This Is My Brain in Love

by I. W. Gregorio

  “I’m sorry, ma’am—we’re out of dumplings.” Will says. “Would you like some fried rice?”

  “No, that’s okay.” The woman sighs heavily and turns around to her kids. “They’re all out, kids. Guess we have to go to the pizza cart instead.”

  Crap.

  Just like that, disappointment sucks all the air from my lungs. We’ve underestimated demand and are leaving money on the table. Every person who stops by asking for dumplings only to pass when we can only offer fried rice is another blow. When I can’t stand the thought of any more lost revenue being shoved in my face, I send Priya out to scrounge up some masking tape so we can hang up a SOLD OUT sign over her amazing dumpling photo. A few people come looking for pot stickers anyway, like we have a secret stash squirreled away for VIPs.

  “We shouldn’t have given out so many samples,” I say the tenth time someone frowns and walks away. That’s probably hundreds of dollars we left on the table. “We should’ve made more dumplings. They don’t go bad when they’re frozen. We could’ve used them up later if we made too many.”

  Will is silent for a minute, like he’s thinking of the old adage: If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all. Then he says, “We’ve been making dumplings practically nonstop since we found out we had a booth.”

  “Maybe it doesn’t matter if they’re homemade,” I fret. “For an event like this, we should’ve just bought premade dumplings and marked them up. We could have made thousands more.”

  “Jos, we did the best we could with what we knew, and it’s still a huge success.”

  But we could have done better. I don’t say it out loud, but I hear the voice—a combination of my dad’s and my uncle’s—in my head anyway.

  WILL

  The thing about fake news is that it preys on the truth. There’s always a kernel of reality that gets watered with misinformation and deliberate misinterpretation until it mutates into something hateful, hyperbolic, and divisive.

  Last fall, Mr. Evans had a whole unit on the journalist’s role in a “post-truth” society. He had to explain the term—named the 2016 International Word of the Year by the Oxford Dictionaries!—to us: “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”

  In other words, the whole world’s starting to process news the way my brain does life.

  Watching Jocelyn crumble into self-loathing, I realize that she has a post-truth brain, too.

  My excitement at selling out trickles into unease when I realize that Jocelyn isn’t smiling. Instead, she’s staring out at the few people who are still milling around. I can practically see the moment when her brain morphs an objective fact (we ran out of dumplings) from something positive (we were so popular that we sold out) into something negative (we failed at capturing all the customers that we could have).

  I glance at my watch—it’s almost one o’clock and we’ve been working nonstop through lunch. I grab a carton of the fried rice. “Hey, I don’t think any of us has eaten since this morning. We’ll all feel way better if we have something in our stomachs.”

  “Thanks, I’m not hungry,” Jos mumbles, still looking out at the people lining up at the other food carts.

  I start cleaning up the serving area in silence. Jos joins me eventually, packaging up the fried rice into take-out containers that we sell for two dollars each. It’s still a moneymaker, given that it’s concocted from yesterday’s fried rice and leftover veggies, but Jocelyn’s distress hangs over us like a darkening sky before a thunderstorm.

  Maybe she just needs perspective, some cognitive reframing.

  “You were amazing today,” I tell her as we pour the dumpling water into a bush by the parking lot. “I can’t believe how many customers we had. This is such a win for the restaurant.”

  She glances away and gives a half-hearted shoulder lift. “Sure.” I know someone deflecting praise that they don’t believe when I see it. “I can’t take credit for it. It was your idea.”

  “But it was your execution,” I insist. I recognize the disconnect between what I see and what she thinks of herself, because I do it, too.

  “Then the execution was shortsighted. I can’t believe I set our expectations so low,” she says, her voice cracking. She sniffs and rubs at her nose angrily. “You were right that we shouldn’t have worried about not having enough customers. We should’ve made twice as many dumplings, and boiled them all beforehand to save a step. Our price point should have been higher, or maybe we could have given out only four dumplings per order, not five. And I should’ve gotten one other person to cook so two people could run the register when we fell behind on orders.”

