I found justice at Chaffin, but it came in two unexpected ways.
My brother Thai was the closest to me in age, and we were competitive in everything we did. Because he was two years older than me, he was better at everything. He was bigger, stronger, quicker, more popular—he even ate faster than I did, and in my family that was a big advantage. There was only one thing I could beat him at, and I discovered it in first grade. He was in third grade at the time, and one day when he was doing his arithmetic homework, he was reading the problems out loud, and I kept calling out the answers before he could write them down. I was thrilled to discover that I could finally beat my older brother at something, but I was even more thrilled that I had discovered something that actually came easily for me—math.
There is a well-known stereotype that Asians always excel at mathematics, and like most stereotypes, it isn’t true. Some Asians excel at math, and some do not. There is nothing in Asian DNA that produces accelerated mathematical ability, but there is something in the refugee experience that draws us to mathematics: our frustration with the English language.
For someone who grows up speaking Vietnamese or Cháo zhōu, learning English involves far more than just memorizing a new vocabulary; it requires a completely different way of thinking. The grammar is different, the syntax is different, and the English language contains thousands of bewildering exceptions and rules that make no logical sense at all. Why is there a w in the word answer? Why doesn’t the word enough end with an f? Why do the words flammable and inflammable mean the same thing?
But mathematics is a language of its own. A number is a noun, and an equal sign is a verb, and if you know what those terms mean, you speak the language. The language of mathematics is a foreign language to everyone at first, so someone who speaks English has no advantage over someone who speaks Vietnamese. Even more important, it’s a language everyone begins to learn at the same time. When I started first grade, everyone else in my class had five years’ more experience with the English language than I did, which put them years ahead of me in every subject that required a knowledge of English. But the day we started to learn arithmetic, we were all beginners, and that meant there was finally a subject I could compete in.
By the time I was in eighth grade, I was a member of our school’s math team that won a statewide contest; in ninth grade I won the Arkansas state algebra competition as an individual—but at the same time that I was winning math contests, my verbal test scores ranked me in the 24th percentile. No wonder I found math so appealing.
But what really made mathematics attractive to me was it appealed to my desire for justice. Math had clearly stated rules. If you kept the rules, you were rewarded, and if you broke the rules, you were penalized. There were right answers and wrong answers, and they had nothing to do with the color of your skin or where you happened to be born. To me, math was an island of justice in an unjust world, and it gave me a way to finally stand out.
And then there was football. I signed up for football by accident. I thought I was just signing up for athletics, whatever that was, but when I showed up for the first practice in seventh grade, they started handing out shoulder pads and helmets, and I was scared. I had no idea what was going on. I wanted to run track, not run into someone else. My older brothers never played football, so there was no one to teach me about the game or even what equipment I would need to get started. At the first practice, I saw that everyone else had cleats, but all I had was a pair of Bruce’s old Avias that I had touched up with a white shoe marker, and the soles had been worn so bald, they had no traction at all. I didn’t own a cup either. I didn’t even know what a cup was, and no one bothered to tell me. It was two years before I found out, and I learned the hard way when I tried to hurdle an offensive lineman and he stood up unexpectedly. I went directly to Walmart after the game, and I didn’t care whether I had a coupon or not.
There was something about football that I found liberating. Ever since I had come to America, I had been biting my tongue and avoiding confrontation, and when I was finally given the chance to run over someone, I felt as if I were tapping into something I never had been able to use before. My entire life had been about restraint, and football was all about release. I was actually allowed to hit someone as hard as I possibly could, and it was completely legal and ethical—even my church approved.
In the classroom I was all meekness and restraint, but on the football field I was all energy and passion. I was fearless—I honestly believed I was invulnerable and that there wasn’t anyone that I couldn’t run over. Before long, there wasn’t. I got stronger and faster all the time, and by eighth grade I was playing on the ninth-grade team.
As strange as it sounds, I loved football for the same reason I loved mathematics: justice. Football took place on a level playing field. It didn’t matter where I was from or that I spoke with an accent, and it didn’t matter what part of town I lived in or what my father did for a living. What I put into the game, I got back. If I worked hard, I was rewarded, and if I worked harder than the guy lined up across from me, I walked back to the huddle while he picked himself up off the ground.
My mother and father had doubts about my playing football because they were afraid I might get injured, but my brother Bruce thought it was terrific. He even took me to the mall and bought me a thirty-dollar pair of Nike Sharks, the cheapest pair of cleats in the store. My brother was proud of me, and for the first time in my life, I was proud of myself—and it felt very, very good.
Thirty-Six
THE RESTAURANT
IT TOOK TWENTY-THREE YEARS WORKING OVERTIME AND double shifts at Rheem Air Conditioning for my father to increase his hourly salary a grand total of $7.00. Each year my father worked in the factory, his salary increased by an average of thirty cents per hour.
