Number One Chinese Restaurant

by Lillian Li

  What she was learning, as she watched her comrades at the Duck House age to the point of retirement, then beyond, was that some men worked to push away the grave. Men like Ah-Sam, Ah-Gang, Ah-Chi, whose skulls looked shrunken on top of their stooped shoulders, could still lift heavy trays with one hand and nap on their feet. Others could not, but had to, and pulled the grave closer with every shift.

  *

  Nan went behind the bar again and lifted one foot out of her heels. When her arch pressed against the rubber mat, she couldn’t help letting out a grunt. She slowly curled her toes, then released them, allowing the little knuckles to stretch and pop.

  Once, for Mother’s Day, her son, Pat, had massaged her feet. His small fingers had been too weak to make much of a difference, but the look of concentration on his face had provided a different kind of relief. He’d poured hot water into a bucket so that she could soak her feet afterward. She’d fallen asleep with her feet submerged, waking long after the bubbles from the dish soap had dispersed and the water had cooled. Would he remember if she brought up that act of sweetness now? Or would he pretend not to understand her mixed-up English? Nan wanted to believe that at Pat’s core, all his gentle childhood selves were curled up, waiting to be awoken.

  “How about a shot of Jack for Ah-Jack?” Ah-Jack walked past the bar on his way to deliver a check. He’d pinched a few shreds of crispy pepper beef from someone’s tray and he offered one to her. The beef fat sizzled on her tongue. “What slow tables. Bad luck follows me.”

  “You never know,” Nan said when he returned to the cashier’s window at the end of the bar to swipe one party’s four separate credit cards. “They might be big tippers.”

  “Indian man at table twenty found a strand of black hair on his table,” Ah-Jack said. “Not even in his food, just near the dish. He pulls the hair out in front of me, and it’s long and rough and curly. Looks like the hair on his wife’s head.” Ah-Jack grasped a handful of his hair, which was gray and soft enough to fall back flat on his head when he let go. “But I can’t tell the man it’s his wife who has the shedding problem. With my luck, he’ll be calling the little boss first thing tomorrow morning.”

  “Jimmy won’t be taking any calls tomorrow morning,” Nan said.

  Ah-Jack hooted. “If I’d leaned in more while he was talking, you wouldn’t need to sneak me whiskey now.”

  “Stop fooling around, old man.” Nan ripped the receipt from the machine and swiped the next card for him. She handed him the shot she’d poured. “Get moving so I can get out of here.”

  They’d been carpooling since they started at the Duck House. Ah-Jack knew better than to try to get her to leave early.

  He knocked back the shot and wiped his mouth.

  “Easy, there,” Nan said.

  Ah-Jack burped delicately in response.

  “You’d better have another one waiting for me.” He hobbled off, cutting a comic figure as he swung his left leg in front of his right. He could still fool the customers into thinking his lurching walk and shaky hands were part of his character, a Chinese Charlie Chaplin who might look as if he’d spill the tray but never did.

  Nan poured him half a shot and added a spritz of water. She waited for him to come back around.

  *

  Nan met Ah-Jack waiting tables at the Mayflower. She’d answered the newspaper ad only a few months after she’d left Macau, and Ah-Jack became the first friend she made in America.

  The owner hired her to replace three of his waiters, who had fled for busier waters. On her first day, the restaurant’s parking lot was so empty that she’d thought it was closed. Ah-Jack—he’d been forty then—had been teetering outside on a ladder, hanging up a banner that advertised the new, desperately attained liquor license. She’d reached out to steady the ladder and noticed the well-shined polish on his shoes.

  “You want a Mai Tai?” were his first words to her. She looked up to find a man too slim for American sizes. A layer of air billowed between his skin and the fabric of his uniform.

  “A Mai what?”

  “Mai Tai.” He finished the knot he’d been tying. “You’ll need to know how to make all the new cocktails the boss put on the menu. Might as well have a taste.”

  He jumped to the ground and unrolled his shirtsleeves. Hefting the ladder over his head, he gestured for Nan to follow.

