Free Pioneer Girl by Bich Minh Nguyen Page B

flexibility, the bamboo reed.
    Foreigners are disliked, admired, & respected.
    Nothing so far corroborated my theory that Rose Wilder Lane was the American woman who had visited my grandfather’s café every day for two weeks. Ong Hai had said he’d helped her cross the street, navigating the traffic that flowed without signals or stops. He was worried about her being by herself in Saigon. He told her his home would be hers as long as she ever wanted it. And she had thanked him, pressed his hand. This American woman was both old and young, Ong Hai tried to explain once. She’d possessed joie de vivre, and a mind completely intact. But the Rose of the archives, Rose Wilder, had died in her sleep three years later, at the age of eighty-two, at her home in Connecticut.
    Nowhere in these journals was there mention of a gold pin. If Almanzo’s gift to Laura in
These Happy Golden Years
had been real, it would have been an heirloom, no small thing for Rose to lose or give.
    I had nearly emptied the contents of the box onto the table and now, disappointed, I started to put everything back. The items had been out of order in the first place—just light penciled numbers on them to correspond to the index—so I didn’t worry about keeping everything neat. There were a few black-and-white photos in the mix, small snapshots encased in plastic. Most were scenes of Saigon life—people on bicycles and cycles, French colonial buildings—the standard images one would find even now in
Lonely Planet
guides. There were pictures of Rose too, standing amid all of this. Only one of them wasn’t of her. It was a faded, blurred portrait of a man standing on a sidewalk. The photo had been taken at an angle, as if Rose had impulsively turned to get the shot. The man looked out at the street traffic. My grandfather had no pictures of himself from his younger days. But I thought it could have been him. Like the man in the picture, Ong Hai often wore light short-sleeved shirts and flip-flops. Café 88 could have been on that street.
    In the index the image was simply listed as
Photo No. 12, Saigon, Vietnam, 1965
.
    I looked up to where Ron was manning the front desk. He was staring at a computer screen, clicking a mouse. I wondered if he was playing some online game. Around me the other scholars and researchers kept on with their own work, making no noise except with the shutters of their cameras.
    For the second time in a week, I turned into a thief. I didn’t even think before the photograph was in my notebook, closed between blank pages where I had yet to write anything down about Rose Wilder Lane, or Laura Ingalls Wilder, or why I was there at the Hoover Library, looking them up, searching for, maybe hoping for, my own claim on America’s favorite pioneer family.
    â€”
    T hat night Alex and I ordered Thai food in. While we waited for it to arrive, I showed him the photograph and the gold pin.
    â€œWho knew you’d turned into such a sly little klepto?” he said, holding the picture up to the floor lamp near the dinette table where he kept a stack of
New Yorker
s. “If I turn it just a little to the right and close one eye, I can see how you maybe do kind of look like him.”
    â€œYeah, yeah, his face is hardly visible, I know. But there’s something of my grandfather in the guy’s deportment. It’s like the signature Ong Hai stance.”
    â€œDid you just use the word
deportment
?”
    Alex’s buzzer rang, and he tossed the photo back to me on his way to the door. “You’re going to stay and find out what’s next, right?”
    The ease of his generosity, right after my theft, which couldn’t help but remind me of Sam’s thefts, shamed me. Perhaps my brother and I were more similar than I cared to admit.
    â€œRose Wilder must have been rolling in royalties,” Alex said as he spread out containers of larb gai and noodles and tom yum