“You! Dumb fuck kid! You chop more onion!”

Besides the two middle aged cooks, there were four young men in the Hung Far Low kitchen. Each of them stopped what he was doing and looked up from his task because each of them was named Dumb Fuck Kid. Then three of them went back to what they’d been doing because the cook standing next to the 8-burner gas stove was pointing his soft cover black bible right at the new guy. Not even half way through his first shift and the poor guy had already become both cooks’ main target of abuse.

Dumb Fuck Kid stopped scrubbing the baking sheets stacked in the sink, wiped his hands on his white apron and started for the chopping table. The red tile floor was slick with grease and with soapy water especially around the sink so he stepped carefully. He’d already slipped twice from an excess of first-day-on-the-job hustle.

“You go like that, maybe you get to the onions by tomorrow!”

Dumb Fuck Kid grabbed a huge aluminum bowl from the rack beneath the table and set it along side the cutting surface. Then he took an onion from a cardboard box of onions and began cutting.

As anyone knows who has chopped onions professionally, the inaugural experience can be disheartening. First, the stinging of the eyes doesn’t go away like it does when you chop one onion at home and then wait a few moments for the unpleasantness to wear off. The eye stinging goes on until they’ve all been dealt with and it stays with you. Second, restaurant knives are very sharp. While going to great lengths to ensure that it is only the onions that are chopped, the inexperienced imagination naturally begins to simulate what it would feel like if the knife were to slip and effortlessly strip away a layer of skin from the side of a finger. This leads to hesitant, cautious chopping when what’s wanted is confidence and a good cadence.

“Dumb fuck kid! You chop any slower, we stop paying you, you have to pay us!”

Dumb Fuck Kid started chopping faster. The cook shook his head, muttered “Dumb fuck kid”, lay the bible on a clean white towel on a stainless steel table and turned back to the stove.

Sunday
Sweetie,
Your aunt Ethel is a complete treasure. I absolutely love her. Your uncle Fred too. They met me at the train station. There weren’t a whole lot of mint condition shiny gray ‘53 Plymouths driving around so they were easy to spot. When I walked up your aunt got out and then it was all, Jeff talks about you all the time, and it’s so wonderful to finally meet his best friend, and while you’re here you’re just part of the family and all this while she’s hugging me there in the street as if I’d just got back from the wars.

They’ve cleared out a storage room in the basement of their apartment building for me. There are maybe 30 banker’s boxes stacked against the wall outside and some old wooden furniture that looks broken. There’s no closet but there is a toilet in the back and a sink. They’ve put in an armoire and a chest of drawers. And there’s an ancient television set – I mean it’s got that tiny little round screen inside a big wooden stand. In their own apartment they have one just like it that actually works and they eat dinner in front of it on folding TV trays. Do you know about this 50’s obsession they have? You didn’t say anything about it. It’s weird and sort of cute at the same time.

The bed’s a narrow cot but that’s fine. I mean I’m not going to be doing anything on it except sleeping. There’s a little round braided rug at the foot of the bed, a chair and desk with a lamp for doing homework and a little night table at the head of the bed with a real live doily on it. And when I walked in there was a glass of milk and plate of cookies on it. Truly. It was so charming, so completely motherly. I didn’t know what to do. I just shrugged my shoulders up and shuffled my feet and said “Thank you, Mrs. Cleaver.” And she actually giggled.

But here’s the kicker and I swear I’m not making this up, cross my heart and hope to die in your arms. She went to Cost Plus and bought a shoji screen. A small one – three panels. And she had it resting flat against the wall next to the armoire. She said she thought I might like a little bit of my own culture in the room to make me feel at home. Now we didn’t have shoji screens at home, but I do know how they’re supposed to work. So I folded it slightly and stood it up near the wall and told your aunt that that’s how my family always arranged our shoji screens. Very traditional, I told her, very traditional to

have a shoji screen in your bedroom. And then I couldn’t help it, I just kissed her on the cheek. And you were right. Of course. She had a job waiting for me. Her best friend from school’s neighbor’s brother knows the owner of a restaurant in Chinatown. It’s got a small under-lit bar on the second floor and it’s a student hangout so you’ve got kids from Reed and Lewis and Clark in the dining room and yours truly, the pleb from Portland State in the kitchen. So it’s two days of class and five days of chopping suey for me, and no time left over for getting into trouble.