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself,” I tell her. The irony of my using that phrase on someone else does not escape my notice. “This was the first time A-Plus has ever done something like this, right? Even if it wasn’t perfect, we definitely turned a profit, and the exposure is priceless.”

  “You can’t pay rent with exposure,” Jocelyn says. “I don’t know if it’ll be good enough.”

  “The fact that I’m getting a hernia picking up our cash box suggests that it will,” Priya says, making a show of struggling to lift our register. “Hey, Catastrophe Girl, let’s wait to do the math before you beat yourself up.”

  It’s then, when I watch Jocelyn shake her head and go back to cleaning up, as if she can’t bear to watch the blow-by-blow of the accounting, that I realize our crucial mistake: We made such a conscious effort to keep our expectations low that we didn’t set ourselves up for maximal success.

  I’m used to setting myself up for small potatoes, informed by years of therapy and lectures from my father about how “unrealistic expectations breed disappointment, perfectionism, and anxiety.”

  But Jocelyn? She can’t bear to count how much money we made, because no amount would be good enough to make up for opportunity lost.

  This Is My Brain on Fatigue

  JOCELYN

  After I do the math, we make back the entrance fee plus an $800 profit, which seems good until we count the time it took to fold all those goddamn dumplings—forty-plus hours of work? We barely break even, even if we only pay ourselves minimum wage.

  What a bust.

  As we load our equipment into the van, Priya and Will chatter quietly behind me, but I can’t bring myself to join in. I know I’m the wet blanket—God, I always know it, but there’s nothing I can do to get rid of the sensation that my head weighs too much for my body.

  Failure doesn’t need to be spectacular, like with that face-planting ski jumper they show every time the Olympics roll around to illustrate the agony of defeat. Actually, I’m beginning to realize, it’s usually pretty boring, sometimes even masked by a thin veil of achievement. We sold out of dumplings. Woo-hoo. I don’t know why we thought it was so crucial to have handmade dumplings in the first place. People at the Boilermaker couldn’t care less if the thing they cram into their mouth is a handcrafted piece of exotic culinary art. All they want is fuel.

  As I pull out of the Mohawk Valley Community College parking lot, Priya snaps a picture of me. “Hashtag Mopey McMopeface.”

  “Hashtag Too Exhausted for My Homicide Filter to Work.” I snap back.

  “I get it,” she relents. “But we had a great day on social media. One hundred new followers, a couple of retweets by the official Boilermaker account. And hey, two sign-ups for our e-mail list!”

  “Wow, what does that brings us to? A grand total of five?” My voice isn’t dry. It’s just dehydration. “The spambots are going to be hacking into us any day now, I mean, we’re major influencers.”

  Priya’s used to ignoring me when I’m like this, probably because she’s got two older brothers. Snark just rolls off her like water off a duck’s back.

  “Will’s a good guy,” Priya says then. “He was totally trying to drag you out of your funk, but you wouldn’t have any of it.”
<
br />   I think of the way Priya and Will clicked right away, of how effortlessly they worked together taking orders while I did all the food work. “Well, if you like him so much, maybe you should marry him.” I pitch my voice to sound like a whiny eight-year-old, aiming for irony but missing it by a mile.

  Priya stiffens in the seat next to me, and I apologize before she can reply. “I’m sorry, that was out of line. I’m a shit human being today.” I know that she would never take Will from me. Not intentionally.

  She doesn’t say anything for a few seconds, and the pause while she composes her response is the only thing that hints at how much I’ve hurt her feelings. Priya and I never have to worry about what we say to each other. “It’s been a long day,” she says finally.

  “Thank you for helping,” I say in a small voice. “I know there are more fun things to do on a summer Friday.”

  “Psht. Fun is for the lazy,” she says. She pauses and looks out the window for a second. “It was important. And you did good.”

  The closest I can get to accepting her praise is silence. But that’s the thing about best friends: Priya understands me anyway.

