I sit with my girlfriend in a plastic booth at McDonald’s and watch as Ms. Li unwraps her McFish sandwich. She had paid for it, and for our McFood as well, with a hundred dollar bill from the early 1900s that the cashier lady had to counterfeit check twice before just about emptying the register to make the change.
Spreading the McFish paper out carefully on the fake marbling of the plastic table, Ms. Li bites open a packet of mayonnaise, which she squirts across her fried McSquare of McFish. This is followed by a full packet of grape jelly, which plurps down over the squirt of mayo and sinks through before Ms. Li replaces the McBun.
Before we leave, she’ll wrap our last two unopened McKetchup packets in a wad of about fifty McNapkins and shove them into the unseen depths of her musty purse. Right now, though, as she eats, she explains to us in her broken and confused English that she doesn’t ever go to the dentist because dentistry terrifies her. According to her, a friend or sister or cousin (I couldn’t discern which even as the story was first being told) went to the dentist once to get a tooth pulled and her gums just never stopped bleeding afterward. She eventually bled to death from the gap in her teeth, and that was enough to damn oral hygienists everywhere in Ms. Li’s eyes.
I’m not sure I entirely believe the story. I’m not sure I entirely believe anything about Ms. Li.
My girlfriend – now my wife – and I first met her in the summer of 2010, between my sophomore and junior years of college. College was in St. Charles, Missouri, but we were back in her hometown of Norcross, Georgia, to stay with her family for a while and ease her homesickness while the chance presented itself. We decided to start a painfully cheap lawn care service while we were there to raise enough money to buy a futon when we got back, and Ms. Li was our first and most regular customer. Her house was just down the street, right next door to her other house, and both had cultivated mini jungles in the front and back yards since the last time anyone had seen to them. We eagerly agreed to see to that for her, and to dig out her driveway from the two inches of dirt and weeds that had grown over it while that was in the process of being seen to.
We did not agree to what came next, at least not at first. Nor did we initially agree to the job that came after that. We were just supposed to mow and weed-eat yards. But we reluctantly made exceptions for Ms. Li, because the only other alternative was saying no to Ms. Li, which is still difficult for us even after our years of experience dealing with Ms. Li, and next to impossible for an amateur.
Ms. Li, see, is a sweet old lady who is 85 if she’s a day and stands at about four foot tall with the stoop. She’s the spitting image of my own great-grandmother, except that my own great-grandmother was not a retired award-winning ballroom dancer from Vietnam. Something about wizened octogenarian grandmothers transcends racial and cultural boundaries. You don’t even need to understand her to make friends with her and feel the cheerful little grandma vibes; which is fortunate, because none of us can understand four out of five words that come out of her odontophobic mouth.
Ms. Li speaks a special dialect of English that throws out the last few consonants at the back of every word, and occasionally a few from the front just for good measure. It’s a bit like French in that way. Luckily, she also has a habit of repeating herself two or three times in the same conversation, so usually after a bit of smiling and nodding the general meaning of what she’s been saying to you will eventually catch up. “You wa go MaDona?” slowly begins to sound like an invitation to McDonald’s, and “I doe go denni cuh I care” becomes an admission that dentists are scary and that’s why she only has teeth on one side of her mouth. As with most second languages, the only surefire way to really learn Ms. Linglish is to immerse yourself in it.
Ms. Li doesn’t just immerse you in foreign grandma vibes and translatory ciphers, though. She’ll also immerse you in her shed if you let her. And for the beginner dealing with Ms. Li, it’s hard not to let her – even if you can manage to fully decipher what it is you’re agreeing to help out with, the fact that she is everybody ever’s Vietnamese great-grandmother will make refusing to help feel like scolding a confused, wrinkly puppy that doesn’t realize what it did wrong.
Once you gain enough experience to level up and gain the “saying no to Ms. Li” ability, however, she’ll just stop by your house every now and then to ring the doorbell and ask again until you say yes anyway. The most efficient approach is to say, “Not right now, we don’t have the time,” a few times very slowly until the message gets through to her, then start looking for free days in your upcoming schedule to set aside for the next time that she shows up to ask.
