someone else’s fiction workshop. Whether she ever finished her novel-in-progress was immaterial to the writer Da
It was Yi-Yiing’s success, at pretending to be Da
“Would you prefer it if I dressed normally around the house?” Yi-Yiing would one day ask the writer. “I mean, maybe it’s ‘enough already’ with the pajamas.”
“But you’re the Pajama Lady-that’s just who you are,” Da
“You know what I mean,” Yi-Yiing said to him.
She stopped wearing them-or, perhaps, she only slept in them. Her normal clothes were a safer barrier between them, and what had amounted to the occasional contact-the brush of her passing behind his back, the touch of her fingertips or the knuckles on her small hands-stopped soon after as well.
“I miss Yi-Yiing’s pajamas,” Joe said to his dad one morning, when they were walking to the boy’s school.
“I do, too,” Da
WITH YOUN GONE FROM their lives-especially later, in their last year in Iowa City, when they were living in the third house on Court Street-their regular habits resumed as if uninterrupted. The third house was on the other side of Court Street, near Summit, where Da
The cook knew in advance how much he would miss the Cheng brothers-almost as much as he would miss Yi-Yiing. It was never knowing what it might have been like to be with the Hong Kong nurse that Da
As their Iowa adventure was concluding, so was-at long last-the war in Vietnam. The mood at Mao’s was not predisposed to a happy ending. “Operation Frequent Wind,” as the helicopter evacuation of Saigon was called-“Operation More Bullshit,” Ketchum had called it-turned out to be a devastating distraction from the di
April 1975 had been a bad month for business at Mao’s. There were four drive-by brick-throwings-one of the restaurant’s window-breakers was actually a chunk of cement the size of a cinder block, and one was a rock. “Fucking patriot farmers!” Xiao Dee had called the vandals. He and the cook had canceled a shopping trip to Chinatown because Xiao Dee was convinced that Mao’s was under attack-or, as Saigon fell, the restaurant would come under heavier siege. Ah Gou was ru