Little Yan was beginning to find her husband frustrating, sometimes even embarrassing. He was now insisting that they find jobs together or not at all. They had worked together briefly at a Chinese restaurant, and then, expecting their asylum to arrive in the predicted three months, Zhuang had insisted that they quit. He took Little Yan out to lunch at the East Buffet to discuss, as usual, their next steps.
As they ate, a call came in on Zhuang’s phone from an old colleague who was opening up his own restaurant. He asked for Little Yan, and Zhuang handed the phone over to her. “He’s very hardworking,” Zhuang explained. “He left his wife ten years ago and never got papers—he can never go back.” The man had paid a friend to sign all the paperwork for the new restaurant.
Little Yan was nodding at the phone. “Where is the restaurant?” she asked, then paused, nodding. “You will have to ask Liehong,” she said, handing the phone back. He was offering her a position at the counter in his new restaurant.
“Are there two positions?” Zhuang asked. He frowned at the answer. “No, no, she can’t take it. We’ll only do it if we can work together.”
Little Yan gave a tiny sigh. “Liehong doesn’t want me to work by myself,” she said, addressing her plate of chicken feet. American values were well and good. He was open to friendships with women who were fiercely independent, with men who were shy and studious; he was interested in all kinds of people who were unlike him. But in his marriage, he was still a man of Wukan. “Zhuang doesn’t think a woman should be smarter than her husband,” she said. And she was fine with the arrangement, as long as he took care of his family and let her be.
She was learning things about her husband in the United States that had lain dormant in Wukan. She had not been blind to their differences—his natural inclination was to run toward a fight, while hers was to keep her head down. She wanted comfort and financial security, whereas he would always put friends, and respectability, above money. He had asked her to stop working even before she was pregnant, since it was considered a loss of face for a married woman to work outside a family-run business. In Wukan, however, she had not thought these differences too important. He had not needed to lean so heavily on her there—they had their roles, his in the tea shop and with the village leaders, and hers at home.
But in the United States, under the pressure of building a new life, both of them were under stress just walking down the street and neither had friends or family to lean on. Here the little differences between Zhuang and Little Yan seemed to turn into chasms. She complained to her parents, “He loves to talk, but sometimes he should speak a little less.” Everyone had to work hard, but Zhuang had trouble accepting the realities of life as an immigrant. “For example, a customer will come in, and the boss will say, ‘No time to eat! Eat fast!’ And Liehong will say, ‘I’m still eating!’
“You can’t be like that,” Little Yan said. “Everyone has to eat bitter.”
Zhuang saw her growing discontent. On his days off, as his own optimism was wearing thin, he would sit at their little card table and offer Little Yan the comfort of his own self-reflection. One day he cooked a meal, chunks of meat in a thin soup, and stared at some photographs they had inherited from another former co-worker. They were photos of Washington, D.C., in the early spring, cherry blossoms framing the White House. “I think it is because of my father,” he said. “He was not a good man. I spent so much of my life trying not to be bullied that I can’t let myself be bullied by these Chinese bosses.”
He sighed and dabbed at his eye with a tissue—he had a blocked tear duct that grew more bothersome in winter. Since he had started working in restaurants, his eye had gotten worse. “When we get asylum,” he said, “I’m going to go to the doctor and get this fixed.” The operation was simple—a matter of a few specialists and less than twenty-four hours in a hospital. It was something his family should have had done when he was still a child. But they didn’t know to do it, and villagers had a tendency to ignore the problems they couldn’t fix themselves.
Once his work permit was in hand, Zhuang decided once and for all to stop working for overbearing bosses. He brought up the idea to Little Yan while sitting on the edge of their mattress, village style, with his knees folded down so they were touching the floor. She could keep working, he didn’t mind, but he wanted to start his own business. He would get some investment from family, take a month or two to figure it out, and open his own store on Main Street. He would make sure it was profitable right away.
There were a million reasons for Little Yan to say no. People who opened stores in Flushing, for the most part, had more money than she and Zhuang did. And if he failed, if they lost all the money and owed their investors, she worried, they would end up deeply in debt and still struggling to find jobs.
On the other hand, she felt relief. It would be quieter to work a job without Zhuang there to police her. And if what he said was true, he would be happy to let her keep working. There would be no arguments when she got home, nothing to keep her up at night aside from her own worries. So she put up no resistance. Zhuang enrolled in English classes at the Flushing Library and set about studying for yet another permit—one that would enable him to open a food stall. “Did you know,” he asked Little Yan one night, “that you have to cook an egg to at least one hundred forty-five degrees? Or else it’s illegal!”
Zhuang’s first plan was Beef King. No one in the United States made smoked beef quite right, he said. In Wukan they made thick strips, smoky and covered in grease. He did reconnaissance on the corner where the kebab guy set up shop every day. He dreamed of logos in his sleep. He would start with a cart, then expand. He would franchise. And then he would take his Beef King money and help his family back in the village. He would use the rest of the money to buy land somewhere in Upstate New York or maybe Florida. He would help others from Wukan make the jump to the United States. They would not be so isolated when they arrived, because Zhuang would be generous with his time and money. They could join him on his land, creating a new community. He had even decided on a name for the homestead he envisioned: New Wukan Village.
