My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store

by Ben Ryder Howe

  “Teal and yellow—what does that mean?” I ask Gab. The color of a deli’s awning often tells you what kind of store lies within. In Manhattan, an evergreen awning tends to signify a Korean deli offering fresh produce, cut flowers and upscale products—the Starbucks of the deli world. Red and yellow, on the other hand, usually means a bodega run by Dominicans, where the groceries tend to come in cans and jars and the prices tend to be more affordable—the Dunkin’ Donuts of New York’s convenience stores. In poorer neighborhoods, where supermarket chains usually decline to set up stores, bodegas are the traditional place where families shop for groceries. Bodegas also often tend to be neighborhood hangouts; in front of Salim’s store I notice that there are milk crates and a wooden bench, where undoubtedly in the summertime old men sit around and do stuff that old men do on city corners.

  “Salim is Arab, if that’s what you mean, but I think he bought it from the building’s owner, who’s Puerto Rican or Dominican and ran it as a bodega. It’s kind of a mixed-up place—a little of this, a little of that. Why don’t you go inside and get me something to drink. I’ll wait in the car.”

  I exit Kay’s Honda and wait for the light. While crossing I take stock of the apartment building housing Salim’s deli, a brick walkup that appears to be in dire condition, slumping sideways and spalling bits of facade. Like all of the attached row houses, it is a couple times as tall as it is wide, the shape of a cigarette pack. Its level roof sits four stories off the ground, exactly the same height as most of the buildings in this historically landmarked neighborhood. There are similar buildings in every direction, most of which appear to be in flawless physical condition, but Salim’s seems to have been left over from a different era. On the exposed side of the building facing leafy, pleasant Hoyt Street, everything sags, everything is crooked—the black fire escape entangled in cable TV wires, the graffiti-covered garage, the peeling windowsills framing bedsheet curtains and flags from countries I can’t identify. The whole building seems to be leaning in a separate direction, as if it no longer wishes to be part of the block.

  Opening the front door, which features one of those annoying brass knobs that require a special sequence of jiggles only the regular customers know how to perform, I find the interior worse than I had imagined. The space is as claustrophobic as the inside of a damp shoe box. The ceilings are too low, the aisles too narrow. If the North Korean deli was dismal, at least it had the potential to be fixed up; the space was reasonably large, and the building itself didn’t seem structurally unsound. Salim’s deli isn’t just hopelessly tiny—I count seventeen paces from front to back and less than seven across—but it appears to be rapidly falling apart, as if a passing truck could make the whole thing crumble. There’s even—and now of course I know why the lease is so cheap—a hole in the ceiling the size of a volleyball, as if an elephant’s leg had come through, and that hole is currently dripping little bits of plaster. Other parts of the ceiling appear to have caved as well—over by the checkout counter, back by the stockroom—but unlike the one over the deli counter, these have been covered with sheets of aluminum, then painted, and now support little stalactites of dust that wave back and forth in unison every time someone opens the door and the wind comes in. Not one angle in the store stands square—the space is like some crazy nonrectilinear world invented by Dr. Seuss—and the coating of fuzz isn’t limited to the ceiling: it’s as if the ancient bottles of Log Cabin maple syrup on Salim’s shelves had all spontaneously exploded before a great gust of ash blew through. As for the floor, I notice that in certain places it makes an alarming squish, raising the terrifying question of how it manages to support the weight of Salim’s enormous, chrome-plated KustomKool refrigerators, which are the one impressive thing about the store, shining brilliantly like waxed Ferraris. And the smell, oh, the smell—a mélange of kitty litter, leaky air fresheners, pastrami, wood rot and Freon.

  This isn’t going to work. Not even Gab’s family could make this into a successful business. There’s too much to be done and too little to work with. How would Gab be helping out her mother by giving her a store like this? The part of me that worries about desperate, wishful thinking was right, and the only question now is, How will I break it to her?