All summer long.
xxxxoooo

Wednesday
Sweetie,
Class is boring. I’ve got nothing interesting to say about it, and neither does the T.A. So instead let me tell you about my life as a blue collar Joe and introduce you to my two bosses, the night shift cooks – Holy Kao and Ming The Merciless. Kao’s the one clutching a bible who yells a lot. Ming’s the silent one with the air of quiet cruelty about him. There are four of us minions who do all the dish washing and peeling and slicing and running around while Holy and Ming The have four or five woks going at a time. Ming The can handle a table of twelve in less time than it takes for the ash on the end of his cigarette to build up.

He always scowls. As I look at that last sentence I realize that I’m probably using the word ‘scowl’ for the first time in my life. Because you don’t really meet normal people that go around scowling the way Ming The does. Sometimes they’re happy, sometimes they’re sad, and every once in a great while they scowl. Not Ming The Merciless. He looks really pissed off about every order he cooks. And in between orders when things slow down, which they don’t very often, he looks pissed off that there’s undoubtedly somebody out there who’s just about to order. And this is when things are going smooth, when the orders aren’t backed up. But when things are hopping and he turns around and finds that he’s out of sliced ginger or there’s no MSG or he hasn’t got a clean wok for a new order, this look of disappointment and betrayal comes over him, like why have we done this to him? Then, my dear, then, his face does the strangest thing. And the human face shouldn’t ever do that. It shouldn’t ever look that way. The scowl just goes away, it disappears. And with it all the squintyness and the grimace and the creases and wrinkles that make up a scowl – they just sort of dissolve. And a second later what’s left is this blank stare of focused hatred and resentment. You just figure the inside of his skull must have a puddle of melted brain from some kind of resentment. Resentment of what? Who knows? But that’s when my eyeballs get fixed on that Chinese chef’s hatchet of his and I try to avoid eye contact.

But then suddenly it’s all over – for the moment, the scowl reassembles itself, Ming The Merciless goes back to silently bad vibing his order, and Holy Kao takes over, shaking the bible he carries everywhere, and shouting at everyone. Sometimes he doesn’t even bother turning around. He just keeps stirring the wok with one hand, holding aloft the infallible Word of God and barking out those scolds.

Hmm. Did I say shouting at everyone? I fear I have misspaken, cute stuff. Last night at the end of shift, our little gang of four, we’re at our small lockers in the break room getting ready to leave, and Benny Chiu slaps me on the back and says that I’m the best. And Phil Li says better than the best! and Ed Ong is cracking up and pumping his fist in the air. So I’m like, what’s that all about? and Phil says that I’m a shit magnet par excellence and that he just went his whole shift and only got yelled at once which is some kind of record I guess. And why? Because all the yelling was now being directed at me. And I say yeah, but why, what did I do? And he says I don’t know, but better you than me and gives me this huge smile and slaps me on the back again and leaves.

Then Benny and Ed head upstairs to the bar and at the door, Benny stops and turns around and says, I don’t know about you but I can’t always tell somebody Chinese from somebody Japanese. And he says, not that I give a fuck, and I go me neither but so what? And he says, Ming and Kao – they could be blindfolded and spun around like tops and they’d still spot you as Japanese in a hot second. And I say, so then Ming and Kao don’t exactly care for… and Ed smiles at me and says, ohhh they sure don’t.

