My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store

by Ben Ryder Howe

  Copyright © 2011 Ben Ryder Howe

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Doubleday Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Howe, Ben Ryder

  My Korean deli / Ben Ryder Howe.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-37477-6

  1. Howe, Ben Ryder. 2. Howe, Ben Ryder–Family. 3. Delicatessens. 4. Editors–United States–Biography. 5. Authors, American–21st century–Biography. I. Title.

  PN4874.H685A3 2009 818′.603 C2008-906970-6

  Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada,

  a division of Random House of Canada Limited

  Visit Random House of Canada Limited’s website: www.randomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  For Dwayne Wright

  1968–2009

  “Most guys from the projects has Wizard of Oz disease: they can’t go nowhere unless they got three other people with them. They’re like, ‘I’m the Tin Man and I don’t have a heart. Will you come with me to look for one? Cuz I’m afraid to leave Brooklyn alone.’ ”

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One

  Steam Table

  Slush Pile

  Location is Everything

  “Don’t Let It Kill You”

  Amateurs

  The Ghost

  “The Square Root of A Doughnut”

  The Accident

  Lucy

  We are Happy to Serve You

  Labor Wants to Be Free

  C is for “Cookie”

  Death Tomb

  Part Two

  Packs

  Naked with Desire

  Alienation of Labor

  Problem Employee

  I Love You, Tomorrow

  A Rare Cat

  Fear Factor

  Costa Rica

  D.I.Y.

  Closing Time

  I Ain’t Never Leaving BROOKLYN

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  PART ONE

  STEAM TABLE

  FALL 2002

  Last summer my wife’s family and I decided to buy a deli. By fall, with loans from three different relatives, two new credit cards, and a sad kiss good-bye to thirty thousand dollars my wife and I had saved while living in my mother-in-law’s Staten Island basement, we had rounded up the money. Now it is November, and we are searching New York City for a place to buy.

  We have different ideas about what our store should look like. My mother-in-law, Kay, the Mike Tyson of Korean grandmothers, wants a deli with a steam table, one of those stainless steel, cafeteria-style salad bars that heat the food to just below the temperature that kills bacteria—the zone in which bacteria thrive. She wants to serve food that is either sticky and sweet, or too salty, or somehow all of the above, and that roasts in the dusty air of New York City all day, while roiling crowds examine it at close distance—pushing it around, sampling it, breathing on it. Kay’s reason for wanting a deli of this kind is that steam tables bring in a lot of money, up to a few thousand dollars per hour at lunchtime. She also wants a store that is open twenty-four hours and stays open on Christmas and Labor Day. She’d like it to be in the thick of Manhattan, on a street jammed with tourists and office workers.

  I don’t know what I want, but an all-night deli in midtown with a steam table isn’t it. I’m the sort of person who loses my appetite if I walk past an establishment with a steam table. I get palpitations and the sweats just being around sparerib tips. Of course, I don’t have to eat the food if we buy a deli with a steam table. I just have to sell it. That’s what Kay says she plans to do. But Kay has an unfair advantage: years ago, after she came to America, she lost her sense of smell, and now she can’t detect the difference between a bouquet of freesias and a bathroom at the bus station. My nose, on the other hand, is fully functional.

  Luckily, I’m in charge of the real estate search, and so far I have successfully steered us from any delis serving hot food. As a result, Kay’s frustration is starting to become lethal.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked me the other day. “You not like money? Why you make us poor?”

  These are not unfair questions. I would say that one of my biggest faults as a human being is that I do not love money, which makes me lazy and spoiled. Like finding us a store, for example. Call me a snob, but somehow a deli grocery—a traditional fruit and vegetable market—seems more dignified than a deli dishing out slop by the pound in Styrofoam trays. Is that practical? We are, after all, talking about the acquisition of a deli, not a summer home or a car. If dignity is so important, why not buy a bookstore or a bakery? Why not spend it on a business where I have to dress up for work?

  Don’t get me wrong: I’m not insecure about becoming a deli owner. I even sort of like the idea. Aside from a few “gentleman farmers,” no one can remember the last person in my family who worked with their hands. After blowing off law school and graduate school, after barely getting through college and even more narrowly escaping high school, why would I suddenly get snobbish?

  But the truth is, I’m still young (thirty-one is young, right?) and can afford to be blasé. It’s like the job I had as a seventeen-year-old pumping gas outside Boston, a gig I remember as brainless heaven. I enjoyed coming home smelly. I enjoyed looking inside people’s cars while scraping the crud off their windows. I enjoyed flirting with women drivers twice my age.

  Who knows how I would have felt if seventeen were just the beginning, and I could look forward to fifty more years of taking orders from strangers.

