The three of us in the room is as close to a family gathering as we can get when we’re not in the restaurant; my mom is already downstairs, cutting and marinating meat. When I was younger I used to wonder if this was the life she thought she’d have when she first came to America as a teenager. Did she imagine that she’d come home from a twelve-hour shift every night with her hair reeking of sesame oil and cornstarch trapped under her fingernails? She knew when she married my father that he was in the restaurant business, of course, but maybe she thought she’d be a cheongsam-wearing hostess at a fancy sit-down dim sum restaurant in the city, the kind of place that uses nondisposable chopsticks and charges five bucks for a pot of chrysanthemum tea.
In sixth grade we had one of those personal history assignments for school—the kind where you make a family tree and interview your parents. I actually asked my mom what she had wanted to be when she grew up, if she wished she’d done something different with her life.
She surprised me: She didn’t regret anything. She didn’t seem to resent the hard work, the dreariness and exhaustion, or the fact that we hadn’t had a family vacation in twelve years.
“You were my dream, you and Alan,” she said. “This is my dream, that you grow up and have good life, be happy.”
The question that kept nagging me afterward, though, was this: If I’m not happy, does that mean I’m killing my mother’s dream? Because I can honestly count on my hands the number of times in my life when I’ve felt unadulterated happiness. I’ve never been a bouncy Tigger, or a kind and steadfast Piglet. I’m an Eeyore, plain and simple.
I can tell when my father gets back from his supply run because the muffler on his ten-year-old Honda Accord broke three months ago and he hasn’t bothered to fix it yet. I wait for the sound of the trunk slamming shut and run down.
“Baba!” He’s unloading drinks into the display case. My hand moves toward a pink lemonade Snapple, but at his sharp gaze I grab a Nestea iced tea (twenty-five cents cheaper) instead. “I hired someone for the internship today.”
He grunts. “You think he reliable?”
“Yeah, I do,” I say. “He’s a high school student, but he’s in the honor society, so he’s got to be pretty responsible.”
“It’s good he a student. Minimum wage only—don’t have to listen to him begging for more money for his children.” Frowning, he lifts a carton of produce over the counter. “Still don’t know if we can afford. He work for one month, we see if we can keep him on.”
“I probably have enough money to cover him for two months,” I say.
My dad grimaces like someone who’s just bitten into a sour orange. “Do not be silly. The restaurant pay him.”
“Are you sure?” It’s a legitimate question—he actually looks physically pained.
“One month. At end of month, if he not pay for himself…” My dad makes a throat-cutting gesture, and I know it’s not just Will who’ll get the ax.
It’ll be my life as I know it.
This Is My Brain on Action
JOCELYN
By Tuesday, I feel like someone should be playing “Eye of the Tiger”: It’s time for the “Training Montage” trope.
For Will’s first day, I’ve printed out the Yelp pages, websites, and social media stats of our major competitors, including the No. 1 China Restaurant two towns over, whose Stone Age marketing plan makes me feel much better about myself.
I also may have taken a peek at the copy of Running a Restaurant for Dummies at our library, but you’ll never be able to prove it. Ten minutes of browsing through that book made it clear how little my parents know about running a business. When I started looking at my dad’s files—they are still mostly on paper and written in that crisply uniform handwriting that is so typical of people who grew up writing Chinese characters—I remembered that he never finished high school in Taiwan. He was pretty much my age when he came over to help my uncle with his business.
Basically, everything he knows about restauranting, he learned on the job. He definitely didn’t have any pro forma sheets or business plans in any of his files. If you were to summarize my parents’ advice on how to run a restaurant, it would boil down to two things: hard work and sacrifice. Everything else is just noise.
When I come down the back stairs to the restaurant dining room, Will is already there and I’m struck by a sudden panic. He’s not wearing his suit, obviously, but with his slacks and navy button-down, he still looks like he should be the head waiter at one of the bistros downtown with outdoor seating. He’s carrying a leather folio and a cardboard cup holder with two hot drinks from the overpriced café that just opened up by the college.
In other words, he couldn’t look more out of our league if he’d tried.
WILL
Jos is wearing flip-flops, a Hufflepuff shirt, and cutoff jean shorts that are so revealing that in my attempt not to ogle my new boss, I’m rendered completely unable to remember the greeting I rehearsed.
Instead I blurt out, “I got coffee,” and shove the cup holder into her hands. Except she’s holding a legal pad and a water bottle and I manage to crowd her just enough that she can’t easily put the things down, leading to some excruciating seconds of awkward juggling that I eventually resolve by admitting defeat and setting the drinks back down on the booth where I was sitting when she came in.
“Thanks,” says Jocelyn when the cups are back on stable ground again. “You didn’t have to do that. Aren’t I supposed to be the one providing fringe benefits?”
I feel myself blushing. It’s early enough in the day that it’s still relatively cool, so I don’t feel any actual beads of sweat on my temple, but I can feel the heat building at my hairline. Right on cue, I hear my mother’s voice reminding me to just breathe, William, and say something.
I don’t give myself a whole five seconds to inhale, but I get to a count of three before I give a shaky smile. “I didn’t have time to make coffee at home and the place was on my way in. You really don’t want to see me trying to solve problems when I’m undercaffeinated. My sister tells me it’s like watching a slow-motion replay of someone missing a dunk.”
Jos grins, and I get down to business so I don’t have to come up with more small talk. “So how do you guys do things around here? Do you have an electronic ordering system?”
Jos rolls her eyes. “I wish.” She waves a paper order pad. “We have two cases of these in our basement, and I’ll bet you real money that my dad would say we can’t waste the rest, and we shouldn’t transition to digital until we use them all up.”
A warm slice of recognition melts away the last of my residual anxiety. “My grandmother hoards stuff like that. She still drives a 1997 Peugeot that she shipped over from Nigeria. ‘It is still working; why would I replace it?’” I mimic the standard retort she uses every time my mother offers to buy her a new car.
“As you can see, we’re a bit of a fixer-upper,” Jos says. “I have a plan, though.”
JOCELYN
After a while I realize that Will’s preppy getup and the overpriced drinks make him more adorkable than intimidating. It’s more of a “tries too hard” than “thinks he’s better than anyone else” vibe.