Number One Chinese Restaurant

by Lillian Li

  “I don’t feel a thing,” he reassured her. “Honestly, I don’t.”

  “Wait, Mom.” Pat reached out for Nan, his fingers digging into her collarbone. She turned around and shook him off.

  “What has gotten into you!” She massaged her shoulder.

  Pat’s hand went into his pocket and pulled something out. He unfurled his fingers and they all looked down at his palm. A braided gold chain pooled softly across the lines of his hand. At the end: a luminous pearl teardrop. He must have been holding on to that necklace all day; why give it to his mother now? Ah-Jack wanted to tell him to stop, to wait for a better time. But he’d glimpsed in Pat’s face what he’d seen that night out on the loading dock, right after Nan had struck the boy’s cheek. Sadness without surprise. Pat already knew what was going to happen; he offered his cupped palm anyway. He moved closer to his mother, teardrop at the center of his hand. She took a step back.

  “Don’t waste your money.” Neck stiff, she turned and walked away. The other waiters, who’d been watching by the kitchen entrance, came in to fill their trays. Ah-Jack followed Nan but kept his eyes on Pat, who’d looped the chain loosely around his fourth finger and pinky. His fellow servers rushed around him. The chain swaying from his hand, Pat went to collect his new order of shrimp.

  Right before Nan led him out of the kitchen, Ah-Jack spotted the necklace sliding from Pat’s fingers, dragged down by the weight of the pearl. Ah-Jack’s shout of warning was in his throat when the teardrop fell straight into the waiting cracks of the steam table. The chain followed, a golden tail, disappearing soundlessly into the stainless steel.

  *

  After he’d sent Ah-Jack away—what had he even shouted at the old waiter for?—Jimmy stayed in the closet, tempted to squirm under the coats and hide beneath the hems. But Osman, the lone Duck House amigo, came in to collect a broom, startling Jimmy back into the dining hall. He did a cursory lap around the room. The restaurant had regained its balance. Dishes were coming out of the kitchen on time and his father’s customers kept calling out to him to pay their compliments. He ignored them all, ending at Janine’s table. The Glory would be fine without him for a few hours.

  “I’ve got to head out,” Jimmy said. Eddie had been happily eating one of his pancakes, but he sucked in his breath and held it when he saw Jimmy. He wished he could punt the small child into the air like a football.

  “Is there a problem?” Janine asked.

  “I just need to find my mother.” He could barely turn his face toward hers. “I’m really sorry. I’ll get you the next-best waiter.” He spotted Pat heading out of the kitchen with a tray full of soup bowls. His body locked up. He caught the boy’s eye with a sharp gesture and waved him over.

  “What’s up?” Pat rested the tray on his shoulder. Forcing the boy to wait on Janine wouldn’t keep the two of them from disappearing while his back was turned. But Jimmy didn’t care. He had to leave.

  “Take care of these VIPs for me,” Jimmy said. “I’ll hear back if the service is anything but perfect.” He smiled over Janine’s head and took her hand briefly, before lowering it back onto the table.

  “Sure,” Pat said. “What’s the order?”

  “Everything,” he said. “Give them every dish on the menu.”

  “That’s too much!” Janine said, but Jimmy said, “You deserve it.” He smiled to keep his teeth from clenching. “This is all because of you.”

  Janine quirked her mouth to the side. She’d detected the black thread of anger beneath the milky sweetness of his words, and this made her cautious, conciliatory. “We can always take the leftovers home,” she said. She raised her face up for a kiss. He pressed his lips quickly to hers, resisting the melting feeling in his stomach.

  “Great meeting you, buddy,” he said to Eddie, who again held his breath.

  “When am I going to see you again?” Janine asked.

  Jimmy was already heading toward the door. “I’ll come by tonight,” he said over his shoulder. For once, no customers called to him. Janine’s eyes tugged at his back as he let himself out. So this was how you got a woman’s attention.