After researching, Zhuang decided, instead, to fall back on what he knew. He had been taking stock of his strengths and weaknesses. One of his strengths, he decided, was tea. Opening a tea shop was not a novel idea. With the arrival of more young people in the neighborhood, a handful of bubble tea shops had opened in Flushing. There was CoCo Fresh, a popular Taiwanese chain, with a mascot that looked like a bug-eyed marshmallow. There were a few family-run kiosks on Main Street, one in the basement of the New World Mall, another in the basement of the Golden Dragon Mall—less of a shopping spot, but the little store had the advantage of low rent, low prices, and a rolled breakfast crepe, with egg and cilantro, called a jianbing. And these were all in operation before the advent of Kung Fu Tea, a Brooklyn-born franchise that had inspired Zhuang’s own ambitions.
A new outlet of Kung Fu Tea had opened just behind the Flushing Library, and Zhuang slipped in with me one day, ready to size up the competition. He ordered a basic green tea and carried it back to a little wooden table. The shop was more modern than the kiosks down the street—it had music playing, cashiers in uniform, and free Wi-Fi. Across from Zhuang, the old lady who spent her days on the sidewalk holding up the “Green card! Marriage license!” bullhorn was meticulously unwrapping a steamed bun, all her supplies tied up in a little plastic bag stored under her stool.
Zhuang set down his tea and took a sip. It had been sweetened. “This doesn’t taste much like green tea,” he said. He strode back over to the kid behind the counter. “Are you using real custard apples or syrup?” he asked. “Syrup,” said the kid, standing very erect in his paper cap. Zhuang nodded and returned to our table. “They all use these syrups,” he told me. “They aren’t real fruit—they’re fake. It’s bad for your heart. It’ll block an artery and give you a heart attack.”
He hoped to open a high-quality option, a place where the tea leaves would be sourced, personally, by himself, and the fruit would all be fresh-squeezed. He would be a strict but amiable employer. He wouldn’t mind if they talked or chatted with customers. He wouldn’t let them sit on their cell phones at work, but he wouldn’t boss them around constantly. He had been reading the Starbucks employee manual. “It doesn’t matter if you’ve served one hundred people in a day, to the hundred and first person, that’s the only time they’ve been in Starbucks,” he recited. “You should treat them with as much courtesy as you did the very first.”
Zhuang had a deep, lasting love of tea; that was not the issue. His challenge lay in developing his own recipes—healthy versions of the popular sweet teas that incorporated mangoes, lemons, and tapioca balls. He decided to invest in a kit. He boiled fruits down and chilled them in the refrigerator, much to Chen Tai’s dismay. An uncle in China had offered to invest ten thousand dollars in the business, and he tried to work practically with the numbers he had. He spent a morning camped out at the CoCo’s near the subway station on Main Street, counting customers and estimating how much he would have to charge to turn a profit. He would need, he thought, around six hundred customers a day. He considered it was doable. Just one customer for every minute of a ten-hour day.
It was lonely work, researching and testing things all by himself. Zhuang spent the afternoons brewing tea and then, having drunk too much caffeine, stayed up late into the night and called China. Around midnight, when the busy streets of Flushing had cleared almost entirely, he went walking, listening to the tinny echo of his friends’ voices over his phone. He joked about the weather and caught up on village gossip. He brought others into his vision, making his optimism relentless. Now when a journalism student or documentary filmmaker visited, he would show them the logo he was trying to design himself, a ship’s steering wheel imposed over the name of his tea shop. He changed fonts and color schemes and sought their advice. He educated himself on the differences between design and video editing programs on his computer, and he asked his visitors for their opinions.
Zhuang wanted to call the shop the Wukan Chinese Tea Bar, then decided that the words Chinese and bar might discourage some potential customers. He opened a Facebook page for an entity called Wukan People Tea, and a bank account to hold the funds he expected from his uncle in China. The woman at the bank suggested that Zhuang give her husband, a CPA, a call and register the business. So Zhuang made an appointment, gathered his IDs, and wrote the name he liked down on a piece of paper, both in characters and in his wobbly written English.
The CPA worked in a high-rise just off Main Street, in a quiet building with an airy lobby and an escalator that seemed out of place in an office building. It was raining, and Zhuang carefully set his umbrella down on a section of newspaper so as not to get the carpet wet. He was still debating about the name. He had written down Wukan People, but then someone had suggested Wukan Village, and now the latter was starting to appeal to him. When the CPA arrived, he explained the business and the benefits of healthy versus unhealthy bubble tea. “Well then,” said the CPA, across from Zhuang in a black suit and red tie, “you will definitely be successful!” He suggested he register the company name as Wukan Village Inc., and Zhuang agreed.
“This is just the business,” the CPA said carefully. “When you actually open a store, you will have to fill out more applications. You will have to have the health department come and check the place. And they do it after you’ve remodeled.”
