SIZZLER WAS WHERE WE went to have steak and salad, not to mention one of the rare instances when my family used forks and knives (we had exactly two forks in the house growing up and some butter knives my grandfather scavenged from a literal dumpster) instead of chopsticks (we ate everything with chopsticks—fried eggs; pork chops; tiny, little green peas—nothing was too big or too small). It was also one of the few times I was permitted to order a soft drink (normally ordering a beverage at a restaurant was seen by my parents as a colossal waste, as it didn’t require any significant human labor or ingenuity to pour liquid into a glass, and, on top of that, it was cheaper to buy soda in bulk at the supermarket). The rationale behind allowing it at Sizzler was because dinner was so cheap that it made my parents feel rich. It was the highest order of indulgence, and I loved it. Fruit punch was my potion of choice. It came with free refills and tasted like bubble gum, the latter of which, in my estimation, was double magic, how the flavor of one thing could conjure up the chewy gumminess of another. Sizzler was where I became a budding synesthete.
At home, my parents mercilessly mocked American habits of eating: steak was nothing more than “a slab of rubbery meat without any seasoning,” salad was a pathetic assortment of bottom-shelf reject vegetables like iceberg lettuce, soggy cucumbers, soapy shreds of carrots, thrown together—“you can hardly call that cooking!” By contrast, in our culinary lives, we were used to food with flavor, depth, complexity—sautéed strips of beef with asparagus seasoned with oyster sauce; hand-folded dumplings plump with ginger, pork, and chives; massive hot pots crammed full of fresh crab; fish balls stuffed with minced meat, shrimp, vermicelli noodles, daikon radish, tofu sheets, six different types of mushrooms, eight different types of green, leafy vegetables that didn’t even have English names. We dined like royalty while living like vermin, often four or five families crammed into a single-family house, everyone sleeping and sitting and eating off furniture found on the sidewalk on garbage days. It was a strange kind of poetry how my family managed to eat so decadently on a fraction of the income our white counterparts raked in. Even stranger were the things white people were willing to shell out money for: a dry slice of turkey, a pile of steamed vegetables. These people are mad! I would often overhear my father saying to my mother.
During our early years in America, my family, like all “good” immigrants, made many attempts to blend in. Food was the most accessible avenue, and so we went down it . . . or at least tried to, but the so-called American dream of assimilation tasted terrible. The worst was the time when we saved up for months to treat ourselves to fresh lobsters from Maine and realized Americans boiled their lobster. Boiled!!! we cried in astonishment to each other. To Chinese people, boiling your food was about as impressive as pouring water into a glass. It was something a child could do blindfolded. It was what you did if you were ever in the position to serve dinner to your enemy. It was like kicking dirt into the air and saying, Here you go, enjoy.
But we made an exception for Sizzler. This was the early nineties, during Sizzler’s heyday, when it aired commercials targeted at the segment of the population who wanted to have three-course meals but could only afford Cup Noodles, a.k.a. people like my family. Sizzler embodied the very essence of America—that even the poor could be greedy, overstuffed even, as they filled themselves on endless plates of food. At Sizzler, flavor and skill were beside the point, as the point was to eat as much food as possible. For my parents—who were born into a decade-long famine that killed somewhere between thirty-six and forty-five million people, who were so malnourished as children that they would sometimes eat expired plain flour fried in oil that had been reused dozens of times for sustenance, and who were unable to grow hair on their arms and legs even after the famine ended—for them, the phrase “all you can eat” was intoxicating. It was like being told: anyone could win the lottery! The concept was unheard-of for people like my parents who grew up in China, where there was never enough to eat. My father was the first to try it after being taken there by some colleagues from work. The next weekend, he took my mother and me to try it, and from that point on, we were hooked.
It was $5.99 for the all-you-can-eat salad bar and $7.99 for a steak dinner, and because I was so small I qualified for the even more reduced children-ten-and-under pricing. At those prices, and with the buffet selection, which included an ice-cream-sundae bar, we could tolerate any amount of underseasoning or oversteaming. My father would always order the steak dinner, and my mother and I would get the salad bar buffet, the scam being that, in the end, there was nothing stopping all three of us eating from the salad bar. As long as my father kept his plate of steak at the table, we felt free to bring plate after plate back, heaping with chicken wings, french fries, rubbery filets of unidentifiable white fish covered in a mustardy, buttery sauce, spaghetti and meatballs, macaroni and cheese, every permutation of raw vegetables and salad dressing, ice-cream sundaes with whipped cream, fudge, caramel, sprinkles, and chocolate chips. It was at the Sizzler salad bar and buffet that I was finally permitted to try Jell-O and realized, to my great disappointment, that it was horrible. It was at the Sizzler salad bar and buffet that I became addicted to shrimp scampi, a dish that bore no affinity to the flavor or texture of the fresh shrimp I was used to having in Chinese restaurants and at home. This kind of shrimp was merely a vessel for butter and parsley. It was at Sizzler that my father developed a taste for sirloin steak, medium rare, and my mother discovered she liked ranch dressing. Sometimes the two of them would hover by the salad bar and wait for the next batch of king crab legs, a hot commodity that lasted exactly a minute before it was all scooped up. My parents were hell-bent on eating as much king crab legs as possible. Anything that expensive, we’d eat. Whether it tasted good or not didn’t matter; all that mattered was that we ate double, triple, and quadruple what we paid for. We’d eat until our bellies were distended, until even the last notch on our belt was too constrictive. We’d walk laps around the salad bar for ten minutes to speed up digestion so we could eat more. Once, when my grandparents from Shanghai were living with us for six months, we took them to Sizzler, and my grandfather, so overwhelmed and giddy at being presented with the concept of all-you-can-eat, ate until he had to vomit, then came back and proudly declared, “Now I can eat more!” It was a marathon sport for us, it made us feel like we had beat the system. “We’ve earned it all back,” my mother would say, beaming after polishing off her tenth plate of food.