  “The poor guy who owns this place won’t be in until right before dinner.” Ah-Jack was already developing the hunch that would later bend his chin down to his shoulders. “You’ll want to look over the menu before he gets in.”

  The inside of the Mayflower was dark and stuffy. An elderly foursome ate in the corner booth. They didn’t look up from their plates when Nan and Ah-Jack walked by.

  “Our food is perfect for their teeth,” he explained. “When you try to make a Chinese restaurant vegetarian, you end up with a lot of mush.”

  “Vegetarian?” Nan grabbed a paper menu from the stack by the empty hostess stand. “Isn’t life hard enough?”

  “I’ve worked in every kind of Chinese restaurant,” Ah-Jack said. “This is the first vegetarian one. But restaurants fail every day for all kinds of reasons.”

  He fixed Nan her first Mai Tai and recited the litany of jobs he’d held, from dishwasher, to manager, to owner—a small Szechuan restaurant that he’d had to sell when his wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. The prognosis was optimistic, which was the good news.

  “What’s the bad news?” Nan asked.

  “No lawsuit money.”

  The drink was sweet and orangey, and the alcohol ungreased Nan’s mouth enough to tell Ah-Jack that she had also waited tables since she could remember. Originally from Hunan, her parents had fled to Macau when she was two. They would have made the swim to Hong Kong if Nan had been older, and so Hong Kong became the dream. She dreamed while she took orders. While she cleared tables, and plucked chickens, and scrubbed floors. She’d pictured herself one day at the best hotel in Hong Kong, standing behind the reception desk and meeting people from all over the world. But her family’s hopes of immigrating had been repeatedly shattered by riots. Then her mother had died. An aunt, hearing the news, had started sending the family money from Maryland. Packages arrived too, filled with chocolate, slices of vibrantly orange American cheese, squares of crackling gum that shot freshness straight up her nose, as well as pictures of the house the aunt’s family lived in, a house surrounded by other, near-identical houses, all white and brick and mossy. Nan had fingered the pictures until the colors bled, and slowly, her dreams began to change. When Nan’s father passed a few years later, the aunt offered to sponsor Nan’s move to the United States. She had jumped at the chance.

  By the end of her story, Nan had torn the paper menu in her hands into scraps. Without her noticing, Ah-Jack had gathered the strips into a small pile. When she looked down at it, confused, he gave her a sly smile. Then he blew the bits onto her lap. She laughed until she shook.

  Under the pretense of learning how to mix the cocktail, Nan made them both another round. The syrupy citrus masked the rum, and by the time the owner came in, Nan was cooling her reddened cheeks against the cheap laminate of the bar counter. She claimed she was getting over a slight fever, and Ah-Jack, rock solid after two cocktails and a glass of whiskey, assured the owner that he’d been training her all afternoon.

  *

  Love came slowly, as weaknesses in the body often do. At first, she merely looked forward to coming to work for a chance to chat with a good-humored man. Not many patronized the Mayflower, leaving the two to talk and graze on the wonton chips meant for the soups.

  She started making note of what brought him pleasure—a fresh apple pie from McDonald’s, candied cherries from behind the bar, the sound of a wine cork popping. The list grew. What did Ah-Jack yearn for? A winning horse, new work shoes, less rain so that the fallen magnolia petals along his driveway might not rot so soon. Nan’s memory became overstretched. Driving home one night, she nearly c
ried from frustration because she couldn’t remember what Ah-Jack had named as his favorite childhood candy. Finally, she pressed against the tender place she’d been ignoring and stood back, aghast but not surprised, to witness the crumbling edge of her reason. Her imagination began and ended with Ah-Jack.

  He was a good man but not strong. He liked drinking and candy and gambling. In a single plastic sleeve in his wallet, he kept a picture of his wife and a jumble of lucky-number slips. Only a pair of faded eyes peeped out through the confetti. In her wallet, Nan carried just twenty dollars, which would last her the entire week. She hated waste, napping, and overeating. At home, she reused the same bowl and utensils for every meal, washing the set once, right before bed. So to fall in love with a man who threw away watermelon with pink meat still clinging to the rind—it was incomprehensible.

