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Buddha Baby
By Kim Keltner HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
Copyright © 2005 Kim Keltner
All right reserved. ISBN: 0060753226
Chapter One
Buddha Baby
Lindsey Owyang was about to learn a thing or two about Chinese people, Catholic nuns, and taxidermy. She didn't know it yet, but this spring would be a season of unusually warm winds, blasts from the past, and stone-cold foxes. She was just a Chinese-American girl with two part-time jobs, a tendency to daydream, and a penchant for Hello Kitty toys, but as the days grew longer and the beach water slightly warmer, she would find herself prying nettles from her family tree and testing her mettle as she struggled to make her peace with Chinatown & country.
She had been born and bred in San Francisco, raised on Cocoa Puffs and Aaron Spelling productions. As a kid she never wore silk slippers or mandarin-collared pajamas, but rather was more often outfitted in checkerboard Vans and an "I'm With Stupid" T-shirt. Confucian proverbs eluded her, but she was well versed in the spunky aphorisms of great philosophers such as Fonzie and Fred Sanford, whose Nick-at-Nite reruns taught her handy phrases such as "Sit on it, Malph," and "Bring me some ripple, Dummy."
In high school she was more interested in Tiger Beat than tiger balm, but her parents did occasionally attempt to blend Chinese and American cultures together by preparing meals such as bok choy with cut-up hot dogs, or macaroni salad with pai don, Chinese preserved eggs. When she played Monopoly, she passed Go as she ate nian goh, and cranking up the stereo after school, she danced to Bow Wow Wow while she munched on cha siu bows.
Her hair was straight and black, and she had a slight build with chow mein-noodly limbs. Pale and sun phobic, she was fairer than most white people, but her bridge-deficient nose and single-lidded eyes shaped like sideways teardrops proclaimed to the world that she was a descendant from the Middle Kingdom. China was a place she knew little about, but her face, her coloring, and her name led strangers to assume she knew more about her ancestors' country than she actually did. At any random moment, whether toiling as a retail drone, squeezing her butt into jeans at Old Navy, or ordering a venti mocha frappuccino at Starbucks she might be asked for detailed explanations about Ming emperors, imperial porcelain from Jingdezhen, or the secrets of Yo-Yo Ma's success.
Socially, she had spent her youth dodging the inconvenience of her Asianness, but in the last three of her twentyeight years she was forced to wake up and smell the bock-fa oil. She faced her Chinese identity head-on, like a person in the center of a dodgeball game who eventually got smacked in the face with the big, red rubber ball that was her Chinese self. She was by no means absolutely comfortable with her ethnicity 24-7, but she was on her way. If you looked on a street map of San Francisco you could spot Lindsey where the avenue to nowhere met the cross street of somewhere. She wasn't a complete dope, nor was she burning a path to success like the next Connie Chung.
• • •
Cosmopolitan told her she should be a dynamic, career-climbing, late-for-Pilates, bright, young thing. However, on this particular Saturday night, Lindsey was a mattress-slouching, tube-sockwearing lazy girl with rug burns.
She had lain down to take a short nap at four, but now it was almost six. Sitting up in bed, she rubbed a prickly swath on the back of one leg, the result of a pillow fight turned ouchy when she'd fallen off the mattress and skidded across the carpet. She pressed the small pink welt with her finger, then pulled the blankets up to get a bit warmer. Wearing only a negligee and a pair of white-and-gold tube socks, she looked like a cross between Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver and one of the Bad News Bears.
Except, of course, she was Chinese.
Across the hallway she could hear the sound of an electric razor and running water. She smiled to herself, knowing that the guy who loved her was just a few steps away.
His name was Michael Cartier and he was a white guy. She'd become smitten with him three years ago and interracial hijinks had ensued. But alas, a twist.
Michael had come into Lindsey's life during the Age of Hoarders. By her own definition, a Hoarder of All Things Asian was a nerdy white guy in beige clothing whose good-guy demeanor camouflaged an insatiable hunger for Asian flesh. Hoarders came in many guises, such as co-workers offering to explain 401k plans or mall trawlers loitering around the Asian food court, and Lindsey had been hyper-vigilant about avoiding them. She knew a Hoarder's appetite was not satisfied by take-out dishes of sweet 'n' sour pork, but rather, he was fixated on the idea of Asian girls themselves as tasty dishes on the city's take-out menu. Lindsey knew that behind a Hoarder's innocuous façade, all he had on his mind was an evening of sweet-and-sour porking.
And into this paranoid world of hers, Michael Cartier had traipsed. She had initially suspected he was a Hoarder, but was surprised to find that not only was he not a pervo-goat in sheep's clothing, but he was, in fact, a Secret Asian Man. He was, as it turned out, one quarter Chinese. His non-whiteness was not readily apparent to the naked eye, and he'd grown up culturally removed from his Asian heritage. But his slice of life was not made completely of Wonder Bread, she'd learned.
Continues...
Excerpted from Buddha Baby by Kim Keltner Copyright © 2005 by Kim Keltner. Excerpted by permission.
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