Number One Chinese Restaurant

by Lillian Li

  Heavy with sauce, the lamb chops plopped onto their table. Some landed on the tablecloth, while others bounced off and onto Uncle Pang’s lap. The platter hit the side of the table with a muffled sound before ricocheting under the booth. Sauce splattered everywhere, leaving greasy inkblots on their clothes. Someone in the next booth gasped. For a few calm moments, the three of them looked on curiously at the tremendous mess. Then, Uncle Pang was up and roaring. Ah-Jack was left to tremble, cradling his left hand like an injured bird. He looked around wildly, for an exit, or, perhaps, for Nan. Jimmy dove under the table without knowing why. He started picking up the fallen chops, his hands leaving tacky prints on the dirty carpet. Above his head, Uncle Pang was threatening to tear down the restaurant. With a thunk, the scotch bottle fell off and rolled under the table, hitting Jimmy in the knee. The smell of cigarette smoke drifted down, as well as Nan’s timid voice, asking Uncle Pang to put out his light.

  “I’m not going to burn this place down with one fucking cigarette!” Uncle Pang shouted. He stalked away from the booth, toward the front door. Nan’s thick ankles quickly followed, with Ah-Jack’s jerky shuffle bringing up the rear.

  From his temporary sanctuary, Jimmy twisted the cap off the scotch bottle and, for the first time in a year, took a deep, searing drink. The sore in his mouth sang out, then quieted into a buzz.

  *

  Outside, the early-August air was balmy and windless. The evening traffic roared by, kicking up litter and dust. At the intersection, a thin white man held a cardboard sign. Jimmy and Uncle Pang stood perched on the restaurant’s curb. Every crook and pit on Jimmy’s body was slick with sweat. Illuminated by the two faux-Chinese lanterns affixed to the storefront, his face must have looked as shiny as the Peking ducks inside.

  “Why are you calling off the plan?” Uncle Pang demanded.

  “You should have told me what it was,” Jimmy said.

  “Stop playing dumb. You’ve been doing that since you were a boy.”

  “You overestimated me,” Jimmy said. “I would never do that to my father’s restaurant.”

  “Oh, now it’s your father’s restaurant.” Uncle Pang wiped at the brown spot on his pants, attacking the stain with unnecessary violence.

  “We’ll pay for the dry cleaning,” Jimmy said. “Jack will be punished.”

  “That won’t change anything.” Uncle Pang shoved his handkerchief back into his pocket.

  “The stains look bad, but they come out very easily.” Jimmy pointed to a spray of dark soy sauce on his knee. “I get stains on my pants all the time.”

  “Don’t be an idiot,” Uncle Pang said. “You’re trying to cut me out of my fair share.” He waved sharply at a car idling in the middle of the parking lot. “After you begged for my help. After you shook my hand.”

  Jimmy blinked, his eyes dry and dulled from the nips he’d taken of the scotch. What had he been so scared of? Uncle Pang was a childhood boogeyman. Granted, he had once knocked a tooth out of Jimmy’s mouth, after Jimmy had snorted most of the coke he’d been tasked to sell. But that was decades ago. He’d been a dumb kid. Now he was forty, with an ex-wife and mortgage payments, and Uncle Pang was pushing seventy. Almost the same age Jimmy’s father had been when he died.

  “If you say so,” Jimmy said. “But I’m saying that we’re both businessmen. We know the difference between good business and bad business and personal business, and I hope you understand which one my decision is.”

  Uncle Pang laughed by clearing his throat.

  “You little cunt.” He took a step toward Jimmy. “You think you’re going to push me out of the Glory? You think you’re the first desperate loser to ask for my help, then back out?”

  “Don’t take this the wrong way.” Jimmy held up his hands. “I’ll always be grateful to you for finding me the new place. I’ll still give you the ten thousand you asked for earlier.” He pulled out the heavy envelope he’d been lugging around all evening. The disappearance of its weight felt like a liberation. “For your trouble.”

  “Money is going to make me forget this?” Uncle Pang’s car pulled up to the curb and he wrenched open the passenger door, but not before snatching the envelope. “I’ll tell you exactly what I told your father. I’ve got a long memory and I will ruin you for this.”