  I’m about to walk out when I remember that Gab had asked me to buy her a drink. Opening one of Salim’s KustomKools, those shiny, chrome-plated refrigerators, I reach for an iced tea, but in order to find one that isn’t “infused” with sea algae or something unnecessary, I have to poke my head way in back. Inside, I don’t know what happens—maybe I get a chestful of Freon, or maybe I just get second thoughts about telling Gab what I really think—but when I come out it’s like, Hey, this place isn’t so bad. Don’t be so critical. Things even look a little different, as if I fainted and woke up in a different store. The dust-coated bananas look perfectly edible, and the dimensions that a moment ago I’d judged impossibly tiny now seem more than adequate. Above all, I suddenly I remember that location is everything, and we’re in Brooklyn.

  So I go outside, skirt the traffic on Atlantic Avenue and jump into the car.

  “Here you go,” I say.

  “What is this?” Gab says, holding the drink I’ve gotten for her. “Strawberry Yoo-hoo?”

  “They didn’t have any nondisgusting flavors of iced tea, and so your choices were pretty much King Kobra Malt Liquor or Nutrament. Sorry.”

  Gab looks disappointed, but when I tell her what I thought of the store, it doesn’t matter. “Really?” she keeps saying. “Really?” Her eyes swell with tears, and we embrace over the emergency brake and the strawberry Yoo-hoo. As we hold each other, I glance over Gab’s shoulder and see the deli’s weird yellow-and-teal awning glowing at the end of the dark block. A truck passes by, and it looks as if the deli is winking at us.

  THE NEXT DAY I call my parents in Boston to tell them about our plans. They are, bizarrely, thrilled.

  When I first informed my parents about the deli a few months ago, I expected them to be mortified. “No, Ben!” I anticipated hearing. “Don’t squander your education and upbringing. We beg you!” But the truth is, they were downright enthusiastic.

  “How exciting!” my mother cried, as if it were an art gallery we were opening. She even offered to come down and help decorate. Her main concern seemed to be that we sell the right kind of mustard and “stay away from that vile diet tonic water.”

  My father’s attitude was disturbingly upbeat as well. “Could be an interesting experience,” he said, “sort of an ethnography, a participatory study into the lives of the urban underclass. Orwell worked as a dishwasher, you know. Conrad spent his early life aboard ships.” Which sort of made me want to remind him that the deli was not a semester abroad.

  My father is a cultural anthropologist, which means that in his eyes everything is potentially “an interesting experience.” Some professors see the world in terms of colliding atoms or fizzing amino acids; my father is a junkie for the mechanics of human interaction. He’s a man who truly lives his profession—joyfully, too.

  For the most part, being the son of an anthropologist is a wonderful thing, especially when you’re growing up. For starters, there tend to be a lot of blowguns and spears lying around the house, and among your friends you’re usually the only one whose parents own an extensive collection of books on devil worship. Also, cultural anthropologists are supposed to be relativists, which tends to undermine their authority as parents. For instance, if at ten o’clock, an anthropologist tells you it’s time to go to bed, you can remind him that a ten o’clock bedtime for fourteen-year-olds is a Western cultural construct and that if our family were Masai cow herders he’d probably want me to stay up all night watching out for lions.

  But while my father is definitely a classical Boasian cultural relativist, he’s also a strict, thoroughgoing New Englander, from a family deeply set in its Puritan ways (so set that after coming over on the Mayflower it spent the next ten generations stubbornly rooted in Plymout
h, presumably so that it could get on the first boats back if people started returning). These people make a strong case for the anthropologist’s argument that culture, rather than just our material conditions or traits hardwired into our brains, determines our behavior. They’re modern-day Puritans, some of them living so far in the past they’re still trying to decide whether it was a good idea to leave England, and have a technophobic aversion to things like dental floss. Someone once said there are two kinds of Wasps in the world: the fearless, fun-loving George Plimpton variety and the dour, fun-fearing variety, like my family. And whereas my father’s professional instinct is to be against rules, or at least question them as tools of social control, his Puritan side is rather in favor of them.