But he wanted more for his family, and he knew he could never get ahead working for an hourly wage, so he decided to start a business on the side. There were very few business options available to someone like my father; whatever business he attempted couldn’t require start-up money or a college degree—it had to be something he could succeed at with nothing but his own blood, toil, sweat, and tears. And so in the summer of 1989, our family opened a restaurant.
My father and mother had different motivations for starting a restaurant. Aside from additional income, my father’s chief goal was to keep his children out of trouble. We were all growing up: I was starting eighth grade that year, Nikki and Thai were in high school, Bruce and Yen were already in college, and Jenny was about to get married. My father constantly heard stories about other Vietnamese kids who were growing up and getting into serious trouble, and he was afraid it could still happen to us. He figured there were two good ways he could help keep his children on the straight and narrow: by keeping us all where he could see us and by making sure we were so busy we didn’t have time to get in any trouble.
My mother’s motivation was more pragmatic: she wanted to make sure her children would never go hungry. That was a motivation that went all the way back to Vietnam for her, when we were exiled to that tiny farm and forced to eke out an existence day to day and meal to meal. She vowed back then that her children would never go hungry, and owning a restaurant seemed the perfect way to ensure we never would. She saw it as a practical use of her time too: cooking for eleven children was almost a full-time job for her, and she knew there was no way she could help her husband start a new business and keep cooking at the same time—unless the new business happened to involve cooking.
Chungking Chinese Restaurant—the name was my father’s idea. He thought the name was clever and original, and none of us had the heart to tell him that there was already a company called Chun King that sold half of all prepared Chinese food in the United States. Since my father had once been the COO of an entire business empire, starting a small restaurant was a relatively simple project for him. He estimated that all we would need to get up and running was a building, a staff, and a menu.
Staffing the restaurant was the easy part—my family was the staff, and free labor was an essential part of the business plan. We couldn’t afford to hire workers; if we had to pay them even minimum wage, the restaurant never would have made it off the ground. Chungking Chinese Restaurant was a family business in the truest sense of the term, and everyone in the family would have to participate if it was going to work. Though Bruce and Yen were in college at the time, they were badly needed because they were the only ones in our family who had actual restaurant experience. Bruce had worked as a busboy, dishwasher, and waiter, and once he even worked as a hibachi chef at a Japanese steakhouse, stacking onion-ring volcanoes and flipping a fried egg into his chef’s hat while the patrons applauded.
Yen was good with money and held the job of cashier at a restaurant called Jade Garden when she was only fourteen. She had to manually count thousands of dollars in receipts every night, and the balance always had to come out exactly right. Every day she was given a certain amount of change to use that evening, and sometimes the owner would sneak a little out or add a little extra just to see if Yen would be honest enough to report the discrepancy—she always passed the test.
Bruce and Yen agreed to finish college later and come home to work in the restaurant full-time, and at that point we had all the bases covered. Bruce and my mother could cook, Yen could handle the register, Nikki could wait tables, and Thai and I could fill in as kitchen staff, busboys, waiters—whatever was needed. Anh and Hon were not quite twelve at the time, but they could help scrape dishes and load the dishwasher.
Now all we needed was a menu. Unfortunately the owner of Yuan’s Restaurant forgot his promise to turn over all of his recipes to us and left town, which meant we would have to start our own menu from scratch. Bruce was the creative one, so he began to visit local Chinese restaurants and sample all their dishes, then go home and duplicate the recipes through a process of trial and error. He invented his own seasoning salt: three parts sugar, two parts salt, and one part secret ingredient—MSG. He concocted a white sauce for seafood and a dark sauce for beef, and he came up with a version of General Tso’s Chicken, which we cleverly renamed General Chung’s Chicken to disguise its source. Bruce’s best recipe of all—a true Chungking Chinese original—was butter-fried chicken wings. The recipe called for deep-frying chicken wings, dipping them in French butter, then rolling them in our special seasoning salt. Our chicken wings may have clogged a few arteries, but our customers must have thought it was worth it because they were the best-selling item on the menu.
Running a restaurant required longer hours than any of us anticipated. We opened at nine or ten every morning, which required us to be there by eight to cut vegetables and make other preparations for the day, and we closed around nine or ten at night, though we never closed until the final customer left. Even if a customer walked in just when we were about to flip the switch to turn off the Chungking Chinese sign, we served him and stayed open until he was finished—another satisfied customer and one more dollar in the register. When the last customer finally left, Bruce, Thai, and I used to jog down to a local park and play pickup basketball until the lights went off at eleven, then go back to the restaurant to clean up and haul the trash to the Dumpster.