  The next morning I wake up feeling like I’ve been run over by a cement mixer and then baked in a pizza oven. The tip of my nose burns like it’s had an encounter with that character on Game of Thrones who skins his enemies, and my neck aches so badly I can barely turn my head to see what time it is.

  I lie in bed for a few minutes after I wake up. Maybe closer to an hour, who’s counting?

  My brother, apparently. At nine o’clock exactly he starts banging on my door at just about the same tempo that my head is pounding.

  “Jiejie,” he yells. “I need you to help me with my homework.”

  I burrow my head farther into my pillow. “Jesus Christ, it’s Saturday morning.”

  “Dad says I need to get it done before I can do any screen time. The guys are doing an epic multiplayer today, but Mom says I have to help out downstairs for lunch because it’s going to be so busy. Baituo, Jiejie, bangwo?” It’s a low blow for my brother to switch to Mandarin, and he knows it. Nothing triggers my guilt and filial piety more than my formal title of “Big Sister.”

  “Only because you said please,” I grumble as I roll out of bed, muscles screeching. After I brush my teeth I pop some ibuprofen and splash some cold water over my face before staring at myself in the mirror. I don’t have bags under my eyes—I’ve got suitcases, and my hair has the opposite of body. It lies like a corpse on my oily scalp.

  At the breakfast table, while I’m helping my brother with his homework, I have coffee and youtiao, baseball bat–length sticks of fried dough that Priya once described as a chubby churro without the cinnamon sugar. It’s basically Taiwanese comfort food, and I can’t help but think that if Will tasted one he’d probably try to get me to sell them in the restaurant, too.

  It’s sweet how excited he is about “authentic” Chinese food, but right here and now I resolve to keep youtiao under his radar for as long as possible, because it’s just not worth the weird looks, the disbelieving chuckles, and the times we’d have to explain what it is and how to eat it. We’re a crappy Chinese restaurant, not a Ten Thousand Villages. Our food will never come with a pamphlet celebrating its exotic origins.

  I polish off one youtiao and reach for the remaining one only to have my mother slap my hand away gently. “Aiyo, Xiao Jia. Chi taiduo, duzi pang.” She pinches my belly fat and I give an indignant yelp. “That for your brother to eat.”

  “What, so it’s okay for Alan to be overweight?” I protest. My mom, empress of Fat Shameland, just shrugs and moves her size-two waist over to the sink to do dishes. It’s like she doesn’t care that people die from eating disorders every year.

  Since the day I hit puberty, my mother’s been on my case. On a daily basis, I’m told that my belly’s too big (duzi tai pang), that I’m a hunchback who needs to stand up straight (ting xiong yidian), and that my hair is a mess (toufa luanqibazao). I’m surprised she hasn’t hit the trifecta already in the half hour I’ve been downstairs.

  My teachers at school would never call me a rebel, but I find little ways to act out: sneaking bites of food when my mom isn’t watching, savaging my hair with rubber bands when I forget hair ties, and generally perfecting my lady sprawl in mixed company. It’s not even like my mom has time to really police me—she’s too busy, which takes a little away from my satisfaction with my rebelliousness, but not too much.

  “I don’t get it,” my brother whines when I make him show his work for a problem. “I got the right answer. Why do I have to go through all these steps?”

  “It’s for your own good,” I say, cringing a little at how much I sound like my dad. When he rolls his eyes, I throw my hands up in the air. “Look, I’m the cheapest tutor you’ve got, so deal with it. You can either take my advice or ignore it and flunk the class again.”

  He seems to choose the latter option, gluing his eyes to the back of our generic Cheerios box.

  “Earth to Alan. Hello?” When I grab the box away from him, he gives me the same innocent smile he’s had since he was a four-year-old getting into trouble with our parents. “Do you want to play your freaking Fortnite or not?”

  “Fine,” he groans. In the next hour, Alan has to go to the bathroom twice, prepare himself a mid-morning snack, and go upstairs to bring down his window fan, but we finally get his worksheet done. Then he’s in his room logged onto his computer within ten seconds.