  The drive to his mother’s house was slow and ugly, all highway except for the last five minutes. An accident on the freeway forced his car to a crawl; his mind only raced faster. Why had his mother reached out to a man he knew she detested? She must have really wanted to keep that dusty old house. Problems kept popping up in his life, as insidiously as the canker sores in his mouth. As soon as one began to heal, two more would erupt.

  The trouble with life was that life needed trouble. That was what Janine would have said. A woman that clever—why was he surprised that she couldn’t be trusted? She was right, of course. A year ago, he had been alone, rotting in his father’s restaurant, working under his big brother, and serving customers whose every dietary request he could, by pure reflex, anticipate. He had been collecting stores of useless information, a basin of stagnant water that continued to fill. He ate the shit staff meals the kitchen churned out, no longer for appearance’s sake, as his father had once commanded, but because he’d stopped caring about how his food tasted. On his days off, he had done nothing but drink and smoke in his apartment. He had been able to sleep for fourteen hours straight, suppressing hunger, thirst, the urge to piss, until his brain stewed in its container. Now he could not sleep three hours without stirring. He could not sit still, and he could not eat, but the bites he managed to swallow were vibrant and nourishing. For the first time in years, he was truly alive. It did not feel good at all. But at least it felt like something.

  His mind fumed and boiled inside his car, but when he reached the circular driveway to his mother’s front door, his thoughts grew quiet. The top of his head tingled when he saw the light shining from the kitchen window.

  His mother was at the door, peering out. Jimmy forced himself out of the car. He tucked the back of his shirt in and hitched up his pants.

  “Hello, traitor,” she said, opening the door. “Have you eaten?” She let him into the foyer. The marble tiles shone, freshly polished. If she had started cleaning again, then she really was ready to root her stringy self to this house’s foundation. She looked more like she had before his father passed away—back straight, trousers sharply pressed. She’d even touched up the color in her hair, the black gleaming near-purple under the chandelier light. Jimmy reluctantly followed her into the kitchen.

  She had known he was coming. She had piled the dining table with platters of food. All his favorites, dishes he hadn’t eaten in years. True home-style fare. Jimmy’s mouth watered despite himself. He thought of the food he’d had in mind for his restaurant. He knew so little about what people actually wanted to eat. He grabbed a handful of roasted peanuts and littered the floor with their casings.

  “Why did you go to him?” he asked with his mouth full.

  “Why you go to him?” she parroted back. “You stupid boy.”

  “I wanted my own place.”

  She knelt down on the floor, picking up the crispy skins with a pinched napkin. He dropped a few more peanuts to spite her. She smacked the back of her hand against his ankle. “He is dangerous man. You made such big mistake.”

  “At least I tried to get our family out of his grasp.” He plunged his fingers into the bowl of sticky spareribs, sucking the meat off the bones. He was resorting to methods that he’d used as a teenager to gross her out. His pettiness added to the satisfaction of seeing her squirm. “He was asking for more money. He’s always been a parasite. I was the only one who was going to stand up to him.”

  “Stand up!” She struck the glossy wood table with her palms. “Only a snake thinks he’s standing up when he’s hiding in the grass. I didn’t raise you right. I made your life too easy. You should get on your knees and beg for his forgiveness.”

  “That gives you the right to throw me back to him?” Jimmy always wanted to laugh when his mother scolded him in Chinese; the impulse had landed blows to his head when he w
as younger. He grabbed more food to suffocate the feeling. His mother shoved a bowl of rice into his hands.

  “You eat like a barbarian,” she said. “You don’t think I begged your father to kick that man out? But I’ll tell you what he told me: You get rid of Pang, you get rid of the money.” A neat row of his mother’s prescription bottles lined the short edge of the table. Jimmy wanted to knock them over.

  “We have enough money.” He shoved his chopsticks deep into the steaming mound of rice. “That doesn’t change the fact that we work in a shitty Chinese restaurant.”

  He expected his mother to screw up her face and scream about how ungrateful he was being. He was ready to scream right back. Instead, she pincered a few choice pieces of spareribs with her chopsticks and dropped them in his bowl.

