Hotdogs and Eggs

Dear ghetto brethren,

‘Tomorrow when you’re home, you can fry up some eggs and hotdogs. There are some tortillas too.’

Stacking bread* means never having to eat hotdogs ever again, except at sporting events where you’re charged $8 for something you could have made yourself for 25 cents. Hot dogs on sale typically cost a buck for a generic pack of 8. Mama usually buys several packs like she was at Costco and freezes them in the refrigerator. She thaws them out when necessary and adds one to her ramen as a source of protein. That’s her dinner. People would be shocked to know that Dad is a pharmacist when we live like we’re below the poverty line.

But Dad wasn’t always a pharmacist, and when he was chasing after his dreams, he was hemorrhaging the family’s assets like a gunshot wound to the abdomen.** Before he became a professional student, Dad had owned a washateria (the southern word for laundromat; everyone in Houston calls it ‘washateria’ and would make a confused, frowny face if you used ‘laundromat’). It was fairly successful, but he sold it in the early 90s to go back to school to become a ‘real doctor.’

It was right after he sold the business that I started becoming conscious of my surroundings (around 5-ish). Mama still worked, but Dad was using the monthly payments from the sale to pay for tuition. And so to save some money, Mama bought stuff like ramen, hot dogs, eggs, and generic cereal. A couple nights a week, Mama would cook some Viet stuff, but it would be mostly white rice, some broccoli with not-so-select cuts of chicken, and simmered fish that had a plethora of tiny bones that lodged in the back of my throat.

I preferred the coronary-artery-thickening American trayf to the stuff she cooked. Don’t tell me that one of the advantages of living at home through college was that I had some of Mama’s fine home-cooking; I frequented Taco Hell more times than I ate at home.

She’ll probably never change her eating or buying habits. I think she could live off of $20 a week in groceries if she had to.

The next day instead of following her suggestion, I drove to Fuqua and Sabo and had some traditional Viet beef noodle soup at Pho Saigon. It is ironic how home cooking means hotdogs and eggs while traditional Viet food can only be found at the local eatery.
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*one of the many ghetto slang for that ‘paper’, as in the paper on which rests dead presidents, Ben Franklin, and Alex Hamilton. Isn’t it funny how when people talk about dead presidents as a placeholder for money, they don’t realize that Ben Franklin wasn’t a president? And Ben is probably the most important dead white guy.
**one of the focuses of my book that I’m actually starting to write