I always felt like I had a pretty good grasp of the Chinese approach to life—I’ve spent time in China and in American Chinatowns, and I lived with my Chinese grandmother until I was twenty-five—but nothing prepared me for the thousands of hours I’d spend in an actual Chinese kitchen with actual Chinese cooks. Here are some notes from my cultural immersion.
As weeks and months passed, our days took on a sort of semi-dysfunctional family feeling. Sue would spend hours every day napping in her easy chair and watching Mandarin-dubbed Korean melodramas. Emma and I would split a burrito at the family table with Sue’s mom, whom we called The Old Lady. She speaks no English at all, which is fine because none of us really spoke with anyone from a different generation while we were working. The one exception was Liang, who took breaks from napping in his car to offer to sell me the restaurant before leaving to snake the drains. Liang talks about antiques and women far too often, and in a way I find uncomfortable, but you gotta hand it to the guy. If the restaurant’s full and a master fuse blows, he’ll save the day by hacking a chunk off of a steel pipe and jamming it in the fuse box.
