chairs, my fingers digging into its cushioned sides, my face impassive, I watched him clamp his unlit cigar between his front teeth and slowly shake his head. Then he rolled the cigar back into a corner of his mouth to speak again.
“Though I warned your parents against him long ago, I’ve overlooked your friendship with Tinh Vu, even tolerated your addressing him as ‘uncle.’ I tried to accommodate a child’s need to rediscover her roots, to embrace the familiar. But you are no longer a child. And you’re more American than you are Vietnamese. Damn it all, Lacie. When was the last time you actually spoke Vietnamese?”
“It’s been a long time,” I admitted. As a teenager, I’d tried to become part of the Vietnamese community in Chicago, but quickly discovered I didn’t belong. Even Uncle Tinh and I had, for many years, conversed in English.
Uncle Duran nodded, smiled around his cigar. But if he thought I was going to back down, he was mistaken.
“Does it matter how Vietnamese I am?” I said. “Or how American? I’m a good mimic and a quick study. As you’ve often pointed out, I can fit in anywhere I want to. All I am asking is to be allowed to do a job that I’m trained to do. That’s all Uncle Tinh is asking.”
Uncle Duran’s smile disappeared.
“And I am asking you—no, I am telling you—that I will not authorize this venture. I have been part of your life longer than Tinh Vu has. I was the one who found you, who gave you a family and a job that means something. Can you so easily dismiss my decision about this?”
Tears welled in my eyes. I didn’t want to defy him, to hurt him. But it was because of him, because of the values he’d taught me, that I had made the only decision I could when Uncle Tinh called.
“You’ve told me often of your work for the senator,” Uncle Tinh had said. “Can you come down to New Orleans right away? On business, Lacie. Please. My people…our people…need you.”
How could I say no?
I looked directly at Uncle Duran, lifting my chin for emphasis.
“I’m sorry, Uncle Duran,” I said. “This is something I have to do.”
He moved the cigar away from his mouth, put it down on the clean crystal ashtray on his desk. When he lifted his head, our eyes met and I braced for what I knew was coming.
“You’re fired,” he said clearly. “Effective immediately.”
I had chosen.
And so had he.
I went back to my adjacent and more functional office. Determinedly dry-eyed, I packed my personal belongings into several cardboard boxes as Uncle Duran stood in the doorway and watched, unspeaking. Then he helped me carry my possessions downstairs and load them into my car. But before I turned the key in the ignition, he leaned into the open driver’s side window.
“Even if I approved of Tinh Vu, which I don’t now and never have,” he said, “I cannot risk having anyone in my employ so closely associated with organized crime. I know what your feelings are on this subject, and I’ve tried to spare them by waiting until now to bring this up. I have evidence, Lacie. Recent evidence that Tinh Vu is actively involved in the production and distribution of breeder documents. You, of all people, should know what that means.”
Then he stepped back from the car. But he spoke, once again, before I’d completely rolled up the window.
“Should you ever find the courage to face the truth about your Uncle Tinh, call me. We can revisit the issue of your employment.”
That gave me plenty to stew over as I sped down the Beltway toward the studio apartment I rented. Uncle Duran’s suspicions about Uncle Tinh’s ties to organized crime were all too familiar. But a specific accusation and talk of evidence were new.
Even though he had never even met him, Uncle Duran had never made a secret of his dislike for Uncle Tinh. It seemed to me that his dislike grew to the point of near obsession when Tinh’s City Vu opened in New Orleans. After that, Uncle Duran had taken every opportunity to point out that great food and impeccable service were not the reasons the restaurant thrived. Impossible, he said any time an opportunity presented itself, that an immigrant could parlay a storefront restaurant in Evanston, Illinois, into a landmark twenty-room hotel and restaurant just a block from the French Market in New Orleans. Tinh Vu could not have achieved this merely through hard work.
I agreed. And so did Uncle Tinh.
Even when he still lived in Evanston, Uncle Tinh had catered to those who wanted to keep their business dealings private. It was not unusual for businessmen, cops, politicians, criminals and, I suspected, individuals who combined two or more of those avocations to meet over a meal in the little storefront. Uncle Tinh always managed to arrange that such meetings were undisturbed. In New Orleans he’d taken the concept a step further. He claimed proudly that if you were to ask any journalist in the Big Easy where the city’s power brokers met, their list would include the quartet of small dining rooms on the mezzanine level of Tinh’s City Vu. Those rooms, I knew, were swept daily for listening devices.
That did not make my adopted Vietnamese uncle a criminal.
Supplying false documents did.
A few years earlier I’d helped the INS break up a documents syndicate in Los Angeles by locating a storage facility that, when searched, yielded two million “breeder” documents. Such documents—counterfeit social security cards, resident alien cards, U.S. birth certificates and more—established legitimate backgrounds for illegal immigrants. They proved legal residency in the U.S. and were used—bred—to obtain genuine documents such as driver’s licenses, student ID cards and insurance cards. Counterfeit documents were big business. The stash I’d discovered was worth forty million dollars on the streets. And those who produced such documents were closely tied to those who exploited illegals once they arrived in the U.S.
In the past I had dismissed Uncle Duran’s periodic accusations about Uncle Tinh, thinking that he was unnecessarily suspicious. And, perhaps, jealous. But now, as I turned onto the ramp down to the garage beneath my building, I wondered whether I should return to Uncle Duran’s office and examine the evidence he claimed to have.
Did I have the courage to do that?
The tears that I’d so successfully suppressed for most of the afternoon began to creep down my cheeks as I pulled into my parking spot. I killed the engine, lay my arms across the steering wheel and rested my forehead against them. For a few minutes I sat that way, unmoving, as I considered my options.
Though I owed much to my Uncle Duran and I had worked hard to make him proud of me, Uncle Tinh was my oldest and dearest friend. He and I first met when my new American parents took me to a little campus restaurant in Evanston, Illinois, for pho. As I attacked the noodle soup with chopsticks and a deep ceramic spoon, Tinh Vu had nodded approvingly, then come over to chat with us. In doing so, he gave my parents a means to communicate with a nine-year-old girl who had lived with them for just a few weeks. My parents spoke only a few words of Vietnamese; I knew only the broken and often crude English spoken by street-smart teens at the refugee camp.
Over the years I ate in the restaurant’s tiny kitchen frequently. Beneath a colorful poster of the kitchen god, Ong Tao, Uncle Tinh and I talked about our lives and our problems and our dreams as we ate steaming bowls of pho or nibbled chopsticks full of do chua, a spicy-hot fermented pickle. About the time I went off to
