This Is My Brain on Action

JOCELYN

By Tuesday, I feel like someone should be playing “Eye of the Tiger”: It’s time for the “Training Montage” trope.

For Will’s first day, I’ve printed out the Yelp pages, websites, and social media stats of our major competitors, including the No. 1 China Restaurant two towns over, whose Stone Age marketing plan makes me feel much better about myself.

I also may have taken a peek at the copy of Running a Restaurant for Dummies at our library, but you’ll never be able to prove it. Ten minutes of browsing through that book made it clear how little my parents know about running a business. When I started looking at my dad’s files—they are still mostly on paper and written in that crisply uniform handwriting that is so typical of people who grew up writing Chinese characters—I remembered that he never finished high school in Taiwan. He was pretty much my age when he came over to help my uncle with his business.

Basically, everything he knows about restauranting, he learned on the job. He definitely didn’t have any pro forma sheets or business plans in any of his files. If you were to summarize my parents’ advice on how to run a restaurant, it would boil down to two things: hard work and sacrifice. Everything else is just noise.

When I come down the back stairs to the restaurant dining room, Will is already there and I’m struck by a sudden panic. He’s not wearing his suit, obviously, but with his slacks and navy button-down, he still looks like he should be the head waiter at one of the bistros downtown with outdoor seating. He’s carrying a leather folio and a cardboard cup holder with two hot drinks from the overpriced café that just opened up by the college.

In other words, he couldn’t look more out of our league if he’d tried.

WILL

Jos is wearing flip-flops, a Hufflepuff shirt, and cutoff jean shorts that are so revealing that in my attempt not to ogle my new boss, I’m rendered completely unable to remember the greeting I rehearsed.

Instead I blurt out, “I got coffee,” and shove the cup holder into her hands. Except she’s holding a legal pad and a water bottle and I manage to crowd her just enough that she can’t easily put the things down, leading to some excruciating seconds of awkward juggling that I eventually resolve by admitting defeat and setting the drinks back down on the booth where I was sitting when she came in.

“Thanks,” says Jocelyn when the cups are back on stable ground again. “You didn’t have to do that. Aren’t I supposed to be the one providing fringe benefits?”

I feel myself blushing. It’s early enough in the day that it’s still relatively cool, so I don’t feel any actual beads of sweat on my temple, but I can feel the heat building at my hairline. Right on cue, I hear my mother’s voice reminding me to just breathe, William, and say something.

I don’t give myself a whole five seconds to inhale, but I get to a count of three before I give a shaky smile. “I didn’t have time to make coffee at home and the place was on my way in. You really don’t want to see me trying to solve problems when I’m undercaffeinated. My sister tells me it’s like watching a slow-motion replay of someone missing a dunk.”

Jos grins, and I get down to business so I don’t have to come up with more small talk. “So how do you guys do things around here? Do you have an electronic ordering system?”

Jos rolls her eyes. “I wish.” She waves a paper order pad. “We have two cases of these in our basement, and I’ll bet you real money that my dad would say we can’t waste the rest, and we shouldn’t transition to digital until we use them all up.”

A warm slice of recognition melts away the last of my residual anxiety. “My grandmother hoards stuff like that. She still drives a 1997 Peugeot that she shipped over from Nigeria. ‘It is still working; why would I replace it?’” I mimic the standard retort she uses every time my mother offers to buy her a new car.

“As you can see, we’re a bit of a fixer-upper,” Jos says. “I have a plan, though.”

JOCELYN

After a while I realize that Will’s preppy getup and the overpriced drinks make him more adorkable than intimidating. It’s more of a “tries too hard” than “thinks he’s better than anyone else” vibe.

Also, he seems to get the restaurant and isn’t afraid to tell me what it needs.

“There’s a lot to work with here,” Will declares. “I mean, the potential of the online stuff is unlimited, and free. There are also easy changes we can make here in the storefront.”

“Our website really needs help, though.” Right now ours is only a landing site with our phone number and a photo of our menu that’s at least two years out of date.

“I can upgrade it. Do you want me to make you an online shopping portal?”

I gape at him. “You know how to do that?”

“Uh, yeah.” He looks sheepish, so I assume I’m looking at him like he’s just barfed up a pile of gold, which he kind of did, when you think about how much money he could potentially be saving us. “It’s not like I’m a computer genius or anything like that. But my mother made me go to programming camp a couple of years ago, and that was one of the things they taught us.”

I shake my head, unable to believe my luck. One improvement down, approximately 574 to go. “Now, what do you think we should do about Yelp?”

WILL

At around ten o’clock, we get our first preorder for lunch pickup at noon, and Jocelyn brings me back to do a tour of the kitchen when she relays the order.

When I walk through the kitchen door, I understand for the first time why Mr. Evans was pushing me to go behind the scenes for my stories. Five seconds of standing there taking in the sights, sounds, and smells of the kitchen gives me more fodder than a dozen e-mails, more detail than I’d be able to pick up with hours of online research. I’m struck first by the wall of sound. There’s the baseline hum of the refrigerator units, the on-and-off susurration of the dishwasher, the woodpecker sound of chopping. One of the cooks, a burly, pug-nosed Asian man who Jocelyn introduces as Jin-Jin, is cracking eggs into a giant vat of soup. A younger woman named Miss Zhou is cutting carrots with a daunting efficiency. An older woman, reed thin with heavy-lidded eyes, sits at a corner table making dumplings.