If she’s asking about her shed, you’ll want to look for about a full week where you’re not doing much of anything. Ms. Li’s shed, when we were first introduced to it, was an even mixture of old cocktail dresses, unpaid bills, bills that had clearly been intended to be paid judging by the wads of old cash stuffed into their envelopes but which had nonetheless never seen the inside of a mailbox for a second time, and wads of napkins around 30 year old packets of McKetchup. Also, pantyhose from the 1960s. Also, mummified rats with their mummified rat guts spilling out of hole in the side of their stomachs. Also, a few boxes of unopened menstruation pads. Also, a disembodied drum from the inside of a drying machine.
That last one isn’t junk, though. She’s going to make a table out of it someday.
Everything else was to be shoveled out, dug through, organized, categorized, analyzed, evaluated, and summarily thrown away into approximately three dozen large white trash bags, approximately one dozen of which went right back into the shed once we’d cleaned out some space for them, because Ms. Li is adamant about saving every scrap of paper that has ever crossed her path in her life, because doing otherwise means that the Vietnamese government can fly over and find her and tell her that she has to leave the country, her sister with the hole in her gums, her two houses, and her collection of dead rats to come back to Vietnam, and unless Ms. Li can lay every single one of her receipts or used napkins with math scribbled across it at her old government’s feet, well, then Ms. Li is in trouble. Presumably.
So we dug out approximately $755 dollars in U.S. currency dated no later than 1957 and two and a half rats dated no later than 1958. The dresses and pants and shirts and hats and blouses and jackets and sweaters and coats and scarves all got hung up on wire clothes hangers that we strung along on a chain threaded through the support walls around the inner perimeter of Ms. Li’s shed. The twelve good trash bags full of old receipts and unpaid bills were stacked in a neat pile in the center of this collection. The dryer drum we tucked into the back corner, there to await tablefication. And any old photographs of Ms. Li as a young woman in a ballroom dancing gown holding a trophy half as tall as she used to be went to Ms. Li, who grinned with half a mouthful of teeth and pushed her entire cartographer’s map worth of wrinkles up around her eyes and pointed and giggled at the past.
“I yu be dansa, see?” she cooed as she bent still further into herself to get closer to the photograph and its memories. “Ba roo dansa, I go dansi aw o’er wor, I go bih dansi copetisha, see?” And she giggled again and shook her head and grinned like a very leathery little girl, and our hearts melted just a little bit inside, and we had no idea why, because it would still be at least another five minutes before our minds decoded what our ears had just brought to it.
Then she asked us to do the same thing to her two houses so that she could move back into them and stop living with her sister, and we said no, we would, but no, we don’t have the time, and we promptly rushed back to college and our cheap aluminum futon plans.
We’re back in Norcross now, living with my new wife’s family indefinitely for awhile, and she still comes by every few weeks to ask about her houses again. And we smile, and we nod, and we say no, not right now, we’re too busy, too much going on, sorry. And then we go and hack down her personal jungle again, and she pays us in watermelon.
We will never help Ms. Li out with her houses, because that’s just one of those games where the only way to win is to never start playing. And we dread the day when she convinces us to start playing, because we know that we’re overdue for it.
But until then, we cut Ms. Li’s grass, and we trim Ms. Li’s trees, and we eat Ms. Li’s watermelon, and we talk with Ms. Li about her sister, and we assure Ms. Li that, no, we haven’t seen her passport around anywhere, but we’ll be sure to look for it, and no, it probably isn’t in your garage that you haven’t stepped foot into since the 1980s, and no, we’re not going to look right now, we’re too busy, sorry.
And when she leaves, I give her a hug that I’m not sure she expected, and I miss my great-grandmother, even though she never ballroom danced to the best of my knowledge.
And I don’t think Ms. Li ever did make that table.