  “My baby boy,” she said. “Where do you think you got all your big ideas? You always think you’re the first one to have a thought in his head, but I gave you everything. Don’t you remember how often I told your father the words you just threw at me? You’re nothing but an eavesdropper.” She wet a rag in the sink and scrubbed at his sticky fingers.

  The food in Jimmy’s mouth turned to glue. She was lying. How could an uneducated woman—someone who had married a dishwasher, for fuck’s sake—know anything about ambition? He tore his hand out of her grasp.

  “You know nothing about your own mother,” she said. “You’ll see. I’ll get Johnny on my side. We’ll sell my house together, and not a cent of it will go to you or that country girl. You’re going to have to turn that poor boy in. You’re going to have to get your hands dirty. And while you learn how to take care of your stupid self, I will rebuild your father’s restaurant and stand at the front of the house.”

  “You belong in the back,” he said. “That’s how you get your hands dirty, counting what you didn’t fucking earn.” His mother used the damp cloth to rub at a grease stain on the table. Jimmy put his bowl down with a sharp clack. “Did you forget you gave Johnny financial power? This house is no longer yours to sell.”

  His mother shook her head in a way that dismissed everything without needing to say a word. But his mother always did the needless thing.

  “The thing to know about your big brother is that his mind is rigid but his spine is weak,” she said. She started wringing out her towel, squeezing drops of dirty moisture onto her slippered feet. “He calls himself the family so he can say he thinks of the family first. He’ll do whatever looks best, no matter what he did the day before.” The blue-green veins in her hands bulged from the strength of her grip. “And you, you are equally transparent.” She seemed to compose herself, but then she threw her rag on the floor.

  “Get out of my house,” she said.

  “No.” Jimmy squared his stance as if his mother were about to bulldoze through him. “I’m not done talking.”

  “How dare you treat your family this way,” she said. “You respect nothing!”

  She grabbed the nearest plate of food—a bowl overflowing with shrimp in red sauce—and moved with it to the garbage can. Before Jimmy could stop her, she’d dumped the entire bowl into the trash. She went back to the table, grabbing the spareribs, the baby bok choy, the green beans and pork. Cascades of fresh, still-warm food fell into the white bin, becoming, in an instant, inedible. Trash.

  Jimmy hadn’t thought that he could be shocked by his mother’s actions anymore. His entire life, she had been a woman who did and said what she felt in the moment, relishing the act without finding relevance in the consequences. She was the kind of mother who, if she thought he was wearing unflattering pants, would find a certain pleasure in saying, “I never noticed how stubby your legs are—like a baby elephant’s,” because her words were accurate, because they had a rhythm and sting. And as her son, the frequent target of her love’s shade, he was no longer disturbed by what came out of her mouth. But this wanton discarding made him ill in a way that had not happened since he was a child, when his mother had come down with a terrible flu and could not stop vomiting. She had lost control of herself. The act of throwing out good food—food that she had spent hours creating; this pure waste of resources from a woman who had once fished his dumpling from the trash and eaten it, hunched over the bin, in front of him—showed how far his mother was willing to go to teach him a lesson. The last dish emptied its contents, leaving only tracks of sauce.

  “Mom, you’ve gone crazy.”

  “Say whatever you want.” She brushed the hair out of her face with both hands. “I’m going to bed.”

  With that, she departed. Her steps descended the stairs to her basement bedroom, where the air was cool and the darkness a consistent dusk. She’d left the rag on the floor and the ventilator over the stove running. Jimmy bet that if he held his hand over the burners, they would still be hot.

  *

  Alone again—what a relief to be alone—Feng Fei thought of what she hadn’t told her son, to console herself over the secrets she had. She’d said more than she’d planned to. Her youngest could build the froth of her rage so high it blocked her sight. But he still believed, like everyone did, that Ah-Pang was Bobby’s friend. That she had no role in the Duck House’s success. That she was harmless, the husk of a self she’d willfully turned into after Bobby’s death. This was her greatest strength: how easily she was underestimated. Ah-Pang had taught her this unbalancing trick. But she’d taught him plenty too. She’d taught him to pretend at a snobbishness he didn’t believe in. She’d taught him how to take advantage of coming from nothing, how to spin that nothing into mystery and play with the imagination of those above him in station. Most important, she’d taught him, or perhaps they’d taught each other, how to tell the best story. In a world without fairness, the best stories rose to the top. So the Duck House was a diamond in the rough, with the most authentic Peking duck, attracting powerful and influential people. The Hans were hardworking dreamers who had carved an indelible place in this country. Ah-Pang was their beloved uncle, a constant guardian. Beautiful stories she told. She loved the way words sounded in her mouth.