Jocelyn brightens. “Come meet my grandma.” She jogs over to the back and introduces me to the older woman. “Amah, this is Will. He’ll be working with me on all the online stuff that Priya and I were talking about.”

“But I’m happy to help out around the kitchen and up front as well,” I insert. I don’t want it to sound like I’m afraid to get my hands dirty.

Jocelyn’s grandma puts down the wooden dowel she’s using to roll the dough and wipes off her flour-covered hands briskly with a wet rag. “Very nice meeting you,” she says in gently accented English. “You work in restaurant before?”

“No,” I admit.

Her face breaks into a wide, eye-crinkling grin. “That what I think. You too skinny. Do not worry.” She pats me on the arm consolingly. “We fatten you up. You like pot sticker?”

“Sure, they’re great,” I say.

“Be careful,” Jocelyn warns. “You’ll want to marry those dumplings when you’re done.”

When I bite into the finished pot sticker, which is still piping hot, sublimely crispy on the outside and juicy and bursting with flavor on the inside, I can’t say that she’s wrong.

“Holy cow,” I say, so overcome that I talk with my mouth still full. If my mother were here she’d be scandalized by my manners. “Why are people not lining up outside your door to buy these things?”

Jocelyn thinks about it. “I dunno. Most of our orders are take-out, so maybe they’re just not as good when they’ve been sitting in a box for twenty minutes? Or…” Her eyes open in horror. “I know why. Because we don’t actually have pot stickers on the menu. Only boiled dumplings, because that’s faster and easier.”

Then she grins like a maniac. “Good thing there’s an easy fix for that.”

JOCELYN

The back entrance to the A-Plus parking lot is open except for the screen door, so I can tell my dad is in a foul mood before I even see him. “Zenmegaode, ludo dou mai?” he mutters as he unloads the boxes of produce from our van. When I look over at Will he’s got a little crease between his eyes. There’s no way he can know that my dad is complaining about our supplier’s lack of green beans, but I’m pretty sure it took him about a millisecond to peg my dad for a grouch.

The screen door screams as my dad pushes it open using his elbow, and he unloads two boxes with a groan and a “zhong si.” He’s panting with his hands on his hips, his back turned to us, when I decide to rip the Band-Aid off.

I give Will a smile that is probably more than a little apologetic. He’s going to have to meet my father eventually; might as well know what he’s getting into from the start.

“Hey, Dad. This is Will. Our new employee.”

WILL

When Jocelyn introduces me to her father, I freeze immediately, because that’s what I do when I’m introduced to new people out of the blue. Dr. Rifkin says it’s a survival tactic that allows me to observe the stranger, put on a neutral expression, and let the other person speak to me first, so as to set the ground rules of our interaction.

Mr. Wu eyes me up and down. He’s wearing jeans and a Hawaiian shirt that’s now patchy with sweat, and I feel like a tool in my button-down.

After what seems like an eternity, he asks, without any preamble, “What your GPA?”

I blink and answer automatically, because that’s what I do with adults. “4.35.”

Mr. Wu squints at me. “How you get GPA more than 4.0?” he asks suspiciously. “What kind of school you go to?”

“I go to St. Agnes, sir. You can get above a 4.0 if you’re taking AP classes.”

Jocelyn’s dad sniffs and nods as begrudging a nod as I’ve ever seen. His eyes are a dark brown, kind of like his daughter’s, but they lack the openness that hers have. “You ever be arrested?” Mr. Wu continues in his interrogation. “Do drugs? I have friend at police station, I can check.”

The outright aggression of his question (nothing micro about that one) leaves me speechless. Thankfully, Jocelyn has my back. “Dad!” she hisses. “Of course not. I asked about that stuff on the application. He got the Citizenship Award last year for crying out loud.”

Her indignation goes a long way toward giving me the words to answer her father’s question. When the sting of his accusation dissipates, I hear my mother’s voice in my head, reminding me to turn the other cheek, to kill with kindness. It’s not as if these aren’t questions that any employer would want to know, even if they don’t have the nerve to ask them to my face.

“Sir, my record is perfectly clean,” I say, in as steady a voice as I can muster. “I can have one of my references, Father Healdon, call you if you have any questions.” I figure it’d be laying it on too thick to add that I was an altar boy and still sing in the church choir.

Mr. Wu frowns and squints at me again, and my brain starts generating rogue press conference questions like a mofo. What if Mr. Wu thinks that I’m too arrogant? What if he decides to call up Father Healdon, who tells him about the time I left my cell phone on and Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” from Thor: Ragnarok (Manny’s distinctive ringtone) went off in the middle of Communion? What if Mr. Wu looks through my résumé and thinks I’m exaggerating my business experience with my “selling ads for the school newspaper” line item?

Finally, after what feels like decades of scrutiny, Mr. Wu lets out a breath through pursed lips and waves at me dismissively. “No, no need to make call, too much trouble. You work hard, there be no problem. But Jocelyn will keep close eye. No hanky-panky! I want to see results! Now come help me carry in grocery.”