  He spat on the ground, clipping Jimmy’s shoe, and dropped his smoldering cigarette into the mess. “Might as well say goodbye to your new restaurant now.”

  He slipped into the black BMW, disappearing behind tinted windows. Jimmy expected the car to peel off, tires squealing, but instead it continued its vibrating hum. It slid through the parking lot, the purring engine matching the decibel of all the other night sounds, and these little noises collected like smoke, drifting over his head, until he could hear nothing else.

  2

  As soon as Jimmy followed Uncle Pang out the Duck House door, Nan and Ah-Jack clustered together by the bar. Nan went behind to mix a complimentary pitcher of their Peking punch for customers who’d been startled by the commotion. Ah-Jack rested his elbows on the counter, shifting his weight off his bad foot.

  “Who told you to try and handle the lamb chops on your own?” Nan said, speaking Chinese now that Jimmy wasn’t around to police them. “You silly old man. When are you going to learn to think before you act?” She scanned the dining floor.

  “Take over section four,” she shouted over to Ah-May, who was heading back into the kitchen with an empty tray. “Ah-Jack hurt his hand.”

  “I have enough to do!” Ah-May seemed ready to plant herself in front of the kitchen in protest. Her wide stance added to the sturdiness of her body and she pulled her long braid over her chest like a sash. “You take over the section.”

  Nan knew what Ah-May was getting at, but she kept her face blank. Waitressing wasn’t Nan’s job anymore.

  “You’re blocking the path,” she said.

  “Fuck you too,” Ah-May said, but she got moving. Her head swiveled as she stalked away, catching up each passing waiter with the latest gossip. Yet another strike against Nan. Her old colleagues didn’t need more evidence of her bias toward Ah-Jack. Did they suspect that he was the reason she’d asked for her promotion last year?

  She turned back to Ah-Jack, who had closed his eyes. If she didn’t know him better, she would have thought he was meditating. His face was calm and wise. But then he opened one eye and suddenly his entire countenance changed into that of a mischievous boy. It was the first time he’d looked like himself all day.

  “Ah-May’s on the warpath,” he said.

  “She’s not happy unless she’s complaining,” Nan said. “Acting like a child. When her own child’s already in braces.”

  Ah-Jack’s eyes closed again. “We’re on a dying planet,” he said. “The little boss is already forty. No fresh blood. Just us clots of dust.”

  “Pat’s only seventeen.”

  “You want your son to keep working for the Duck House?” Ah-Jack nudged the large pitcher she was filling. “Are you crazy, woman?”

  As if on cue, Pat sauntered out of the kitchen’s side entrance and into the front hallway. The top of his apron was undone, falling to reveal a chest that was at once too broad and too thin. He headed straight for the hostess stand, where Annie, Johnny’s daughter, was drawing on the seating chart. Nan had watched them flirt since Pat started working as a dishwasher a month ago, but at some point, the tide had changed, and their interactions had gone from playful to furtive. Nan had tried to ask her son about his new girlfriend, but he gave her few chances at work to corner him. She thought having him at the Duck House would help her keep an eye on him. At least she’d do better than his high school, which had noticed him only long enough to expel him. But her son was a sneaky boy. When he reached over the hostess stand to fiddle with the keyhole cutout in Annie’s qipao, no amount of distraction or disgruntled waiters could stop Nan’s heart from clutching.

  “Where else can I keep him?” she said to Ah-Jack, who had also n
oticed the two teenagers. “In a cage?”

  “He’ll be okay,” Ah-Jack said. “You’re like a babysitter and a guardian angel, all wrapped up in one.” He waggled his eyebrows, which were thick and black and looked out of place underneath his mop of gray hair. Nan laughed.

  “You two are looking cozy.” Ah-Bing slid behind the bar to make a round of Shirley Temples. Ah-Bing was the same age as Ah-May, and they liked to team up on their tables and tips. It was a familiar sight to see the two of them, crowing back and forth, while they settled platters of pan-fried noodles and stewed fish onto neighboring lazy Susans. Ah-May must have intercepted him in the kitchen. Sure enough, the waitress stepped into the bar after him.

  “Good night for you two?” Ah-Jack patted his breast pocket.

