After the last customers were served, the staff crowded in the kitchen for family meal.
I had just started working at Green Tea/Green Olive Bistro, a restaurant not far from my house. The owners, Cindy and Denny, were my parents’ age. They’d immigrated to the U.S. by way of Hong Kong and Vietnam, and for the past couple of decades, they ran another restaurant that was also called Green Tea in a neighboring suburb. For their new venture, they rented space in an old Uno Pizzeria, the same one my mother had pointed out whenever we drove home from the grocery store. According to her, that location was tough for any restaurant, including a national chain like Uno, since it was tucked in a sleepy strip mall plaza and not visible from the turnpike. That was one of the problems with Lotus Garden, my mother was certain: its relatively isolated location compounded by other issues. My mother’s comment lingered each time I walked into Green Tea/Green Olive for my shifts as a hostess.
But Cindy and Denny were optimistic. They wanted to make the most of the pizza ovens, so they hired a chef who had defected from a popular spot in New Haven that was known for its clam pies. They used the word fusion to describe the concept, and I could tell they were eager to try something new. Maybe, they hoped, the idea could catch and give them the success their first restaurant had not found.
When I saw the menu, though, I understood that it was a restaurant with two separate kitchens, little merging together. On one side, there was a kitchen where chefs turned out plates of General Tso’s and orange chicken—American Chinese takeout food, as my father called it. On the other side were the pizzas, which customers hesitated to order, remarking to me how novel this was while I smiled blandly and poured them water. (These same customers, not surprisingly, were also the type to compliment me on my English.)
I spent my shifts tethered to the hostess stand, snacking on broken fortune cookies and counting how many people I’d seated, the numbers for the evenings rarely reaching more than forty or fifty guests. I knew this was not optimal and that Green Tea risked a future like Lotus Garden, which now only existed as boxed-up dishware and dusted paper menus in my family’s basement.
Over the months that I’d worked at the restaurant, I’d developed a protectiveness for it. It was kitschy and so earnest in its pursuit of what Cindy and Denny thought diners might want, though ultimately, in the eyes of its customers, it was overpriced pizza and Chinese takeout. But I found comfort within its walls, in the ways Cindy and Denny were determined to ensure its survival by incorporating elements they hoped would create a sophisticated or exciting ambiance: the jazz band that played each weekend evening; the flaming scorpion bowls that the bartender, a young woman from Hong Kong studying epidemiology at a local university, whisked throughout the dining room.5
I often tried to coax my father to the restaurant toward the ends of my shifts.
Just come, I invited him. Get something small, I’ll pay for it. Just sit and listen to the music.
He visited once and sat in a booth by the bar. He studied the entire menu and remarked how expensive each of the dishes was, and asked what the staff would eat for family meal later.
He had an exuberant, uncomfortable energy about him. There was a wistfulness that I would see amplified when I took him to Cindy and Denny’s original Green Tea a half hour away, which served dim sum and had a modest clientele that spoke Cantonese.
At this original Green Tea, I watched my father take in the space. He sat, his mouth slightly ajar, and surveilled the waitstaff as they carried metal trays of har gau and siu mai to tables. He craned his neck to get a better look at the chicken feet, not uncommon in Cantonese restaurants. But Cantonese restaurants were not common in suburban Connecticut, which made this all the more impressive. I understood then that my father was seeing the version of Lotus Garden that never surfaced. This moment unearthed the parallels between us. I was drawn to Green Tea for the ways it reminded me of my parents’ restaurant, and how it might provide answers to some of my unspoken questions. My father had done the same when he’d opened Lotus Garden, curious to understand the father he’d never met, hoping that my grandfather’s successes would transfer to him. I am not sure what answers, if any, my father gained. If Lotus Garden had allowed him a closure or a closeness to his father, or if it only emphasized their distance. It is always strange when a child realizes that they are attempting to recreate their parents’ path with their own; something uncanny within these movements, embedded within it a contradictory worry of recreation and a hope of carrying out a wish that had not been fulfilled.
