Starting
Point With love, even a hot dog helps
By JAMES STEPHEN
BEHRENS
Her name was Chi. She was a
boat person who fled her native Vietnam when that country swiftly
altered course in the mid 1970s. She and her husband and three children came to
live in the rectory of the parish where I was then assigned, in northern New
Jersey.
Her husbands name was Joe. He had an advanced degree in
chemistry. Their children were small, and Chi was pregnant. She cooked for the
priests, and Joe took care of the grounds.
Everything American was new and, looking back, frightening to
them. So many things that the average American takes for granted hit Joe and
Chi all at once. Our language, customs, dress, culinary tastes and social
comportment were totally new, strange and painful. Whereas they had
successfully negotiated a treacherous sea with an unsure boat and future, their
safe arrival in the United States thrust them into a different sea, and they
experienced the massive vertigo of the loss of all that was familiar. They were
suffering from an overload of the new.
Chi sat at the kitchen table every morning with a modest pile of
books -- English/Vietnamese dictionaries, grammar books and guide books to
American culture printed in Vietnamese. I would stop in every morning and say
hello, and she would smile at me and try out new words. She beamed when she
knew she made the connection between an English word and a Vietnamese word. She
would frown, smile, look at the books, thumb through the pages and word-by-word
begin to unravel English.
One day she heard from someone that hot dogs were a favorite
American meal. She asked me in the morning if I liked them and I said yes.
Everyone like? she asked again, and knowing that the
other priests liked them, I smiled and told her yes.
Lunchtime came, and I could see her through the kitchen door,
smiling and checking the oven. After a few minutes she brought in a platter of
little hot dogs, the hors doeuvre kind. There must have been at least a
hundred of them. Chi smiled, placed the platter on the table and stepped back,
checking the faces of the priests and in particular the pastor. Her eyes read
faces like a blind persons fingers read Braille.
The pastor frowned. The rest of us -- there were four in those
days -- smiled in encouragement to Chi, but it was too late. I will never
forget her look of pain and anguish. She held her hands to her face, started to
cry and ran back into the kitchen. The pastor said something stupid to us, a
comment meant to brush off the whole incident.
I got up and went into the kitchen, and Chi was sitting at the
table crying and pointing to a picture of hot dogs she had found in an American
glossy magazine. I tried my best to tell her it was all right, that they were
good, that we ate such things all the time, but I sensed that the hot dog
incident was the proverbial straw that (momentarily) broke the camels
back.
She needed to cry, and perhaps some of the ugliness of seas that
she never wanted to sail poured from her eyes and her heart. I hugged her and
hoped she understood that everything would be good again and OK.
Months passed, and Chi and Joe came to find a comfort and ease
with the American way of life. I could tell that a world that they so wanted
was coming to them, its access made possible through many kind people and an
ever-growing use of English. Chi smiled more and became more herself. She gave
birth to a baby boy, who would be in his early 20s now. Not long ago I asked
about them and was told that they opened a business of their own and have
prospered and are happy.
How secure things seem when we assume that we know our world, know
who we are and who are neighbors are. Such a world is smooth sailing all the
way.
But I think that beneath each and every human face there is a
seeking, unsure self. Comportment keeps us smiling and chatting, agreeing as
best we can as to a mutually assured and taken for granted world.
In Chis anguished face and her tears, I saw something of
myself, something of everyone, something of the whole world. We want to do
good, be good, learn the good. But all we really have are little hot dogs. But
with time, patience, love and a hug when our platters are not quite right, even
little hot dogs go a long, long way.
Trappist Fr. James Stephen Behrens lives at Holy Spirit
Monastery in Conyers, Ga.
National Catholic Reporter, January 28,
2000
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