  Ah-Bing’s Sprite nozzle spurted unexpectedly and a bloom of sticky water grew on his shirt front. “What do you think?” he snapped, rubbing the end of his nose, where his glasses were perched. The glasses gave thin, stringy Ah-Bing an impatient squint.

  “Nan already gives you all the easy, big-spending customers, and now you’re not even working,” Ah-May said to Ah-Jack. She stabbed paper umbrellas into the red-drizzled drinks.

  “Do you have to be such a clown, everywhere you go?” Ah-Bing added.

  Nan handed him a napkin. “You weren’t so harsh last week when you were the one who needed saving. During your smoke break. And you.” She grabbed the remaining umbrellas out of Ah-May’s hand before Ah-May broke them in her grip. “Remember when Jimmy almost caught you pinching an entire duck?”

  “What did it cost him to tell Jimmy a few little lies?” Ah-Bing glared down at her, no longer interested in Ah-Jack. “Did it lose him his tips? Did it land him five extra tables to watch while someone else took home the money?”

  “You’ve changed,” Ah-May said to Nan. “You’re just as bad as the little boss.”

  Her words had summoned him; the front door opened and Jimmy came back into the restaurant. The timing felt deliberately cruel. Nan came around to the front of the bar, to make their huddle look less suspicious. She wished the little boss hadn’t emptied so much of the bottle clenched in his right hand. Even drunk, Jimmy moved effortlessly through the dining room, like a big cat, too fast for them to scatter. His eyes darted from Ah-Jack to Nan to Ah-May and Ah-Bing.

  “Why aren’t you at your tables?” he asked. Despite his rounded cheeks and large, childlike forehead, Jimmy’s face looked sharp and hard. “Do you four need a vacation?”

  “Them leaving now.” Nan jumped in before she could stop herself. “Ah-Jack taking small break. His diabetes make him need sugar. And make left foot hurt.”

  “We do our jobs,” Ah-May said.

  “Then go do them.” Jimmy had the unnerving ability to make his eyes glow in their sockets when he was angry. He looked lit up from the inside. Ah-May left the bar in a huff. Ah-Bing hefted his drink tray onto his shoulder and followed.

  Jimmy turned his attention back to Ah-Jack. “I shouldn’t be looking at your face after what you just did,” he said. “You should have fired yourself. Save me the trouble.”

  “We need Ah-Jack.” Nan was trying to keep the urgency out of her voice. Johnny could be swayed by feelings, but Jimmy needed hard facts. “Ah-Ling go hospital for test. Ah-Gang needing hip fixed. Too little people if Ah-Jack go. The big party will come next week. They will renting a private room all night.”

  Ah-Jack added nothing, only stared at the bobbing lime slices in the pitcher of punch. Nan’s body buzzed from the inside, as if she’d swallowed an electric charge. Why wasn’t he begging like she was? He would go bankrupt without this job, lose the townhouse, and how would he pay for Michelle’s chemo then?

  A gurgling belch escaped from Jimmy’s lips, and a flash of what looked like nausea passed over his face.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said, almost to himself. “Finish your shift. Give me the tips you’ve made tonight.”

  Ah-Jack reached into his blazer pocket and pulled out a neat wad of bills. Jimmy grabbed the bundle and lightly brushed his thumb over the fringe.

  “I’ll be checking the receipts against this amount,” he said. “No more breaks. What’re you waiting for?”

  “No break,” Ah-Jack agreed. He pushed away from the counter and gingerly settled his weight back into his feet. Nan tried not to look at his left foot, entombed in his leather shoe. She stayed where she was. Jimmy hadn’t dismissed her for a reason.

  “You’ve got some nerve,” he began, jaw popping from tension. “You don’t think I’ve noticed what’s been going on in my own restaurant?”

  “I am sorry,” she said.

  “You’re sorry!” He laughed and sloshed the liquid around in his scotch bottle. He leaned in. “I hate listening to the waiters gossip. Their chattering, like a bunch of dumb chickens. But do you know what I’ve had to listen to since Johnny made you manager?”

  “I am sorry,” she said again. She hadn’t known the waiters were talking.

  “‘Nan is giving Ah-Jack all the best tables,’” Jimmy mimicked. “‘Nan lets Ah-Jack skip lunch service,’ ‘Nan told the hostess not to seat any children at Ah-Jack’s section.’ Get this straight. There’s nothing you can do to keep me from firing him.”

