V is for Victory

we were in a van on our way to the hospital to see my brother for the first time, my dad had just got back from some engineering conference and i hadn't seen any of my parents for days ever since he left and my mom went into labour one night and left too... they left me with grad students who did not realize that i needed to change clothes, you know? i remember being passed around like a toy from dorm to dorm, sleeping in different beds but always the same clothes, no pajamas even. one morning i turned my socks inside out to wear. i thought it was the most brilliant thing i'd ever discovered. maybe it was.

so we're in the van and my dad is flipping through a baby names book. he looks like he's cramming for a test. "how about victor?" he shouts over the din of the van --it's a commercial van by the way, for carrying tofu, not a mini van --those didn't exist yet i don't think.

"no," ms. tai said shaking her head. she was the mother hen to all the chinese grad students, the first generation of mainland chinese to come out of china since the wars. her husband was a professor and she owned a tofu factory, where my dad worked on the weekend, and where i worked too, putting sticker labels on the cartons and being acutely aware that i was a novelty for all the adults around me, watching me.

"why not?" my dad asks, the book still open at victor.

"victor is a nice name," mrs. tai allows, "but on the playground the kids will call him 'vee vee.'"

my dad and i look at each other and shrug. what's wrong with vee vee?