  For the first time in what seems like forever, I can just do nothing. My parents and Amah are already downstairs doing prep work. I know they’ll call up when they need me, or pound on the ceiling with a broomstick if the landline downstairs is being used to take orders. For these few minutes before the lunch rush, I can sit.

  “So there’s good news,” I tell my dad while we clean up after lunch. “We sold all the pot stickers, and literally thousands of people stopped by and now know about us.” My dad grunts with approval, and his eyes practically light up with dollar signs. “Once we include all our expenses, we net about eight hundred dollars, which I think is great considering it’s our first year—”

  “Dengxia, dengxia. Ni shuo shenme?” my dad interrupts. “How you sold out, but only get eight hundred bucks?”

  “Well, there’s the cost of food and equipment rental, and there was the Expo booth fee.…” I don’t mention the labor costs.

  “How much this booth?” my father asks suspiciously, his Wasting Money Warning System blaring.

  I’m glad that he’s been too busy to ask the question until now. I try not to have my voice wobble. “Well, it was four hundred dollars, but as you can see we really made it up.”

  His eyes bug out and he opens his mouth to say something, then stops. His brow furrows and his gaze grows distant before he squints at me. “You still make eight hundred dollars. You sell more than twelve hundred dollars’ worth of food?” he asks.

  “Yeah.”

  My dad does his “not bad” frowny face, the one that makes him look like a surprised catfish, and my heart does a little flip. That’s practically his version of a high five.

  “Overhead too high,” he grumbles as he takes a stack of flat take-out menus and turns them into trifolds. “Next time work on cutting expense. How much you charge per order?” he demands.

  “Five for five dollars, but next time I think we can do four for five dollars at an event like this.”

  “Also next time sell egg roll. Cheap and easy, make good profit.”

  I sit down next to him to help fold. It isn’t until we’re almost done that I realize the phrase he used twice to critique my business plan:

  “Next time.”

  This Is My Brain on Stew

  WILL

  As bone weary as I am when I get home from the Expo, I still can’t sleep. So I open the file that I’ve titled “The Restaurant at the End of the Strip Mall” and do something I haven’t done since the creative writing module in m
y seventh-grade English class: I freewrite. I try to capture all the granular details of the day: the smell of sesame oil just before it starts smoking, the sound of a metal spatula scraping against a wok, the feel of a worn twenty-dollar bill as you slide it into a register.

  On Saturday, the day of the race, my family drives by the restaurant on our way to Red Lobster, and I notice a few more customers than usual sitting in the red-cushioned chairs by the counter, waiting for takeout. One of the storefronts in the strip mall is vacant, and I take a picture of the sign so I can look up the developer who manages the complex.

  The next day, when my family is knotting up ties and slipping on sandals as we get ready for church, I wonder whether the Wus ever have a day of rest. Unlike a lot of other small restaurants in the area, A-Plus isn’t closed on Sunday or Monday. From what I understand, their backup cook is Grandma Wu, and their substitute waiter/busboy/delivery person is Jocelyn’s brother.

  Sunday night is family night in our house. It’s the one day a week my mother cooks dinner, when she’s not on call, and she uses it as an opportunity to make some of her favorite childhood dishes. It’s so my sister and I develop a taste for Nigerian food, since there aren’t really any African restaurants in our area. I’m her sous chef this week. Grace is nowhere in sight. My mother taught her to cook (after all, my nne nne would have been scandalized if she hadn’t) but recently Grace has started opting out. Part of me resents Grace for having the guts to leave and then not get in trouble for it, but in the end it isn’t half bad having some mom time for myself.

  I take out one of the bags of tomato puree that my mother keeps in the freezer for jollof rice. When I measure out the actual rice grains, I’m struck by how the long-grained rice we use is so different from the stubby short-grained rice they use at A-Plus.

  My mother prepares the fish and meat for the egusi stew and grinds up the melon seeds and crayfish. This is my mother at her best—relaxed, centered, and focused on a singular task. It’s when she’s cooking that I feel most comfortable talking to her; maybe it’s because her attention is turned elsewhere, so I don’t feel as much like I’m under a microscope.