  “I am fair,” she said, without conviction. “They like complaining.”

  “Complaining is one thing,” he said. He banged the heavy butt of his bottle against the bar. “But when they bother me, you’ve gone too far. I don’t care what Johnny promised you. Don’t get too comfortable. Usually when you have something for thirty years, you throw it away.”

  “I will be better.”

  With a noncommittal grunt, Jimmy left Nan at the bar and disappeared into his office at the other end of the dining room. Nan felt her heart start to slow. The flush on her face no longer prickled. The waiters eavesdropping around her went back to their tables.

  “Karma,” Ah-May muttered as she bustled past.

  Nan darted out her hand and pinched the waitress’s butt. Ah-May cried out in mock outrage and pinched her right back in the wrist. They were still friends, after all. They were all friends, if one defined friendship as the natural occurrence between people who, after colliding for decades, have finally eroded enough to fit together. That was all Ah-Jack was as well, an old friend.

  Their joking and flirting had been the mainstay of their friendship since they’d started working side by side thirty years ago. They watched out for each other, a buddy system that followed them outside of work. He’d changed multiple spare tires for her on the sides of busy roads. Her couch was always open if he drank too much or bet too high at the races. How could Jimmy and the others expect her to change the way she spoke to Ah-Jack, the way she felt, just because she was managing him now?

  The irony was that she was probably the best manager the Duck House had ever seen. She had a way of coddling the most belligerent customers, never resorting to throwing half-off coupons on the problem—Johnny’s favorite move—or indiscriminately punishing the waitstaff with a week of forced unpaid leave, as Jimmy liked to do. She used her nose for conflict to head off complaints, steering easily chilled matrons away from the air-conditioning vents; handing toddlers balls of dough to play with and gum on; and offering discounted drinks at the bar when reservations were overbooked, as they were every single weekend. When, inevitably, a customer lashed out, she was prepared to take the full force of their anger with a soothing tone. She had a personality that did not inspire people to be better but persuaded them to be comfortable at their worst. Passing out free punch to the dining room, she knew the restaurant would receive no negative reviews for Uncle Pang’s outburst earlier.

  When her ladle hit the bottom of the pitcher, she checked the room for signs of tension. Not the customers this time, but the waiters. It was impossible to tell—they were professionals on the floor, their faces rubbed smooth of emotion. Though Ah-Bing’s back was to her, Nan knew he looked entirely different than before. He would
have pushed his glasses up to pinch the top of his nose, which turned his squint feline and friendly. With this simple push, Ah-Bing morphed into the happy, playful waiter she saw out on the floor. He even sounded different, his English boyish and simple, lacking the sharp slyness that textured his Chinese. The transformation was stark and immediate, and pure fantasy. Yet Nan still believed that this motion of shifting his glasses up his nose was what reminded Ah-Bing of who he was allowed to be, and when. Every waiter had a trick. The quartet of little girls at one of his tables cheered as he approached, and he cheered right back.

  Ah-May’s words came back to her. Had she really been babying Ah-Jack for months? Even if she had, Ah-Jack was so popular and well loved—by both the amigos and his comrades-in-arms—that she’d expected everyone to look the other way. But while Ah-Jack got the easy retired couples, business lunches, and service-phobic Korean families, the other sections got the unsupervised teenagers tossing seven credit cards into the bill holder. They got the first-generation Chinese who pretended not to understand how to tip, and the single-ladies clubs in which every single lady happened to be celebrating her birthday that night. The waiters were tired of trying to keep eight candles on eight separate pieces of complimentary cheesecake lit. They were tired of wrangling booster seats and of chopping up hot duck carcasses for Filipino grandmothers to chomp on. They were tired of nearly getting an elbow to the neck every time they delivered a check to a table of strong-willed matriarchs, each preferring death to letting someone else’s credit card be swiped. Could she blame the other waiters for reporting her to Jimmy?

  Always, Nan was the failure. In her desperation, she’d turned everyone against her and, worst, against Ah-Jack. No wonder he’d dropped those lamb chops—she hadn’t let him carry anything heavier than fried rice in weeks. Ah-Jack was only eighteen years older than she was, and far from the oldest waiter in the restaurant. So why was he the only one who looked truly old?