This Is My Brain on Pot Stickers

WILL

The next day is food prep boot camp. Jocelyn is honest in laying out her expectations.

“Your first few jiaozi are going to look like lumpy little bags of crap,” she says bluntly.

“Wow, tell me what you really think about my fine motor skills,” I joke. It’s okay that she’s candid. More than okay, if I’m completely truthful. When my father asked me yesterday what I thought of my new job, I said that the work was interesting and that my boss was smart, fair, kind, and completely 100 percent free of bullshit.

Sometimes you don’t realize how people layer their lives with a bubble wrap of concern for other people’s feelings, until you meet someone who’s unvarnished—what some people would call rough around the edges—and realize how refreshing it is not to have to sort through their protective wrapping and suss out who they really are. It just makes you that much more likely to peel off your own buffers against the world, to let yourself breathe.

As Jocelyn explains to me the steps of dumpling making, I can’t help but notice that one side of her bottom lip is just a little plumper than the other, and that she has a tiny mole on her left cheek, near her ear.

“Earth to Will, want a pop quiz?” Jocelyn snaps me back from my distraction.

“No need. I got it. Cut off about an inch of dough. Roll it into a ball, flatten it, and use the dowel to thin out the edges while moving it around to make it symmetrical. Put in about a tablespoon of filling. Then you do the twisty thing.”

“Not twist!” Grandma Wu scolds. “Pinch.” She demonstrates the way to crimp the edges of the dumpling wrapper together. Her moves are as perfectly fluid and graceful as a concert pianist’s. I kind of wish we had ESPN here to offer a super-slo-mo replay.

“Do you think you could do that again, maybe not as fast? It looked a lot easier in that Crazy Rich Asians scene,” I say.

“Best way to learn is to do, no to watch,” she insists, waving her dowel. And I prove Jocelyn wrong. My dumplings aren’t lumpy little bags of crap.

They’re lumpy little bundles of crap that pop open and spooge raw pork onto my T-shirt.

After I manage to make four passable jiaozi in the time it takes Jocelyn and her grandmother to make two hundred, we take a break to transfer the dumplings to the walk-in freezer so we can store them for the race. Then we regroup with Grandma Wu and work in assembly-line fashion. We fall into a synchronized swim of movement, my initially awkward motions smoothing out into a clockwork of activity that hums along with the Wus’.

Our rhythm only breaks once, when Mr. Wu comes in after a supply run. He’s glued to his phone and his forehead is furrowed and pinched like one of our jiaozi seams. “… cannot raise rent by ten percent. It unreasonable,” he shouts. “I give you five percent. We have been good tenant for many years.”

He listens for a few minutes, his breath audible in the suddenly quiet room. Beside me, Jocelyn is frozen mid-wrap, straining so hard to hear the conversation that she’s vibrating.

Still listening, Mr. Wu starts shaking his head. “You want to do that? You try. We talk again in July and see what happen.” He jabs his thumb to end the call, his mouth twisted in a rictus of frustration. My reporter’s curiosity is killing me. What’s up with their landlord? Are they really in danger of being kicked out of their space? Mr. Wu puts his left hand over his face and stands there for a second, then storms out of the kitchen to the dining room.

As the swinging door flaps shut, Jocelyn’s shoulders stiffen. Her mouth tightens. And grimly, with increasing speed, she keeps on folding.

Before I know it, we have another five hundred jiaozi cooling in the freezer unit, and we call it a day. My T-shirt is gray with flour and there are spots of grease on my jeans that will take a mighty pretreat to remove. When I get up to wash my hands, my stomach rumbles.

Grandma Wu gets a glint in her eye and barks out some commands in Mandarin. Within minutes she’s shepherded Jocelyn and me to the front and laid out plates like the staff do for their end-of-the-day meal, with side dishes that don’t show up on the menu: smashed cucumber salad, sautéed bok choy, and stir-fried “glass” noodles that Jos says are made from mung beans.

“Why aren’t these noodles on the menu?” I ask as I stuff my mouth. “And these cucumbers? They’re ridiculously good.” They’re obscenely flavorful—salty and sweet, tangy and nutty all at the same time.

“I dunno,” Jos says. She’s barely eaten anything on her plate, using her chopsticks to make a series of mounds with her noodles instead. “My dad just copied the menu my uncle used. Also, mung beans aren’t exactly a big draw here in central New York.”

I nod, but think to myself that the noodles seem like a no-brainer addition—extremely tasty and made from generally low-cost ingredients. On the other hand, I’m beginning to understand that cucumbers are relatively expensive as fresh veggies go. But it could be an in-season special for August and September, when local farmers are drowning in cukes. I could even ask Mrs. Peabody next door for some the next time she comes around trying to offload her extras. If the restaurant’s rent is going to increase, a new popular item could help. I’m dying to ask Jocelyn for their landlord’s contact information, but it’s pretty obvious that now is not the right time.

