Chop Suey Nation by Ann Hui

Author:Ann Hui
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Chinese restaurants, Canada, Cooking, Chinese, Canadian, Food habits
ISBN: 9781771622233
Publisher: Douglas and McIntyre (2013) Ltd.
Published: 2019-02-01T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

As we left Saigon’s Garden, I couldn’t stop thinking about my conversation with Mr. Le. He seemed genuinely content. It brought to mind a young woman I’d met over a decade ago, Gah-Ning Tang.

At the time, I had been working on a magazine story about the children’s author Robert Munsch. In my reporting, I had interviewed Ms. Tang, who had been friends with Mr. Munsch since she was a kid. Decades earlier, at the age of eight, she had written him a letter from her home in Hearst, a tiny logging town in Northern Ontario. In the letter, she had enclosed a hand-drawn picture of herself holding a cluster of balloons lifting her up and away. The picture charmed the writer and eventually inspired his book Where Is Gah-Ning? about a little girl who uses balloons to escape her tiny town.

Like Mr. Le, Ms. Tang, too, had grown up in a Chinese restaurant. The restaurant was the reason her family was in Hearst. It was the reason she was so eager to leave, whether it was by car, a train or a bunch of balloons. Mr. Le had told me he didn’t mind spending all of his time at the restaurant. But I remembered that for Ms. Tang, that hadn’t been the case. She and I were about the same age and had stayed in touch over the years. So I called her up.

“I really didn’t like being in the restaurant,” she told me. Her family lived in the same building as the restaurant, so there was no way of escaping the family business. The brick building on George Street in downtown Hearst housed the King’s Cafe on the main floor. And in the basement apartment was where Ms. Tang lived with her parents and sister.

There was no division, she said. Anytime they weren’t doing homework or working on a school project, she and her sister were expected upstairs, to help out. “Our uncle joked that when you’re tall enough to reach in the sink, you’re old enough to do the dishes,” she said. When they were little, helping out meant running up and downstairs for supplies—grabbing ingredients from the freezer and bringing them up to her dad in the kitchen upstairs. And when they were older, they would help with packing takeout or catering orders, and wait tables.

They weren’t paid for their work. It was just expected. “My dad wanted us to learn that you’re supposed to help your family,” Ms. Tang said. She actually didn’t mind the work itself. Sometimes she didn’t mind the restaurant even.

She just wished her life wasn’t so different from everyone else’s around her. Her friends at school didn’t have to work. They got to do whatever they wanted after school. They were allowed to go to sleepovers. They lived in houses.

When her friends slept in on the weekends, they didn’t have to wait until the breakfast rush was over before their dad could make them something to eat in the kitchen.

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