  TODAY WE ARE looking at a deli with a steam table. This morning I was informed of the news by a fire-breathing giant, a creature escaped from a horror movie about mutants spawned by an industrial accident, who hovered at my bedside until I awoke with a start, upon which the creature said: For two weeks you be in charge of finding our store, and you not come up with anything. So starting today we do it my way. Then the creature exited, accompanied, it seemed to my half-asleep ears, by the sound of dragging chains.

  For the rest of the morning I lie there under the sheets as a form of protest, not intending to get out, until my wife, Gab, sits down on the bed next to me with a cup of coffee.

  “I want you and my mother to go together,” Gab says. “I can’t come because I have things to do at home.”

  The store is near Times Square and has a name like Luxury Farm or Delicious Mountain. Its Korean owners claim to be making eight thousand dollars a day, a preposterous sum that nevertheless has Kay all excited.

  “Don’t be afraid of steam table,” she says as we drive to the store. “If smelling something stranger, close nose and think of biiig money.”

  I exhale deeply and try to follow her advice, but instead of fist-fuls of cash all I can think of are slabs of desiccated meat loaf slathered in congealed gravy and the smell of boiled ham. So I focus on the drive into midtown—the glowering skyscrapers, the silhouettes of bankers and lawyers behind tinted windows a few stories above the traffic, the gigantic television screens featuring high-cheekboned models talking on cell phones, and at street level my future comrades among the peonage: the restaurant deliverymen
, the tarot readers, the no-gun security guards and the DVD bootleggers.

  The owner of the deli is a distressingly perky woman named Mrs. Yu. She’s frizzy-haired and victimized by an excess of teeth, and she’s wearing the Korean deli owner’s official uniform: a puffy vest and a Yankees cap settled snugly over her Asianfro. Her age—approximately mid-fifties—is the same as Kay’s, which makes her part of the generation of Koreans who came to America in the 1980s and became the most successful immigrant group ever—ever: the people who took over the deli industry from the Greeks and the Italians, the people who drove the Chinese out of the dry-cleaning trade, the people who took away nail polishing from African-Americans, and the people whose children made it impossible for underachievers like me to get into the same colleges our parents had attended.

  “My name Gloria Yu,” she says when we walk in. “My store make you rich.” She winks at me. “Cost only half million dollar.”

  It seems hard to imagine how any convenience store, even one that can get away with charging twelve dollars for a six-pack of Bud Ice, could be worth half a million dollars, but Gloria Yu’s store probably deserves it if any of them do. Like a ship squeezed inside a bottle, a full-sized supermarket has somehow been folded into the space meant for a restaurant or a flower shop. Thousands of items line the shelves, seemingly one of everything. In my general state of paranoia, it occurs to me that if I were to be trapped in this place by some sort of prolonged emergency, such as a flood or a toxic cloud, I could survive for months, maybe even a year, and find something new to eat each day.

  “So,” Gloria Yu says to me, her voice quivering with excitement, “this your first store?”

  “Yes, it is,” I confess guiltily.

  “I knew it!” she says, practically jumping up and down with excitement. “I knew it! I knew it! You not look like normal deli owner.” A few customers glance nervously our way.

  “So where you from?” Gloria Yu asks me.

  “Um, Boston.”

  “Boston? Like the Boston, Massachusetts? No, no, no. No, no, no.”

  “What do you mean, ‘no, no, no’?” I ask impatiently. “That’s where I grew up.”

  “Not where you grow up, where your family from?” Gloria Yu says.

  “Oh, you mean originally? Like where are my ancestors from? Here, I suppose. Here as much as anywhere else.”

  “Hmm …” says Gloria Yu, massaging her chin thoughtfully. “Very interesting. Okay, time to show deli!”

  Now Gloria Yu thinks I am some sort of freak. Hopefully it will prevent her from selling us her store.

  “You two go ahead,” I say. “I’m going to wander around alone.”

  Am I a freak? Why does the steam table scare me so much?

  On an even deeper level, though, I wonder, Is fear of the steam table a fear of commitment? A fear of going all the way? Maybe I just need to get it over with and eat a plateful of American chop suey.

  “Hey you!” a voice says.

  I look around, but there’s no one. Kay and Gloria have moved several paces ahead. I’m standing in the drink section, an area filled with glass-doored refrigerators and a rainbow assortment of fluids.

  “Hey mister!” the voice commands.

  Still nothing.

  “Over here,” the voice says. “Look inside.” And now I see. Next to me, apparently imprisoned within a soda refrigerator, is a balding Korean man in a puffy vest.

  “I’m you,” the man says, banging meekly on the glass.

  “I’m sorry?” I say, yanking the door open. The prisoner stands behind a rack of soft drinks, only his right hand poking through.

  “I’m Yu,” he says. “Mr. Yu. Store owner. You come to buy store, right?”

  “Oh,” I say. “Nice to meet … you.” I speak these words, as far as anyone watching is concerned, to nothing but a rack of soda. (The refrigerator is one of those models that open up from behind, so you can stock the shelves from back to front. Except for his hand, Mr. Yu remains hidden.)