But Green Tea/Green Olive would not last. This seemed clear to me long before it became true.
* * *
A memory from when I was five:
It was a summer evening that was thick with humidity and mosquitoes. My father broke stalks of sugar cane into small pieces with a cleaver. He drew the blade back and slammed it into the cutting board until cane splintered. I winced each time. He handed me a small piece while he popped another into his mouth.
Ho sik, he said.
Ho sik, I agreed.
This is like candy. This is where sugar comes from. Make sure you chew out all the juices. He demonstrated, his teeth macerating the fiber. They grow a lot of sugar cane in Cuba.
I was young, but not too young to know that this was where my grandfather had lived. At the time, I did not understand how grief could be consumed, how food was one way to process a memory, or the absence of one. My father could not speak of what questions the cane made him ask about his own life. All I could taste was sweet juice, which I sucked from the woody pulp until it was dry.
Mimicking my father, I whacked the trash can open. I spit out the cane.
* * *
During family meal, I filled my plate with leftovers from service, along with blistered green beans with soy sauce and black bean paste; chicken, sliced and sautéed with carrots and other leftover vegetables; a tender beef stewed with daikon that was soft like a pat of butter; a soup with a thin broth and briny, boiled knots of seaweed. In Cantonese, I answered the chefs’ questions about my family and where they were born, laughing when they teased me about my lack of fluency and promising that I’d work on my pronunciation.
Our dishes in hand, we fanned along empty tables. The band that Cindy and Denny hired was finishing their set, the last few customers readying to leave. We ate in companionable silence. When everybody came together at the end of the night like this, it felt familiar, something joyous and relieved in how we bent over our plates. It was amazing how we could create our own space this quickly, even if temporary.
* * *
Whenever I take my father for dim sum or to a Cantonese restaurant, I let him pick what we’ll eat. He enthusiastically reads the menu out loud. I always expect him to order in Cantonese or Taishanese. When he does not, when he instead asks for another napkin or a pot of chrysanthemum tea in English, I am perplexed. Maybe he is self-conscious about his fluency these days. Maybe he worries he doesn’t know the right slang. His Chinese finally emerges when the waitress asks what dialects he speaks. A familiar conversation in Cantonese unfolds.
My father sits up straighter, enthusiastic and eager to have a rare audience when the waitress poses these questions to him:
Where were you born?
What is your last name? How do you write the character for Chow?
When did you come to the United States?
Oh, your daughter lives in [Seattle or Boston or New York or D.C.]?
Oh, there’s no good dim sum where you live? Where is that, again? Connecticut?
Yes, such a shame. You should visit your daughter more. She’ll treat you.
Ha ha ha. You’re right. A daughter should always take care of her father, ha ha ha.
* * *
After the staff meal, Cindy gathered leftovers into quart containers.
For your daddy. She pushed a bag into my arms, insistent. When I first started at Green Tea, Cindy had asked about my parents, and after I mentioned that my mother had died, she made sure I left my shifts with plenty of food. This small act was so comforting in its matter-of-factness; though it made me long for my mother—to be mothered—it did not highlight her absence, which was a relief.
When I returned home, my father and I fell into a routine we had only recently established—as though working at this restaurant had provided us an armistice. He’d rise from his seat in the family room, where he’d spent my whole shift watching a documentary about space travel or a war or whatever the local PBS station aired. While I took off my shoes, he pulled the containers from the bag and appraised each one.
At the kitchen table, I watched my father spoon soup into a bowl. He chewed on a tangle of seaweed while he lifted open the container with the braised beef. Steam fogged his glasses and the gentle scent of star anise floated across the table.
They gave you a lot of meat. Approval lined his voice.
I arranged the rest of the food in front of him. The school year would start again in just a few weeks. I hoped that in less than a year, I’d be far from this house.
Under the dim kitchen light, watching my father slurp the soup, I understood I was witnessing a memory in progress—of the two of us, separately, recalling this moment, and of our future selves returning here to this scene.