Chop Suey Nation

by Ann Hui

  Then it was time to eat. Ah Ngeen and the female relatives had spent the entire morning cooking a feast to welcome him to his new home. He looked at the table laid in front of him. There was a chicken, roast pork and plate after plate covered with vegetables. He glanced now at the kitchen counter. There was still more food there—extra dishes they didn’t have room for on the table.

  Afterward, Ah Ngeen and Ye Ye showed him around the house. They took him upstairs, where there were two bedrooms and a bathroom. “Janice and Jennie sleep here,” said Ah Ngeen, pointing to one of the rooms. His sisters. “They’re still at school,” she said.

  Then they took him downstairs to the basement. Ye Ye had spent weeks building this room, Ah Ngeen told him. She pointed to the single bed and the wooden desk. He had built the furniture too, she said, pointing at Ye Ye. “This will be your room,” she said.

  Dad nodded. He had never had his own room before, but he didn’t want to let on his surprise. He’d been so overwhelmed by the car, and the house, and the city. He didn’t want them to think he was a bumpkin. They left him as he put his suitcase on the floor and began to unpack.

  As he was folding his sweaters, he heard a commotion from upstairs. The door slamming shut and then footsteps running. A few moments later, a small head peeked out from behind the doorway. Then another. Both girls had tanned skin, blunt bangs and long, straight black hair.

  They stared curiously at him. He stared back. He didn’t know it, but the two girls, who were just nine and seven, had only been told a few weeks earlier that he would be coming. Until that point, they hadn’t even known they had a brother.

  After a few seconds of staring, he finally put his hand up and tried greeting them with their Chinese names. But he was met with blank faces. They didn’t seem to understand him. Ah Ngeen had warned him earlier that they spoke mostly English.

  He didn’t know what else to do, so he just smiled. The two girls smiled back. No one seemed to know what to say or do. Finally, the two girls turned on their heels and ran away.

  That night, Dad lay in his bed, staring up at the ceiling. The bed felt hard against his back, but that wasn’t what was keeping him up.

  For years, he had dreamed about this day, about coming to this new country. He had imagined himself here, living under one roof with his parents and sisters. The past few months and weeks had been occupied with planning, filling out paperwork and gathering documents. And for the past week he’d only thought about getting here. Boarding the train, then plane, to arrive in this new place.

  After all of that, he was finally here. He was under the same roof as Ah Ngeen and Ye Ye. They’d all had dinner together, talking and eating around one table just as he’d imagined. What they hadn’t talked about was the years they’d been separated, or why. He wondered how much they even wanted him here. He thought about the blank faces on the two girls—his sisters who hadn’t even known he existed.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Nackawic, NB.

  Spring 2016

  On about hour five of an eight-hour drive from Quebec City to Moncton, I found myself drifting off, thumbing absently around on my phone. By this point, we had been on the road for over a week. The long drives—the blur of the highway signs, the Tim Hortonses, the same five songs that kept playing on the radio—were starting to grow tiresome. I glanced over at Anthony, who had a glazed expression on his face. I could tell he was tired. I knew I was.

  “Maybe we should stop in a town,” I suggested. “Maybe check out a Chinese restaurant in one of them.” There was a town coming up called Nackawic with a restaurant. It was called Saigon’s Garden after the former name of the capital of Vietnam. But according to Google, it was a Chinese restaurant and, going by its ratings, it was a good one. So we exited off the Trans-Canada Highway, taking the Route 105 Bridge over the river and into the town.

  After about twenty minutes of weaving around Nackawic, along the Saint John riverbank, past a pulp mill and the “world’s largest axe” statue, I started to grow suspicious. Our GPS was taking us down a rural road, past mostly wooded areas. We pulled the car over and looked at the GPS map more closely. The road would continue like this for as far as we could see. It didn’t look right.

  I dialled Saigon’s Garden on my phone. A very young-sounding woman picked up.