  “This store very good,” Mr. Yu says cheerily, his hand gesturing dramatically and at one point seeming to lunge straight for my crotch. “Eight thousand a day no problem. You like something to drink?” The hand starts pointing at different flavors. “Which one your favorite? Have any one. Try many different color.”

  “Thank you,” I say to the hand, while taking out a bottle of Code Red. “It’s a nice store.” Mr. Yu wants to continue the conversation, but before he can, I gently close the door. Then, in an unplanned gesture, I bow solemnly to the walk-in refrigerator.

  “Okay, Mr. Original American,” says Gloria Yu, coming up behind me with Kay. “You ready to buy my deli?” She winks at me again and says something to Kay in Korean—something evidently quite hilarious, as they both erupt in hysterical laughter.

  “What’s so funny?” I ask.

  “Don’t be worrying,” says Gloria Yu, adding mysteriously, “You’ll be making successful again soon.”

  “What? Excuse me?”

  “Don’t be worrying, I said. Success coming! But first, I want to show you something.” A devious smile lights up her lips. “I want you and your mother-in-law to come with me so I can show you where this“—she gestures expansively at the steam-table spread, like a game show model unveiling a new car—“is made.”

  We follow Gloria Yu to the store’s basement, where things get dingy pretty fast. The space is cramped, the light dim, and as the temperature starts to climb, the smell of American chop suey becomes as overpowering as a trash can full of baby diapers. In the basement we find a gang of six Mexicans dressed in thick fire-retardant gloves and steel-toed boots—work gear more appropriate to a steelworks than a kitchen. Evidently you don’t cook the food that gets served at a steam table. You attack it with extreme bursts of heat from an oven that looks like a smelter. And you don’t prepare it, either. You buy it premade from an offsite mass producer of cafeteria and hospital fare somewhere in Connecticut.

  The whole experience is rather shocking, and I think Kay feels bad for me. On our way home, I expect the usual barrage of scorn, like sitting too close to a nuclear reactor, but instead she’s quiet. And then as we drive over the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, the gateway to Staten Island and the traditional summing-up point for any of our family’s journeys, she tells me she’s changed her mind.

  “We need small place, for family only. That one too big. Besides, I’m not really trusting that woman anyway. If store be making eight thousand dollars every day, how come she and her husband still working there?”

  A few minutes later we pull into the driveway of our home and find Gab outside. Instead of having just snubbed out a cigarette, which is what she was really doing, she pretends to have been waiting for us. She does have news, after all.

  She bends over and sticks her head through the passenger window, maintaining just enough distance so that we won’t smell the smoke on her breath.

  “I found the perfect store,” she says.

  IT WASN’T MY idea to buy a deli. The idea came to my wife at the time of her thirtieth birthday. Thirty can be an uncomfortable turning point for those inclined to measure their own accomplishments against those of their parents. Gab took it especially hard.

  “What have I done with my life?” she asked me.

  I reminded her that she had graduated from one of the best colleges in the world (the University of Chicago, where we met almost ten years ago) and obtained both a master’s degree and a law degree. She’d even had a burgeoning career as a corporate attorney at a Manhattan law firm, until she’d decided to chuck it all so she could open this deli for her mother.

  “And?” she retorted angrily. “Do you know what my mother had accomplished by the time she was thirty? She had three kids who she had raised with no help from my father. She had her own business, which she ran by herself. And she was about to immigrate to America, a country she knew nothing about. All by thirty!”

  I thought of reminding Gab that her mom never finished co
llege—Gab was beating her three to none in the degree category—but it didn’t seem like what she wanted to hear.

  Over the course of the next few months, Gab’s thirtieth-birthday paranoia transformed into an obsession with repaying her mother’s sacrifice. Mistakenly, I had thought that she had already done that by being successful herself. But as the year went on, it became clear that Gab would not be satisfied without a sacrifice of her own. So her goal became to give back some of what Kay had given up in coming to America.

  She was going to give her back her business.

  And sacrifice her husband.

  Kay’s old business had been a bakery serving typical Korean desserts. She spoke of it so lovingly one wondered how she had ever coped with its loss. However, unless Americans suddenly developed a taste for mung bean balls and glutinous rice cakes, doing the same kind of business was not going to be an option. Kay knew how to run a deli, having twenty years of experience clerking at 7-Elevens and Stop’n Gos across America. Yet she was no longer the same person she had been in her twenties. Though still frighteningly strong at the age of fifty-five (her one weakness being an inability to say no to relatives requesting favors), she was now prone to thunderous physical breakdowns that left her bedridden for days. And the breakdowns were getting longer and more thunderous. She still smoked, she ate terribly, and she invariably found ways to get out of the doctors’ appointments her children tried making for her.