  She could no longer ignore the heat and breeze of his passing body at work. The space between them when they stood side by side turned electric, raising the small hairs on her skin. One day, he pushed his hands against the crown and base of her spine, to correct her posture, and she went to stand in the walk-in freezer, plunging her trembling hands into the bucket of frozen dumplings until her entire body shivered.

  For four months, before the owner’s children replaced the entire staff for the summer, Nan lived in a feverish state of alertness. She imagined living like this forever and felt no fear. On their last day of work, she moved sluggishly, unable to picture herself leaving the restaurant, and Ah-Jack, for good. Her aunt had found her a job as an assistant to a loan officer, which paid less but could, her aunt claimed, lead to a real career, or at least a chance to sit down at work. On that last Mayflower night, as Nan and Ah-Jack walked toward the exit at the end of dinner service, Nan asked him to join her for a drink.

  “The Earl?” he said. “Just a few shops down?”

  She hadn’t had a bar in mind.

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s the one.”

  She spent the ten dollars and sixty cents in her wallet on bright-blue cocktails that stained her tongue and made her legs sweat over the wooden booth. She was barely twenty-two, old enough to understand that a gambling man with a sweet tooth could love a sick wife and cheat on her also.

  Soft as he was, Ah-Jack wasn’t a nervous man. He never fiddled, as Nan did, and he would tease her about the trail of shredded paper napkins that followed her around the restaurant. At the bar, he passed her each of his emptied beer bottles so that she could tear the wet labels off the brown glass.

  “You’re unlike anyone I’ve ever met,” Nan said, after draining her last cocktail. She stared at the label she was stripping.

  “You probably haven’t met enough people.” Ah-Jack laughed. “I’m ordinary.”

  “Maybe to others,” she said. “But not to me.”

  Ah-Jack circled his thumb around the mouth of his bottle.

  “I suppose that’s all that matters,” he said. He flagged down their waitress and asked for the check. But before Nan could panic, he asked, “You find a new job yet?”

  “No,” she lied. “But there are Chinese restaurants everywhere.”

  “There’s a new one opening in Rockville. The rumor is that tips will be high from the start. If you can hold off working for a few weeks, they’re hiring in July.”

  “Is that what you’ll be doing?”

  Before Ah-Jack answered, Nan felt a familiar blooming sensation in her chest, followed by a cold sweat on the bottoms of her feet. This ugly, jittery thing had trailed her her entire life, pushing her to dream, pushing her to come to this foreign place. She had fought so hard to do away with this feeling. But when Ah-Jack said he would be first in line to interview at the Beijing Duck House in July, she couldn’t stop herself. She allowed hope back into her life.

  “We might carpool,” he said. “If you decide to work there, Ah-Nan.”

  She had a job lined up, a chance at life outside a restaurant, with weekends and vacations. Why follow someone blindly? And not a man of caliber or character, not a man she might ever possess, but Ah-Jack! A man with “Ah” preceding his person, like an opaque veil drawn across his body. And she was Ah-Nan to him.

  She nodded right as their bill came.

  “Call me Nan,” she said. She counted out the bills to pay her part of the check. She didn’t dare look at him. “At least until we’re comrades-in-arms again.”

  “Nan,” he said, drawing out her name.

  She met his eyes through the messy wisps of hair that fell short of her bun. A bridge materialized between them, transporting secret packages that would never reach their destinations. Too soon, she looked down again.

  3

  The first thing Jimmy did once he’d barricaded himself in his tiny office was pour a glass of scotch. The second thing he did was call Uncle Pang’s real estate agent, Janine.

  While he waited for the connection to go through, he stared at the photograph of his father hanging alongside the office door. The picture had been taken on the Duck House’s opening day; his father had been only a few years older than Jimmy was now. It was the same photo they’d sent to the Washington Post to accompany the obituary. The actual newspaper clipping was shoved somewhere in his desk drawer—Jimmy had refused to let Johnny frame that too, but the lie it told was so familiar that Jimmy had practically memorized it.