  I asked for the address of the restaurant.

  The girl hesitated. She excused herself, saying she had to go look it up.

  It occurred to me that, in a town of fewer than a thousand people, customers rarely needed to know the address of the place. They just knew where it was. A few minutes later, she returned to the phone. The address online was wrong. I wondered how long it had been that way without anyone having ever noticed.

  We turned around, back toward the highway, and then turned onto a rural road, driving a few more minutes before pulling up next to a squat-looking brick building with a dusty blue roof. Except for a small sign above the window, there was no indication that it was a restaurant and not, say, an auto parts shop. Down the road was a pharmacy and an old farmhouse. Otherwise it was surrounded by shrub and forest.

  We pulled open the glass door to find a cheerful-looking sign above the counter. “Welcome to Saigon’s Garden.” There was a dining room to the left.

  The young woman we’d spoken with on the phone was behind the counter, and I ordered a couple of spring rolls and egg rolls. By this point, I had given up on eating a full meal at every restaurant we visited. We could only eat so many Cantonese chow meins, and many of our visits took place between meal times. Instead, I had taken to ordering spring rolls and egg rolls at every restaurant we visited. This way, we were at least ordering something. And if they ended up going to waste, at least it was only a little bit of food.

  Truthfully, we probably could have chosen just one of the two—either egg rolls or spring rolls. But by this point in the trip, I still couldn’t keep track of which was which. I knew I liked one better than the other, but it was embarrassing having to keep asking, over and over, which was which.

  The woman seated us in the dimly lit dining room. The room was modestly decorated, save for a few pieces of Vietnamese art on the wall. There was one other table occupied by three middle-aged customers wearing ski jackets who gave us curious looks. When the woman returned with our water, I asked if the owner was around.

  About ten minutes later, a young man wearing a puffy vest and glasses appeared at our table. He was tall, with short, spiky hair. He introduced himself as Gen Le, then apologized for keeping us waiting. He’d just arrived at the restaurant about half an hour earlier, he said, so the kitchen was backed up with orders.

  “Where were you coming from?” I asked.

  “School,” he said.

  The answer caught me off guard. I asked how old he was.

  “Twenty-two.”

  Each morning, he would wake up and drive the forty-five minutes to New Brunswick Community College in Fredericton, where he studies accounting, he explained. From eighty-thirty in the morning until about three-thirty every afternoon, he had class. After class, he’d drive straight back to Nackawic, where he lived with his sister and parents. It was his sister and him who ran the restaurant. By about four p.m, four-thirty at the latest, he was usually back at the restaurant working.

  Then once the restaurant closed around eight, he’d go home to do his homework. From Monday to Friday, week after week, this was his routine.

  He must have noticed my awed expression because he added, quickly, “I’ve gotten used to it.” He had a gentle giant quality to him—tall and broad-shouldered, with an impish smile and soft-spoken manner. He spoke with a slight lisp.

  His parents had taken over this restaurant in 2006, he explained. His family is ethnically Vietnamese, but figured it made more sense to run a Chinese restaurant than a Vietnamese one. In a town like Nackawic, he said, “nobody knows what Vietnamese food is.” But his parents have gotten older. And now his dad is sick.

  So he and
his sister decided to take over the family business. The two of them support their parents. Eventually, once he’s finished school, they might shut down the restaurant. But for now, it’s what’s supporting the family.

  When he was finished explaining to me his daily schedule I gently interrupted him.

  “You know this isn’t a normal life for a twenty-two-year-old, right?”

  He just smiled. He’s glad to be able to do it.

  “I’m fine with it,” he said. “Keeping myself busy—I’ve gotten used to it.”

  * * *

  As we left Saigon’s Garden, I couldn’t stop thinking about my conversation with Mr. Le. He seemed genuinely content. It brought to mind a young woman I’d met over a decade ago, Gah-Ning Tang.