  Not that his rules are so onerous. My father’s rule book when I was growing up was The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E. B. White, which he gave me a copy of in ninth grade. Most people think of The Elements of Style as a book about writing, but it’s actually about character—specifically, how to be a crusty old man. As a teenager, I hated it, of course. Instead of teaching you to unlock your inner Salinger or Hemingway, it encouraged you to think of writing as a discipline. Strunk and White saw style as dangerous (“Approach style warily,” they advised, as if it were a recipe for a homemade bomb) and creative writing in general as “the Self escaping into the open.” Good writing, they argued, must be constrained by values such as modesty (“Place yourself in the background”), consistency (“Hold a steady course”) and respect for tradition (“Prefer the standard to the offbeat”). To achieve style you first had to achieve control, which specifically meant not unleashing that unruly, appetitive Self. A good writer did not show off so much as vanish into thin air.

  Of course as a teenager I failed to follow Strunk and White’s rules, in writing or in general. Nor did it occur to me that growing up with a plethora of rules was in any way connected with a hyper-controlled Puritan background. I didn’t think of us as having a “background”—we were just people who happened to live in the same place, Greater Boston, where nearly all of my father’s relatives had lived for nearly four hundred years. It didn’t change the way we thought or acted. Oh, sure, practically everyone in my family was named after a fanatically devout bootmaker or indentured servant from the seventeenth century, but history didn’t determine our actions. Those ritual-laden family reunions every summer in Plymouth? Inconsequential. This was silly, of course. In the sixties and seventies, my father’s generation did everything possible to escape their own Waspiness, cutting themselves off from that embarrassing culture of pink pants, country clubs and names like Flick and Bunny. Instead, they gave their children names like Vishnu and Cuauhtémoc and married people from non-Brahmin backgrounds. However, the old values must have run deeper than they realized, because many were passed on to my generation more or less intact (if less and less embedded inside a meaningful context). It could be confusing—in fact, it was meant to be confusing. As my grandmother once said, “You’re not supposed to talk about Wasp values. You’re just supposed to have them.” Which is what made a source like The Elements of Style invaluable, insofar as it helped articulate the values that, whether wholly admirable, like Strunk and White’s emphasis on modesty, or questionable, in the case of their obsession with control, simply happened to be the ones I grew up with.

  But the big question wasn’t what Wasp values were; it was how to reconcile them with the wide-open embrace of the world my father seemed to encourage as an anthropologist. How did you get the two worldviews to mesh? Most of the time the conflict consisted in harmless skirmishes over politics or the culture wars, or I’d feel the tension internally, as in the realization that no matter how much you wanted to be a Rastafarian or a lobsterman, you’d never escape your inherited identity. Out-and-out conflict was a rarity, though, in part because while my parents had plenty of rules, they were against telling anyone what to do, especially their own children—even more so now that we were grown. And besides, the Wasp-Puritan morality is so good at getting inside people’s heads and turning them into mild-mannered, stability-oriented replicas of their parents, they didn’t really have to.

  After I tell her about the deli, my mother sends me a gift: something from L.L. Bean called a “mountain town jacket” (“an updated, casual take on the classic chore coat”) and matching khaki pants. As mothers tend to, she is worried that I’ll be cold, and the outfit she sends actually turned out to be quite comfortable and warm, though instead of looking like a future deli clerk, I look like I’m off for a little trout fishing on the Beaverkill.

  However, she then makes it clear—well, clear for people who, whenever possible, avoid saying anything directly—that there is one aspect of our new life she’d rather see end as soon as possible:

  “So does finding a deli you’d like mean that you can start thinking about moving out?”