In our early years, the kind of American food that was accessible to my family, who had come over to New York by way of Shanghai in the late eighties and struggled at the edge of the poverty line, was fast food and the occasional TGI Fridays–type establishment where the cost of a meal would have been exorbitant if it weren’t for a family friend or two who moonlit as waiters and slid us free appetizers and drinks. Neither were worthy competitors against the Chinese food my parents cooked at home. Sizzler, however, was the exception. It appealed to my parents’ thriftiness, and it appealed to their desire to embrace the American fantasy that there was plenty to go around for everyone!
As my family started to become upwardly mobile, our trips to Sizzler became less and less frequent. It was no longer satisfying to eat until we wanted to puke; it no longer felt like we were robbing the restaurant of its profits; it felt instead like we were robbing ourselves of health, comfort, taste. Like all things too good to be true in our consumer-capitalist society, the quality of food went down as the prices went up. Eventually, in 1996, Sizzler went bankrupt and closed a ton of restaurants. Around the same time, my family moved out of the mostly Asian and Central American immigrant enclave in Queens to a far wealthier, majority-white suburb on Long Island, where there weren’t any Chinese supermarkets or restaurants serving the kind of Chinese food we knew and loved. The white kids in my school mocked me whenever I brought Chinese food in for lunch. Just as my family placed American food on the lowest of rungs, the white kids I encountered did the same with Chinese food—it was too oily; it produced the kind of flatulence that shook heaven and earth; it had primitive flavor profiles; it was unhealthy. Everything we thought about American food was mirrored back to us with regards to our food. The Chinese food I grew up eating was so abundant, varied, fresh, light, bursting with flavor, and yet somehow always cheaper than American food. This is what I knew, but at my new school, I had no allies to back me up on my claims. My classmates mostly ate greasy Chinese take-out that had no resemblance to the Chinese food we ate at home or in restaurants. Whenever my family went to Chinese restaurants in our mostly white neighborhood, the Chinese restaurant owners would apologize profusely in advance for catering to American tastes. “That’s how they like it,” the owner would say, shaking his head while we waited for our order—“slathered in flour, drowning in MSG, and deep-fried. That’s what these people want.”
Over time my parents eventually developed a gag reflex against “American” food. The sight of a chicken breast made my father queasy, whereas my mother became unilaterally opposed to white food, as in food that was literally the color white. With the exception of white rice, my mother could no longer tolerate any and all white-colored foods—mashed potatoes, cream of broccoli soup, Alfredo sauce, even her once-favorite ranch dressing was now repulsive. As for me, I still craved, from time to time, that garlicky, buttery shrimp scampi, picking it out of the linguine, since carbs had to be avoided at all costs when partaking in a Sizzler’s buffet (they filled you up too quickly and were a waste of money). Even more, I continued to dream of drinking fruit punch that tasted like bubble gum—two things that were so all-American, whereas I was so not. Constantly, I was reminded of how not all-American I was. From the way my eyelids looked, to the way my last name sounded, to the way the back of my head sloped, to the dances I wasn’t allowed to go to, to the homes of my classmates that I wasn’t permitted to hang out in—and even if my parents had let me, no one was inviting me anyway. I was a lonely, strange teen who lived mostly in the past and the future, as both were more romantic than the present.
The loneliness of being different turned out to be more than bearable, it spurred an interest in wanting to learn about the deep roots of racism and xenophobia in this country, and anyway, adolescence ultimately did not scar me, but fortified me. Though there wasn’t much that could penetrate my teen angst during those years, I do remember one particularly low evening, when I couldn’t wait for time to go any faster, when all I wanted was to skip forward in time, when I was in the back seat of my parents’ car, driving through Queens, and we drove past the Sizzler on Northern Boulevard, abandoned and lifeless, but still with the old sign intact. Seeing it again, the part of my brain that felt pleasure and joy lit up like crazy, remembering how when we pulled into the parking lot, the three of us would become ebullient, knowing that we were about to have the most special of nights—a night when we could eat like a bunch of sloppy Americans and come home, happy and in pain, vowing to never do it again, knowing we would surely do it again.