  At the time, I had been working on a magazine story about the children’s author Robert Munsch. In my reporting, I had interviewed Ms. Tang, who had been friends with Mr. Munsch since she was a kid. Decades earlier, at the age of eight, she had written him a letter from her home in Hearst, a tiny logging town in Northern Ontario. In the letter, she had enclosed a hand-drawn picture of herself holding a cluster of balloons lifting her up and away. The picture charmed the writer and eventually inspired his book Where Is Gah-Ning? about a little girl who uses balloons to escape her tiny town.

  Like Mr. Le, Ms. Tang, too, had grown up in a Chinese restaurant. The restaurant was the reason her family was in Hearst. It was the reason she was so eager to leave, whether it was by car, a train or a bunch of balloons. Mr. Le had told me he didn’t mind spending all of his time at the restaurant. But I remembered that for Ms. Tang, that hadn’t been the case. She and I were about the same age and had stayed in touch over the years. So I called her up.

  “I really didn’t like being in the restaurant,” she told me. Her family lived in the same building as the restaurant, so there was no way of escaping the family business. The brick building on George Street in downtown Hearst housed the King’s Cafe on the main floor. And in the basement apartment was where Ms. Tang lived with her parents and sister.

  There was no division, she said. Anytime they weren’t doing homework or working on a school project, she and her sister were expected upstairs, to help out. “Our uncle joked that when you’re tall enough to reach in the sink, you’re old enough to do the dishes,” she said. When they were little, helping out meant running up and downstairs for supplies—grabbing ingredients from the freezer and bringing them up to her dad in the kitchen upstairs. And when they were older, they would help with packing takeout or catering orders, and wait tables.

  They weren’t paid for their work. It was just expected. “My dad wanted us to learn that you’re supposed to help your family,” Ms. Tang said. She actually didn’t mind the work itself. Sometimes she didn’t mind the restaurant even.

  She just wished her life wasn’t so different from everyone else’s around her. Her friends at school didn’t have to work. They got to do whatever they wanted after school. They were allowed to go to sleepovers. They lived in houses.

  When her friends slept in on the weekends, they didn’t have to wait until the breakfast rush was over before their dad could make them something to eat in the kitchen. Her friends were allowed to go to prom, they weren’t told they had to work instead (her uncle later intervened, and she was allowed to go). And her friends didn’t spend evenings scrubbing the restaurant bathroom because someone had drawn graffiti on the wall.

  “I fought with [my parents] a lot. I was like, ‘Why can’t I have a normal childhood? Why did we have to end up in a restaurant? Why can’t we just live in a house?’”

  But now that she’s grown older and moved out on her own to Toronto, her views have changed. The experience taught her a good work ethic, she thinks. And even though her parents were busy, having them upstairs meant they were always around if she really needed them. She also thinks that, by working at the restaurant, she was able to get to know them in a way that most kids don’t—as colleagues and peers, as opposed to simply parents.

  “As much as I had a list of things to hate,” she said, “I still like our family’s story.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Vancouver, BC.

  1974–75

  In a classroom inside the beige-brick Britannia Secondary School in East Vancouver, the students sat in neat rows. It was night school, Introduction to English, and the teacher was going around the room one by one, asking Dad and the other students where they were from. There were students from Fiji, Peru and Korea, all of them newcomers. A few others were Chinese. Some were from Guangdong and others from Hong Kong.

  “What’s your name?” the instructor asked Dad in English.

  He replied in Cantonese, “Hui Yam Hung.”

  “Do you have an English name?”

  He said he didn’t.

  The teacher scrunched his brow, then thought for a few seconds.

  “My sisters have English names,” Dad added. “Jennie and Janice.”

  The teacher nodded thoughtfully.

  “Well, why don’t I give you a J-name too, then?” he asked. “How about we call you—Johnny?”

  Dad thought about it. English names weren’t like Chinese names, he had learned. They didn’t have to be filled with meaning or poetry. Johnny was a name like any other.

