Grass Roof, Tin Roof by Dao Strom

Author:Dao Strom [Strom, Dao]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780618145591
Amazon: 0618145591
Barnesnoble: 0618145591
Goodreads: 87305
Publisher: San Val
Published: 2003-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

The service took place in a large banquet room above a Vietnamese lawyers’ office and an Asian grocery in a shopping plaza in Santa Ana, otherwise known as Little Saigon. The room was rectangular with one bank of windows overlooking the parking lot. We sat on metal-framed, red-cushioned conference chairs set in rows facing the front of the room, where there was a carpeted stage and large black speakers aimed outward. The service would’ve been held at a local Vietnamese Catholic church, but our relatives were afraid the church wouldn’t be large enough; there were nearly a hundred people attending. The Vietnamese Catholic priest wore a long white robe; he wore thick eyeglasses and his skin was pockmarked. Beside him on an easel was displayed an 8 by 10 photograph of our mother’s face, smiling and made up (as she never was in daily life), taken by a photographer friend of hers. In it, rouge had been applied in circles over her cheeks; her lips were glossy; her hair up in hairpins. Her face looked masklike and tranquil, and older than it had usually appeared. The frame was ringed with flowers, and on metal TV trays beside it were candles, red-tipped incense sticks, red envelopes, rice, fruit, flower petals, and a hand-bound book of uneven, coarsely textured paper, inside of which were pasted clippings and photographs. All our mother’s brothers and sisters and some of our older cousins wore white head sashes. Their clothing was formal, rustling, perfumed, white, or floral. The aunts were so thickly made up you could read the boundary, clearly marked along their jawlines, between the orangey brown of their facial foundation and the natural brown of their necks. All this adornment, all these mourning accoutrements—to me, it was as if our relatives had put on what they thought were the adequate masks of grief. They dabbed at their eyes; their husbands next to them looked heavy-lidded and piggish and irate and stared straight ahead.

I had wanted to wear black but it was not acceptable. When I asked why, one of my uncles said, “It is just Vietnamese custom.” He did not look me in the eye, and his expression was disapproving and disgusted. Sitting through the service, I felt not like myself, uncomfortably ordinary, in the khaki pants and white button-down shirt I had finally agreed to.

My sister was wearing a white dress; our cousins had taken her shopping. Thien wore a white head sash, willingly, with the rest of them.

All in Vietnamese, the service was a mix of the traditional and the sentimental. A woman thinner and prettier than most in the room stood after the priest and a number of my mother’s sisters and brothers and friends had spoken, and she began to sing. She sang with exaggeration, dipping and swaying and tilting her head back at the appropriate moments, the accompanying synthesized strings and guitar solos piped into the speakers from a soundboard to the side of the stage; a spiky-haired boy in a white shirt and skinny tie sat over the controls.

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