  Now her sons had become preoccupied with other stories. What if Feng Fei couldn’t win them back? After all, they—the thieves—had inherited from her the ability to shape the world around them. Johnny, with his nobleman’s pretensions, saw himself as the patron saint of their family. She had to admit that after Bobby died, her eldest son’s story had worked like a numbing draft. But he was useless, to the family, to the restaurant. The charm, the diplomat’s accent, the face and showy intelligence that worked on his customers, never worked on his family. Even Bobby, who wasted little time thinking about his sons, had once remarked that Johnny was flimsy as a paper doll. But paper was sly; it left the smallest burning cuts. If Johnny took over the Duck House, as neither she nor Bobby had ever wanted, he would quickly find the restaurant work, the back of the house, beneath him. Contradictory to the story he told about himself. He would leave to find “more meaningful work,” abandoning the place that had elevated him to this insufferable level.

  The back of the house was demeaning, but, more than that, Johnny was incompetent when a task asked that he make himself unlikable. As was the case with many first sons, their Johnny grew up to be a trophy that needed to be polished daily by others’ hands. Jimmy, on the other hand, had no reservations about smelling unsweet. From childhood, he’d been a little whirl of fury, collecting slights on his skin like balls of burr. In China, while Johnny had corralled the neighborhood children into doing his gentle bidding, Jimmy bit and scratched whoever tried to play with him. She’d had to spank him raw, but part of her had enjoyed having a child who would fight back. In America, the schools had civilized him, but they’d also dulled the edges of his personality, turning him, if not timid, then taciturn. Only when he began to work in the Duck House did that vein of anger pulse again. He had ruled the back of the house. He was the one who’d created the infamous “vacation,” one week of forced unpaid leave, like slapping a dog on the nose and locking
it up. He was the one who’d strong-armed the waiters into improving their phonetic English, until the customers no longer had to ask them to repeat the specials. Unfortunate that Jimmy got his story mixed up in his head. He’d had to go against his essential nature to force his plain face out into the dining room. She could have told him how ridiculous he looked, parading around like Johnny, just as she could cut Johnny down to size for thinking he had any clout in the back. She was most disgusted when faced with a person who did not understand his own limitations. When she saw such behavior in her sons, she could have wept from disappointment. She had tried to teach them the only way she knew how, with an old fable she’d read in a translated book. She’d repeated the story so many times.

  “One day,” she always began, “a donkey wandered out of its stable, attracted to the sound of its owner laughing.” At this, Johnny always started laughing as well, and Feng Fei would shout at him to stop acting like an idiot.

  “The donkey saw that his owner was watching a monkey dance on the roof of his house.” Feng Fei would make the fingers of her right hand flutter on her sons’ noses. “So the donkey climbed onto the roof with the monkey and started dancing too.” Feng Fei’s left hand would follow her right. “But the donkey was too heavy for the roof. Its hooves broke through the plaster, making a large hole. The owner pulled the donkey outside and beat it until it cried, ‘Why did you laugh at the monkey but not at me?’”

  She always paused here, waiting for her sons to chorus the moral of the fable back. But they would already be distracted. She would have to slap their hands to get them to listen.

  “‘Because you are a donkey, and it is a monkey,’ the owner said, bringing the stick down on the poor, dumb donkey’s hide.”

  “Which ones are we?” Johnny would ask, desperate to be part of the winning team. “I’m a monkey, right, Ma? And Jimmy’s a donkey!”

  “I’m not!” Jimmy would protest.

  “That’s not the point,” she’d say. “The point is that what some can do, you cannot. What you can do, others cannot. Get it?”