  “Johnny,” he repeated. “Johnny. I am Johnny.” He nodded his head, and the teacher printed the name out for him in a notebook.

  * * *

  The original plan had been for Dad to work with Ye Ye on his construction projects. But within a few weeks of working together, it became clear to Dad that he’d have to find another job.

  Since that first meeting at the airport, things had remained tense between the two of them. Both men were quiet, and stubborn—accustomed to doing things their own way and unchallenged. Neither one was the type to initiate conversation, or even make small talk. They could barely figure out how to act around one another, never mind work together.

  At work, Ye Ye was temperamental, quick to berate Dad for any mistake. In response, Dad would quietly fume. After half a year, and at the end of one particularly combative day, Dad decided he’d had enough. There was no way he could keep working with Ye Ye. But what else was there?

  In China, where everything was laid out for him, he’d found his lack of choices suffocating. But now he realized it had at least been a safety net. Ye Ye and Ah Ngeen were able to provide for him, but only to a point.

  At the end of English class one day, a government official came to assign the students to their co-op placements. This was a requirement for new immigrants like Dad. Sitting across from him, the official asked Dad what he wanted to do. Dad told the man that he had only a high school education and some basic English skills. All he knew was that he didn’t want to keep working in construction.

  The officer asked what he thought about restaurant work. Most of the Chinese immigrants were working in restaurants, the officer explained. Plus, hadn’t he said he knew how to cook? It seemed like a no-brainer.

  To Dad, a job was a job. If it got him out of working with Ye Ye, it was fine with him. He said yes.

  * * *

  Dad started at Gum Goon, “the Golden Crown,” the next day. It was, at the time, the biggest and fanciest restaurant in Chinatown, near the Woodward’s building. The restaurant took up both the second and third floor of the downtown building.

  That morning, he rode up the escalator into the giant dining room, marvelling at the idea of an escalator inside of a restaurant. The second floor, where he was going to work, was the dim sum dining room. The third floor, decorated with elaborate dragons carved out of wood, was where the restaurant held weddings and banquets.

  Dim sum was where most of the beginner cooks started. As soon as they handed him his apron, they had him stand to the side, watching as dozens of chefs and cooks rushed around, balancing tall stacks of steamers and heating up giant woks the size of small tables. It felt like chaos.

  The kitchen itself wa
s huge, divided into three sections. The first section was where steamed dishes were made, where trays of har gow, siu mai and braised ribs were stacked carefully. The second area was for stir-frying and deep-frying, where handfuls of jian dui were lowered carefully into hot oil. The last section was for barbecue: golden-yellow whole chickens, char siu with shiny, sticky red skin and crispy, brown roast duck.

  All of the si fus—the chefs—stood on the same side of the room. Most of them had spent many years cooking in Hong Kong before Gum Goon had brought them here. Most of these men specialized in just one variation of cooking—barbecue, or stir-frying, or dim sum. With their sauce-splattered T-shirts and black-and-white checkered pants, these men were the only ones allowed to wield the wok paddle for the stir-fries, turn the barbecue in the hot oven or manage the deep-fryer baskets.

  The head chef, who was in charge of the entire kitchen, worked the steamers. He kept a careful eye on the har gow and siu mai, the staples that marked the difference between mediocre and great dim sum restaurants. The shrimp filling for mediocre har gow was cloaked in thick, gummy wrappers that stuck to the teeth like pencil erasers. Great har gow had a translucent skin, thin enough to fold into eight or more pleats. Great har gow yielded pleasantly at the bite.

  On the other side of the room, opposite the si fus, was everyone else: the prep cooks, the food runners and the dishwashers. This was where Dad worked.

  In his first few weeks, he spent entire shifts running around, gathering ingredients for the chefs. Si fu would call out “har gow,” and it was Dad’s job to run and bring out more baskets. Or he’d call out the name of a stir-fry and Dad would run off to gather the onions and ginger and carrots in a bowl.