Bruce, Yen, and my mother worked full-time while the rest of us worked after school during the week and full-time on Saturdays. We were closed on Sundays, though I still had to go in for a couple of hours to drain and dump the old cooking oil and get the soups started for the next day. I had football practice after school every day, so I had to hurry over as soon as I was finished, wash all the lunch dishes, and work until closing—and squeeze in a little homework whenever I could. Bruce and Yen worked fifteen hours a day, six days a week, and Nikki, Thai, and I averaged eighty hours a week during the summer.
And the kitchen was hot. The front of the restaurant was air-conditioned, but the kitchen was not, and when the heat of a blazing stove was added to a sweltering Arkansas summer, the kitchen thermometer topped 110 degrees. One of my glamorous jobs was to prepare all the chicken that would be used in recipes like General Chung’s. O.K. Foods made daily deliveries of cases of whole chickens packed in ice, and they left them on the floor by a drain because the kitchen was so hot that the ice quickly melted. By the time I got to the restaurant after football practice, I was racing against the clock to cut up all the chicken before it spoiled, and at $40 a case that was something we could not afford. My job was to remove the skin and then cut the whole chicken into its component parts: white meat and dark meat for the various chicken recipes, fat and skin for the grease, and bones to make soup. My brother Thai and I got so fast at doing it that we could dissect an entire chicken in less than a minute.
Though working at the restaurant took all of our spare time, none of us was paid for working there. As members of the family we were expected to work on behalf of the family, just as my father and his brother had worked for Grandmother Chung back in Vietnam. Every dollar my father had earned went to Grandmother Chung, and she had given him money as he needed it. We had a similar arrangement: every dollar a customer paid and every tip any of us received all went into the cash register, and every Saturday night Yen would open the register and give each of us a small allowance for the week.
When the restaurant first opened, the youngest three children were not old enough to work. Bao and Toan were only four at the time, and baby Du was only ten months old. Since the entire family worked at the restaurant and we couldn’t afford to hire a babysitter, we just brought the young ones along with us. There was an enormous refrigerator in the kitchen, and beside it was a wooden pallet stacked with sacks of rice. Bao and Toan sat in the small open space between them and played with pots and pans all day. Du was a bigger problem because he was so small; we had to put him in a plastic tub that was used to bus tables and give him a few plastic spoons to play with. When Du got a little older, we used to put him in a high chair and set him in front of the window that looked out from the kitchen into the restaurant. Du was our doorbell; whenever someone walked into the restaurant, he would shout, “Customer!” and when anyone approached the cash register, he yelled, “Checkout!” When Du was old enough to walk, he thought he owned the restaurant; he used to walk from table to table and ask customers, “Is everything good here? Is everything okay?”
The restaurant was located about five miles from our house in Barling, and with all of us having to commute back and forth each day, my father decided to look for a house closer to the restaurant. Just a few months after the restaurant opened, he found one; in fact, it was exactly one hundred yards away. It was larger than our house in Barling, but we were all larger, too, and we had all been accumulating more possessions. The brothers’ room was a disaster area. Two or three layers of clothing were always draped over everything, and shoes and backpacks were left scattered all over the floor.
There were eight boys in our family and five beds in our bedroom—two bunk beds and a queen-sized mattress. At any given time there might be five, six, or even seven brothers sleeping there, and we were all too old and much too large to sleep four to a bunk as we used to do in Barling. This time berths were assigned by a simple pecking order: the older brothers got beds while the younger brothers got booted ou
t and either slept on the sofa or crawled in with one of the sisters.
The kitchen was the nerve center of the house because that was where my mother always was, and my sisters congregated around her. They were always talking, and they spoke in Vietnamese with phrases of Cháo zhōu and English interspersed. They talked fast and loud, and the tonal nature of the Vietnamese language made the kitchen sound like an open-air market.
Once the restaurant opened, my mother would seldom cook at home anymore. Monday through Saturday we ate our meals at the restaurant, but Sundays were different because that was the one day the restaurant was closed and my father didn’t have to work. On Sunday my mother would cook an enormous pot of stew along with rice, noodles, vegetables, and some salted pork or beef, and by the time we came home from church, it was ready to eat. Since none of us ate breakfast, we were ravenous, but my father was especially cranky by that time. When he didn’t get his food fast enough, he used to curse before gathering us around the table to give thanks. That seemed a bit inconsistent to us, but none of us thought it would be a good idea to point it out.
We had a big round table, and the girls always sat around it and talked with my mother as they ate while my brothers and I grabbed a plate and headed into the living room, where the television was. We had only one small TV in the house, and everyone understood that it was my father’s domain; whenever he sat down, he put on the channel he wanted, and whatever he watched, we watched—and we always looked forward to Sunday afternoons because that was when he watched Kung Fu Theatre.
Where the Wind Leads Page 26