All summer long, honey.
xxxxoooo

It was 6pm on a Wednesday night, most of the students were summering somewhere else, the place was dead and Holy Kao was restless and bored. He’d flipped open his bible, read something in Leviticus that got him muttering to himself and ended up wandering around the break room smoking an unfiltered Lucky Strike because Ming was already smoking in the kitchen and the owner had placed a strict limit on smoking in the kitchen: only one person at a time. Kao was half consciously lifting up and examining everything in his path the way that the restlessly bored do. So it was a matter of bad timing and worse luck that Dumb Fuck Kid had chosen that day to arrive five minutes late and to have in his possession a dozen anti-homesickness photos sent from Seattle by Sweetie, to have stashed them in his locker with his jacket, and in the entirely futile rush to get into his white apron and avoid a biblically inspired chastisement to have neglected to push the door on his locker all the way closed.

Holy Kao was still muttering to himself as he exhaled a cloud of fine toasted tobacco smoke and was barely conscious of opening the already half opened locker door as he walked aimlessly by. He had no way of knowing who the locker belonged to or even if it belonged to anyone since there were more lockers than employees. Neither he nor Ming used a locker. They arrived together already dressed for work and the gang of four just assumed that the two of them did everything together like Bert and Ernie and passed their lives dressed in greasy white aprons and white hats.

So it was with a childlike delight that Holy Kao aroused himself out of his restless torpor upon discovering that his hand, emerging from inside the locker, contained a small stack of photographs. The topmost photo told him that the locker belonged to the fucking Japanese kid they were being forced to supervise. A man and a woman and three kids – one of them the new kid – were standing in front of a house. Couldn’t tell where exactly; might have been anywhere, he supposed. The kid looked a few years younger.

The second photo was a snap shot of the kid and some blond guy, maybe a few years older than the kid. They were standing on a pier together, smiling happily, and holding hands. This was the only picture of Dumb Fuck Kid would allow himself of the two of them together that couldn’t be passed off as he and his best friend just hanging out. At first, Holy Kao chuckled to himself and thought that they looked just like a couple of fags and relished the idea of being able to give the new kid constant shit for the rest of the night.

And then for just a moment time slowed down as the pieces started arranging themselves, and the moment they suddenly fell into place and he knew that they didn’t just look like fags, Dumb Fuck Kid, already warned by Benny Chiu that the boss was in his locker, walked up.

“Dumb fuck kid! You a fairy boy?”

Dumb Fuck Kid closed his eyes, took a deep breath and held out his hand. “That’s mine. Give it back.”

“Why are you a fairy boy? You don’t like girls?”

“Give it!”

Holy Kao held his bible aloft like a battle flag. “God doesn’t like fairy boys! You shouldn’t be a fairy boy!”

The remaining members of the gang of four, not very much less bored than their boss, had gathered around Dumb Fuck Kid. Dumb Fuck Kid held out his hand. Holy Kao took the picture off the top of the stack and picked up the next one. “Hope you don’t have more fairy boys in here.”

“Give them all, goddammit!”

Holy Kao ignored him, thumbing through the photos. Then he stopped. His face seemed to collapse and his mouth came open. He held up the photo. It was a black and white snapshot, obviously much older than the others. A man and a woman dressed like in the 1930’s sat together on a couch. Kao stared at it, then at the scowling face of Dumb Fuck Kid, then at the photo.

And began screaming in Chinese at the top of his lungs. It was so loud that each of the gang of four looked around to locate and avoid whatever wall was collapsing or psycho gunman was taking aim at them. He seemed to be screaming the same thing over and over. Phil Li looked at Ed Ong, the only one of them who spoke Chinese. Ed shrugged. “Not my kind of Chinese, I’m Cantonese.”

A moment later Ming The Merciless came loping into the break room clutching his chef’s knife and looking like a demented hatchet murderer. He stopped next to the assemblage and looked at the gang of four as if determining who would be first to go.

Holy Kao waved the photo in front of him, then held it up for him to see. Still shouting, he pointed at the picture then pointed at Dumb Fuck Kid. Then he stopped shouting and waited. Ming took the photo, put on a pair of glasses, and looked at it. A moment without reaction, then his face drained of color. He put a nicotine stained index finger on the face of the man in the photo and managed to croak “Hawaii!” before fainting unconscious onto the tile floor, clipping his head on the way down on the corner of the wooden bench next to the lockers.