Fifty Years Done
By Emily Cheng
The air in my parents’ restaurant is hot and greasy and always loud, but that is how they know it is good. I first stepped into the restaurant when I was ten and didn’t know anything. My parents were owners of a Chinese restaurant, and I didn’t even know what a wok was. They brought me in to “work” when they couldn’t find a grandparent or uncle to watch over me. I would sit by my mother and do the simplest tasks, packing white and brown rice into Chinese takeout containers. With every container I finished, she would tell me “not enough, more, more.” Then, she would take the container out of my hands, scoop triple the amount I had filled, and pack it with the rice bursting out of the paper box. She would always give more rice than I thought we could afford.
When it was not so busy, I eyed the chefs who held large metal woks and tossed food with them like it was nothing. I would learn that these woks were the key to a real Chinese restaurant. They needed special care—constantly seasoned in oil and heat to produce wok hei, the breath of the wok. Over the shouting of my mother and chefs in the kitchen was the sound of oil sputtering and popping at the addition of washed green scallions. I had convinced myself that this was the wok breathing life into food. And in this same way, the woks’ air would season the whole kitchen—its staff, the walls of the restaurant, and the greasy floors—imbuing itself into everything.
***
In mid-October, my father called to tell me that they have decided to sell the restaurant and have found a buyer. They’ve spoken about it a few times, but it was something so distant it didn’t seem real. “I just wanted to let you know.” So simple, unsentimental.
I didn’t have enough time to think of an answer for him, so I only began to process after he hung up. Did we have enough money to live? It was the most obvious question, and I hope they had thought this through. How much was the restaurant? But more accurately, how can you assign a price to this? Overnight, everyone had seemingly become hard and unemotional when all I could do was feel. Feel for all the stories unaccounted for.
***
My father remembers his childhood at the restaurant as the worst time in his life. It is a Chinese tradition that the oldest son is the one who will suffer the most. He was the one to care for his younger siblings and the only sibling expected to help in the restaurant, tasked to hold the family together while his parents worked in the kitchen downstairs.
After high school, he would return to the restaurant and help my grandmother take orders at the front. My grandmother, overwhelmed with stress and responsibilities, would verbally lash out at him in front of customers and the entire kitchen staff. Good for nothing! Stupid! Worse than garbage! Words to that effect. Words my father could not believe a parent could say to their child.
When my grandparents retired, they urged him to take it over; they saw it as the greatest gift they could pass down. And as the oldest son, my father could not refuse. Traumatized by his childhood, my father spent nearly the next 40 years working at the restaurant. He has worked through countless invoices and business statements until he physically could not handle seeing numbers anymore. He started taking medication to help him through this, but eventually it stopped helping. At his lowest point, he stood at the top of the third floor of the restaurant office and attempted.
I remember my father before this time. He would come home and play with us and smile. He was so happy to just be with us, in the moment, alive. He has never been like that since. He had survived, but some part of him had died in the restaurant many years ago.\
***
Now, he’s cleaning up the mess from the past 50 years. He has been moving out his sister’s old books and his parent’s picture frames. As much as the restaurant has hurt him, his texts to our family group chat read a bittersweet. “Today I realized Cleaning out 30 years worth of stuff is quite exhausting.”
The second floor of the restaurant is an office that looks more like a dump. It is a collection of everything discarded, but not thrown away. My father sends us a picture he’s found of him and my grandfather in the clutter of that office. It’s him as a kid. My grandfather has on a yellow polo, one arm wrapped around my father, wearing a matching polo in white. I don’t recognize my grandfather in this picture, but they’re both smiling. And for some reason, I find myself zooming on the icee my father is holding because seeing him as a kid brings out something so sad in me that I don’t want to feel it. All I can see now are his tiny fingers gripping onto a paper cup.
***
My mother has no fears. While my father works in accounting, my mother works in the kitchen, in the fire. She comes home with cuts and blisters. I’ll ask if she’s ok, if it’s painful, if she can still go back to work. She won’t give it the slightest attention. “It’s not anything.” Her hands are not rough, but strong, necessary to push woks, withstand burns, and raise children.
She was like this even before I was born. When my mother was pregnant with my older brother, she continued to work in the restaurant. She called orders and cooked and sweated in the humid New York summer air.
For one order, it required lobster which they had not prepared that day. My mother, big-bellied but still strong, walked downstairs to the restaurant’s inventory to start preparing the ingredients. On the way, a coworker bumped into her, and she fell one flight of stairs down to the bottom. My mother was rushed to the hospital by my father who had already started grieving. When she was told she and the baby were fine, she had taken that day off, then returned to the restaurant the day after.
She kept working all the way to August, until the moment before her water broke.
***
My mother has spoken with the Chinese man buying our restaurant and his lawyer. She’s been managing stipulations, lawyers, contracts, and all the things that she does not understand. And she feels herself getting older and smaller, fading into a shadow of her past self.
“You are in such a good place. To have perfect American English.” I can type these words, understand the nuances of English words, and find beauty in the language. But when she tries to negotiate with the lawyer, she gets pulled aside and her English is called “childish”—like she is playing games by changing her mind, but it is only that she is unable to explain her thoughts in American words. She tells me this is what happens when you are bad at English.
For so long, I’ve been trying to learn Mandarin, but even with Sunday Chinese school, textbooks, and living in a Mandarin-speaking family, my fluency is still that of an elementary school student. Sometimes, I think about all the stories my mom wants to tell me but can’t. All the words that she knows in her perfect Chinese, the three dialects—Mandarin, Cantonese, and Fuzhounese—she’s fluent in.
I know she is not a shadow of who she was. She is only waiting in the shadows, holding onto the words she knows. She is biding her time, planning her moves, and learning her options in an American world. And when she’s ready, she’ll strike.
***
I am angry at myself for wanting to hold onto the restaurant. For even feeling sentimental towards leaving it behind. It has been the source of my parents’ despair for decades. I should really be celebrating, cheering, and jumping at the idea of it never being in our lives again. Leave it somewhere far, far away. For too long it has been a mass, growing and growing, becoming unbearable and draining my parents. Cut out a pound of the flesh that feeds on the pain of good people. Cut out this tumor.
But as much as it has hurt, it has supported three generations of my family. It is my grandparents’ true first-born, and my parents’ entire lives. As I’m going back home to see the restaurant for the last time, I am going to indulge in the gluttony, filling myself with the pain, hurt, love, death, and ends of my moments being there. It’s like I’m gripping onto a broken wok, seeing all of its scratches and imperfections, and trying to learn to let it go. I know using it will break it—the shards recutting the wounds of my family.
So once more. Before I go, I’ll oil it one last time, give it heat, give it breath, give back all it has given to us. In return, we’ll slowly learn to move on and learn to feel the way it has breathed into our family new life.
About the Author
Emily is a student, writer, and her own personal chef, honed from her experiences at her parents’ restaurant. In her free time, she is an avid puzzler and admirer of her dog, Truffle.