  This is the real reason she’s excited about Salim’s deli. My parents have always been uneasy about us living with the Paks. “A young couple needs privacy,” my mother said to me recently, briefly terrifying me with the thought that she was going to start talking about our sex lives. “You need to be able to create your own identity as a couple and develop it inside your own space.” I could not agree more. Maintaining your own identity, let alone developing it, can definitely become a problem when you find yourself sharing underwear with your father-in-law. Maybe if I could get the Paks to not be so damn communal and occasionally knock on a closed door (there’s no point in even having doors in the Paks’ house; it’s like they’re not there), we could develop a modicum of personal identity, but I fear it will take longer to train them than I hope to be here.

  In my family, cohabiting with elders after a certain age violates one of the basic laws of the universe. My parents sent me to boarding school when I was fifteen, and in case I didn’t get the message as to what that meant for our relationship, the school was eight hundred miles away, in Colorado. My parents had strong feelings about independence—they themselves, as children, had been sent on summer-long ordeals out West for toughening. It was simply part of childhood: the parents found the most oppressive summer experience imaginable (usually some nightmarish camp in the wilderness staffed by the recently deinstitutionalized), then waved good-bye. And when the time came to really move out, whether it was to boarding school or college, you knew you were never coming home—for instance, my parents let my room to a tenant practically the day after I was gone.

  Don’t get me wrong: I’m not complaining about the fact that my parents didn’t want me to live with them. And I would hate to create the image of them as stereotypically frigid Wasps, more interested in polishing the china than attending to the messy emotional needs of their children. While they shipped me off to boarding school during a phase when I wasn’t the most pleasant teenager to have around (at the time I had decorated every inch of my room’s walls with Richard Avedon’s pictures of severed cow heads), I think they thought holding on to their children was selfish, because it would prevent us from growing up and moving past adolescence. Being a kid in the suburbs was too easy in some sense; moving out was the necessary challenge to spur growth. It was their duty to let go, whether they liked it or not.

  For a family like Gab’s, however, nothing could be more normal than parents living with their adult children. Koreans, like many Asians, have a strong tradition of filial piety—that is, of dutifulness to one’s parents. In America, kids are supposed to antagonize their parents: they’re supposed to torture them as teenagers, abandon them in college, then write a memoir in which they blame them for all their unhappiness as adults. But in Korea they serve them forever, without a second thought. They take care of them, support them, and frequently orient their entire existences around them. For instance, almost all of Korea’s elderly cohabit with one of their children, usually the first son, whose wife is expected to essentially become a live-in servant to her in-laws. These obligations aren’t etched on a tablet. It’s not li
ke Gab ever said to me, “I am a dutiful daughter from a Confucian-based society and must honor my parents,” the way she would in a Hollywood movie. She just did things that to me seemed above and beyond the call of duty, even for a devoted daughter, like bringing Kay and Edward on vacation with us, or sharing our income with them even when they didn’t need it.

  Of all people, I assumed my father, the authority on culture, would understand this, but he seemed as baffled as me. “You mean, Gab wants to do all those things for her parents? She’s not being forced? What a system.” At the same time, it’s not as if the Paks don’t value independence. When Gab was growing up, her mother pushed her to become as financially independent as she had been forced to become at her age. “Never depend on a man,” she would say. “Always be able to take care of yourself.” And the Paks are independent—they’re the ones living in a foreign country, after all, while my family stays as immobile as Plymouth Rock.

  “DON’T LET IT KILL YOU”

  THE NEXT NIGHT I COME BACK TO BOERUM HILL SO I CAN inspect the neighborhood and make sure the store isn’t near any slaughterhouses or toxic waste sites. It appears as if dealing with the challenges inside Salim’s building will be more than enough.

  Before I do that, though, I stop by the store so I can meet Salim.

  The first time I see him he’s standing at the checkout counter, a tired-looking Arab-featured man not that much older than me watching a TV show and eating his own inventory.

  “Salim?” I say, sidling up the counter.