Jocelyn’s noticeably down for the rest of the afternoon, even though we get a few more followers on Instagram and Facebook. I try to cheer her up by showing her my mock-up e-commerce interface.

As Jocelyn clicks through the steps customers would use to order, I see the clouds begin to lift. Pretty soon she’s blazing with excitement. “Will, this could be a game changer,” she says, bug-eyed with wonder. “Even two or three orders a night will make a huge difference.”

Ten percent, I think. That’s how much their rent might go up by. Surreptitiously, while Jocelyn’s taking a phone order, I google “average restaurant margins” and find that they average from 3–6 percent.

No wonder Jocelyn’s stressed; just looking at the stats makes me queasy. Suddenly, the offhand comments she makes to Alan, along the lines of “You better pull your weight, or we’ll have to move again,” make sense.

“I’ll get the online ordering up and running tonight,” I promise Jos.

Before I leave, I remember to tell her that I’m going to be a little late tomorrow because I have a doctor’s appointment. I tell her I’ll stay an hour after closing to make up for the time.

“Oh, is everything okay?” she asks.

“Yeah, it’s just a skin condition.” It’s a fib I’ve been telling for years whenever I’ve had to explain why I have to skip out on something for a therapy session. Dermatology is one of those things that’s almost always an instant conversation stopper, and Jocelyn’s no exception.

I can’t help hoping, though, that someday I won’t have to lie about where I’m going.

I don’t get to go home and change before heading over to hang out with the guys. I collapse onto Javier Diaz’s basement couch, more tired than I realized. Tim Rosenthal is our fourth player today. He’s wearing his “Tolkien White Male” T-shirt.

“Javi and I call France,” Manny says, loading up a game of FIFA.

The background roar of computer-generated stadium noise washes over us as we settle into our normal trash talk. I’m a little slow to start, my muscles aching from the repetitive motions earlier in the day. Manny scores first off a header and tears his shirt off, running around the basement as the in-game commentators go wild. Of the four of us, he’s the only one who plays soccer for St. Agnes. Tim’s not the biggest fan of anything that requires him to break a sweat, and team sports aren’t really Javier’s thing. I played youth soccer for a few years—my uncle Akunna was my coach for the first year—but only lasted a couple of months of travel league. I begged my mom to let me quit after the time I almost hyperventilated going back onto the field after missing a penalty kick.

The next year, my mom signed my sister and me up for tennis lessons. We started playing mixed doubles as a family, and that satisfied my mother’s desire to keep us active. By that time I was seeing Dr. Rifkin, and he taught me all the little ways to trick my mind into calming down during a match, like focusing on the feel of my right toe in my sneakers, counting the ridges on my racket, and recalling how a perfectly hit volley reverberates in my shoulder.

“Missed you yesterday, Will,” Manny says. Yesterday—Wednesday—was, of course, new comic book day. “Marvel’s gearing up for their next crossover.”

“Pfft,” says Tim. “Getting ready for the next crappy money grab, more like it.”

“Someone’s bitter,” Manny sings. “Did you rewatch Justice League last night or something?”

If we’re honest, the four of us all read across distributor lines, but Manny and I have always been more Marvel than DC fans, mostly because of Black Panther and Kamala Khan. Tim, on the other hand, was raised in a die-hard DC family. There are literally pictures of him being toted around in a baby carrier dressed as the Robin to his parents’ Batman and Catwoman.

After FIFA we play Mario Kart, because at the end of the day there isn’t a multiplayer that’s a more straightforward adrenaline rush. Plus there are enough random power-ups, shortcuts, and pitfalls to equalize the competitive advantage that Tim has as a hard-core gamer (and who doesn’t like a game where you can throw banana peels at your friends?).

By the second run, my bone-weary fatigue is gone, and my shoulders have finally relaxed. Javier waves his hands excitedly as he throws a blue shell and rubber-bands into the lead with an outraged shout from Manny. I laugh out loud as Tim hoots at Manny’s comeuppance and gets so distracted by his gloating that I use a Mushroom and race into first myself.

For the first time all day I’m completely loose, my brainpan unoccupied by business strategy, family pressures, or uncertainty about my future, gleefully mindless as I race around a physics-defying fantasy world with my buddies. For these few precious moments, life is easy.

On the way home from the Diazes’, I pass A-Plus. The open sign is no longer lit and the curtains are drawn, but the lights are still on. I imagine one of the Wus sitting at a booth tallying up a spreadsheet on their crusty Dell laptop that needs to be plugged in at all times because its battery won’t hold a charge anymore, and I feel a pang of guilt. I’m pretty sure Jocelyn didn’t spend her evening playing video games. She was probably stressing over that day’s take and what that spreadsheet would look like after a rent increase.

For the first time, I wonder what she does outside of the restaurant and school. What makes her happy? Does she plan on taking over A-Plus, or does she have other dreams? And does she find having fun as difficult as I do?