“After?” Zhuang asked. He wondered about pouring all that money in if there was still a chance he might get rejected by the health department.
“They have to check to see if the ventilation is good,” said the CPA. “And that everything is safe. If you work with a construction company that knows restaurants, then you shouldn’t have any problems.”
Zhuang took all this in while the CPA typed furiously at his computer. A piece of paper started making its way through the printer, and the CPA looked up. “I charge five hundred dollars to file the business name.” Zhuang reached into his back pocket and tossed a wad of cash onto the desk. Silently, the CPA counted the bills.
On the walk back from the appointment, Zhuang kept up his spirits. He gazed into the window of a store selling Rolexes, a sign announcing their last seven days. He liked the white granite in the display cases and the bright lighting. He had asked a real estate broker, however, and he had said the shop would rent for at least $25,000 a month. It was too much. But Zhuang didn’t want to open a little mom-and-pop kiosk in a basement. He drank too much tea again that afternoon and tried to work out the money in his head, walking up and down Main Street in the middle of the night.
* * *
• • •
Zhuang was holding himself together with the idea of his tea shop. It saved him from embarrassment, giving him a project to tell people about, something impressive and respectable. He had discovered a new phone application called WeChat and left voice messages for his friends. “Hey brother, hey brother,” they inevitably started, “I miss you.” He didn’t have to lie to anyone about his vocation. He was an entrepreneur in a land of entrepreneurs.
Little Yan can’t put her finger on the day it all fell apart. For weeks, Zhuang had been talking about the investment that would arrive from his uncle, never wavering in his faith that it would come in. And then he grew quiet. And then one day he told her that his uncle had to buy an apartment somewhere in Shenzhen and needed money for his son. “Or something,” Zhuang said. “He wasn’t totally clear.” And then, around the same time, Chen Tai told the couple that she needed them to leave—her daughter was getting married, and she and her husband were going to take over Zhuang and Little Yan’s room. Chen Tai invited them to the wedding, at the East Buffet, but they would have to move out soon.
Zhuang gave Little Yan a day or two to digest these bits of news before he sprung another surprise: he was going to buy a car. “It will be easier for me to find work,” he explained. “And we can find a cheaper apartment, farther away from Main Street.” He could buy it on a payment plan, he assured her. It wouldn’t cost too much right now.
Little Yan was exasperated; they were soon to be without a home, and Zhuang was spending money faster than she could earn it. He had been planning his tea shop for more than six weeks, had been out of a job for longer, and Little Yan had not yet learned to drive. Her instructor kept them on the streets nearest Main Street, narrow strips of pavement between apartment buildings that were technically two-way but that were so tightly packed with parked cars that two drivers could not actually pass at the same time. She hated driving.
Zhuang went to a Chinese-owned car dealership not far from Flushing’s center and tried to take out a loan. The salesman looked at Zhuang’s finances and quickly told him he would not qualify for a loan. “You have no credit history,” he told Zhuang. “You can’t get a loan with no credit history.” It was another humiliation; the scaffolding of Zhuang’s optimism was starting to fall away.
Determined, he answered an advertisement for a secondhand, two-door Honda that a Chinese student was selling. It still had a UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN sticker in the passenger-side window. It cost him seven thousand dollars, but the transaction was quick and respectful.
Then Zhuang set out to rent a new apartment and found a place for little money—a sublet of a sublet—a short drive from the center of Flushing. It was a second-floor apartment with a big kitchen, two occupied bedrooms in addition to their own, and a shared bathroom. He had stopped worrying about adults sharing their bathrooms.
On the day they moved their small collection of belongings into the new room, a woman came out of the apartment downstairs and confronted them. “Who told you you can move in?!” she asked, screeching. “You can’t move in! She can’t rent it to you!”
Zhuang was at a loss. “You should talk to her about it,” he s
aid. “We already gave money, and we already have the key!” Zhuang’s fuse was shorter than usual. He heaved his little mattress up the stairs and went back down as the woman watched from her doorway. “If you have a problem, you should not yell at us!” he yelled at her. “This has nothing to do with us! We are paying renters!”
The woman slammed her door. It was not an auspicious beginning.
Zhuang had promised Little Yan that he would look for a job, but he was brooding. He thought about the money they were spending on Little Yan’s parents, and the money he was sending to his own family. He worried that she wasn’t listening to him as she used to. When he tried to assert his authority, she resisted. She had changed jobs—moved to a new nail salon—without even telling him. He didn’t know her co-workers, and he didn’t know why she had moved. He asked her to quit, and she refused. She didn’t like a fight, but she was not going to give up the last piece of security she had.
Zhuang turned their interactions over in his head too many times. He had made so many concessions and compromises. He helped cook and do laundry. He had suffered so many humiliations and worked jobs he never would have accepted if he had been on his own. He had done it all for her!
He decided that he wanted to teach Little Yan to drive. On her day off, he sat her down in the driver’s seat and took the passenger’s seat. It did not take long for him to lose patience. As she paused in an intersection, he snapped at her. He confused her by telling her to turn one way or another. When she moved her hands from the proper position on the steering wheel, he chastised her.
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