This Is My Brain on Moving Pictures

JOCELYN

“Alan, Amah! Come on, it’s all set up.”

“Aiyo, dengyixia. Kuaiyao wanle.” My grandmother doesn’t budge from where she’s watching the electrifying end of this week’s episode of Single Ladies Senior.

“I’ll just be a minute,” Alan says. “Lemme just finish this practice test. I’ve got a good feeling about it.”

“I’m giving you guys ten minutes,” I say. “Jin-Jin has somewhere he needs to be. I think it’s a date with one of the waitresses at the Vietnamese place.”

I go back downstairs, where the whole A-Plus staff is finishing up their evening meal. Will and I have set up his dad’s portable projector against the side wall of the dining area. I had to take down a couple of framed TRAVEL CHINA posters from the wall, and seeing the empty space gives me ideas. What if we replaced the decor with canvas enlargements of some of Priya’s shots? I file the thought away and double-check that Will’s Bluetooth speakers are still connected to my laptop and playing the most aggressively positive music I can find.

Halfway through the B section of Sara Bareilles’s “Brave” we hear a loud shout from upstairs and my brother comes storming down. “Holy cow! I got one hundred percent! Will! I didn’t get a single one wrong on my full-length practice test!”

“That’s my man!” Will and Alan fist-bump as Alan does a victory lap around the room before plopping his worksheet next to my dad’s plate.

“Bucuo,” my dad says, nodding his head. Then he amends himself in English. Instead of saying “not bad” like he did in Mandarin, he says, “Very good.” My brother beams.

A minute later, Amah finally comes down, and Will pulls over her special cushioned chair from behind the counter. I clear my throat.

“Thank you all for being here. You may not know it, but this is A-Plus’s fifteenth anniversary week. Obviously, none of us were here when the original owners started the restaurant, but the fact that we’re still thriving and doing strong business fifteen years later shows that Utica really loves its Chinese food!”

Amah, my plant, bursts out in spontaneous applause, and Will and Alan join her. My dad looks a little like he’s opened a tin of cookies only to realize that it’s been repurposed as a compost bin, but my mom looks genuinely happy. Miss Zhou actually cracks a smile.

It makes sense that the restaurant’s lease gets renewed on the anniversary of its opening, but I didn’t realize A-Plus had been open that long until I dug through our maintenance records.

“In honor of our fifteenth anniversary, my friends Priya and Will and I put together a little tribute to A-Plus and our customers. We hope you enjoy it.”

Because I’m a drama queen, I turn off the lights. It’s only dusk, so there’s enough ambient light from the street so it’s not completely dark, but it’s enough.

It was Priya’s idea to open with an old-timey movie countdown, and I have to admit that it gives me chills when the final beep sounds, the screen fades to black, and Sarah McLachlan starts singing.

“You don’t think it’s too on the nose?” I whisper to Will as “I Will Remember You” fills the room to a shot of my dad flipping the store’s CLOSED sign to OPEN.

“What do you think?” Will says, smiling. I look over at my A-Plus family, and they’re all riveted. Miss Zhou is leaning forward half out of her chair with her chin on her hands. My dad’s the only one who seems even the least bit uncomfortable.

Good, I think.

“Hey!” Will nudges me as still pictures of the restaurant being built come up. “Where’d you get these pics?”

“I did some digging,” I say. “Your dad’s friend at the chamber of commerce was able to get the contact information for the previous owners. They live in Kansas City now. Can you imagine?”

“And you think I have all the answers?” Will says wonderingly, shaking his head.

When the scene changes to focus on Amah’s jiaozi making, I notice my mother dabbing away tears. After a minute we pan over to a shot of Will making jiaozi, at which point Sarah McLachlan finishes and is replaced by circus music augmented by whoopee cushion sound effects when his jiaozi lose their structural integrity. Alan and Jin-Jin really enjoy that part.

Then the Beatles’s “With a Little Help from My Friends” comes on to footage of the Boilermaker Expo. Priya’s cut together half a dozen reaction shots of happy customers, and when I look around the table I can see people lighting up as they see how much joy the food we make brings to people. Then there’s the time-lapse shot of a full day at A-Plus to the refrain of “Do you need anybody? I need somebody to love.”

The pièce de résistance, though, is the single-shot clip of the very same group of people who are watching the film, winding down at the end of a long week.

As Ringo Starr sings, “Oh, I get by, with a little help from my friends,” I watch my mom, ever the bedrock, carrying in the rice, using a paddle to serve it steaming, right out of the pot. For once, Alan and I haven’t scattered to our bedrooms at the end of the day, and we’re putting out the tableware—gosh, do we look young, but also older than our years. Jin-Jin comes in with his dishes, then collapses into an exhausted sprawl, but then he says something that I can’t quite follow and Miss Zhou laughs, the fatigue dropping from her face for just a moment. Will rounds out our motley crew, and Priya’s camera catches the deference with which he spoons out a plate for my amah and tops off my dad’s water when it gets low.

If Priya’s video were a film, it’d be the kind that gets a Rotten Tomatometer rating from critics but scores off the charts in its audience rating. Even as I teared up the first time I watched her initial cut, the reviewer in me wanted to use words like “mawkish” or “sentimental.” And the tropes! I stopped counting after a while: The “Family Restaurant” trope. The “Multigenerational Family” trope. And here I am, the walking “Your Tradition Is Not Mine” trope.

But the second time I watched it and burst into uncontrolled weeping, it occurred to me that the video works because the tropes hit so close to home, not in spite of them. That’s when I called up Priya and told her that my plan was to make this the most manipulative video in the history of man. If my whole life was a trope, I was going to own it.

I’ve watched the video enough times that it doesn’t make me cry anymore, but I can see Miss Zhou scrabbling in her purse for a tissue. Even my dad looks a little stricken. And yes, I’m a total atheist (or at least an agnostic), but at that particular moment I pray. I pray to an unnamed God or Goddess that my dad will see. That he’ll realize that our family is so much bigger than him and Mom and Alan and Amah and me. I pray that he’ll understand that now is not the time to give up, and that he’ll see that he’s not alone anymore, that I have just as much a stake in the business as he does. Most of all, I pray that he’ll see that for the first time in my life I might have a chance at happiness—and that my dreams for the future might not look exactly like his.

I turn the lights back on, and my mother is the first one to burst into applause. Everyone joins in, even my dad. And as people blink back into reality, I turn to Will.