  Bobby Hong Cheng Han, a prominent Maryland restaurateur and founder of the Beijing Duck House, passed peacefully on Independence Day, July 4, 2010, surrounded by his family and friends. Mr. Han was born on February 2, 1940, in Beijing, China, and started his life in restaurants as a dishwasher at the age of twelve. Mr. Han married Feng Fei, his next-door neighbor and the love of his life, and immigrated to America on his own in 1975 to give his family a better life. Separated from his adored wife and children, Mr. Han worked his way through the restaurant ranks in Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C., to buy their ticket to America. The Beijing Duck House, Mr. Han’s crowning glory, opened its doors in 1985, the product of over a decade of hard work and determination. Mr. Han combined the strong flavors and rich seasonings of Northern Chinese cuisine to make the Duck House a hot spot for famous actors, politicians, and even presidents, all of whom credited the signature Peking duck as the best they’d ever tasted. Mr. Han leaves a legacy of two children, John and Jim, and the first of many grandchildren, Annie.

  Every time Jimmy looked at his father’s young, grinning face, he would be reminded of this strange memorial, which proved that half-truths made for the blandest fiction. A lie that was newspaper sanctioned: What could be a more fitting tribute to his father? And why argue when the lie of his father’s life was no different, really, from the eulogy his mother had told at his father’s funeral, before she’d vanished inside the mansion he’d left to her. No different from the speeches that Johnny made at charity events and thousand-dollars-a-plate fundraisers. No different from the story Jimmy himself used to pick up women before last call.

  Tonight, however, Jimmy was the only one telling the story and the only one listening.

  Bobby Han died, stomach bloated with cancer, with only his wife at his side. His two sons stayed behind at the restaurant, as instructed, to take advantage of the holiday crowd.

  Han was unlikely to have been born anywhere near China’s capital city, since his mother, during her one visit to America, spoke with an accent so incomprehensible that Han’s wife had called it “dirt,” her word for “country.”

  Said wife, Feng Fei, was ten years younger than her husband, who, if their screaming matches could be believed, tried to abandon his family as soon as his feet touched American soil.

  It was not Han but rather his best friend, “Uncle Pang,” who secured visas and later green cards for Feng Fei and the children, incurring a debt they would never fully repay.

  Before the Beijing Duck House could open its doors, a fortunate lightning storm had to strike Han’s first restaurant, King China, and burn the shithole to the ground, allowing him to flip t
he insurance into a down payment for an abandoned building right off the highway.

  Han was hardly reinventing the wheel with his menu. Northern Chinese cuisine could be summed up in three words: meat, onions, and garlic. And hot spot for the famous? Jimmy had had five years to laugh at the foolishness of that particular line.

  So fuck his father’s legacy. Fuck his mother’s too. Jimmy’s new restaurant would not have such cheap illusions. Or clumsy, broken booths. Or incompetent waiters. His new restaurant would be as polished as the silver chopsticks he’d already bulk-ordered. The décor would be tasteful but luxurious. His menu would actually change—every week a new special, a catch of the day. None of the waiters would speak with an accent. His customers would be afraid of displeasing him.

  “Hello?” Jimmy stopped revising his father’s life story at the sound of Janine’s soft voice. He straightened in his chair.

  “Jimmy, is that you?” She sounded surprised to hear from him. He’d never called her this late before.

  “Janine!” Jimmy practically shouted. “We need to talk about the restaurant. This a good time?”

  “I just put my son in bed,” she said. “So not the best time, but not the worst.”

  “I wouldn’t bother you this late,” Jimmy said, “but I just had to get your thoughts on a new project.” He crossed his legs and his knee hit the desk. He leaned back in his chair and knocked his head against the wall. He was the only person in his family too big to fit in this office.

  “You always bother me this late,” Janine said. He pictured the curve of her smile and remembered the conversation they’d had last week. He took a deep breath. She would fix everything for him.

  “I fired Pang, like you said to.” He kept his stomach clenched tight. Despite the circumstances, a part of him still hoped Janine would be impressed.