China

On our dining table, every dish is a dime-store pattern: blue dandelions, red nasturtiums, the entire stack, a small legacy won in a 1959 coin toss by Lealand, the uncle with the long arms and legs, who pitched penny after penny at a parking lot carnival until his pockets were emptied of everything, but lint and luck. My family wouldn't buy Emporium bowls thick like heads of cabbage or soup spoons holding hand-painted water lilies; our plates, chipped and resounding, clatter at every feast. In America, we acquired what was necessary: some English to earn a living, cotton for dull work, enough noodles for a long life. My father and uncles fled China with a black leather trunk, four wool sweaters, and proud photographs of their two-story mansion. They rented on Mason, Alfred's Steakhouse clanging all night below. Great-Uncle's wife donated a lazy susan, mini Bora Bora pitchforks, and wooden bowls, rancid from salad oil—whatever she couldn't unload at her yard sale. Sundays, she invited her nephews to hang coats, change diapers, and serve finger sandwiches, told guests, ignore those farmboys, too stupid to say yes or no. The boys didn't tell her about the jars of jade or the "big house," its pond swimming with yolk-eating carp. They studied calculus and chemistry and worked after school, eighty-five cents an hour, pouring coffee at Mee Heung Bakery and ironing pleats in sweat shops towards a new life: chicken and fresh fish every day, wonton noodle soup and television at midnight, Grace Kelly on weekends.When I get off the boat, America is a beautiful country, my father says as he watches Uncle Lealand, the organoleptic specialist, dish up the leftover black bean lobster for his cats.