My dad is the gruffest person I know. He doesn't show a lot of emotion, which makes him incredibly hard to read. While my mom is the extrovert in the family, my dad is, by far, the introvert. It doesn't surprise me that his comfort zone is in the back of the restaurant, the kitchen.
I am a daddy's girl, through and through. When I was really little, my dad went to Taiwan for a week, to accompany my pregnant aunt home. My mom says I would not stop crying. She doesn't remember this week fondly, but it makes me smile. He was just my favorite person in the whole world.
My dad was born in South Korea, though our ancestry is Chinese. He was the third in a family of four. My grandfather owned a small restaurant, and I've heard stories of him serving food to soldiers during the Korean War. The restaurant business, as you may say, is our family trade.
When my dad was 23, he left Korea to work at my uncle's Chinese restaurant in Omaha, Nebraska. He later moved to Iowa to work for another uncle's restaurant and ultimately planted roots in Illinois, where he opened his own restaurant with my mom.
I loved Jennifer Lee's book, "The Fortune Cookie Chronicles," because she tells the story of the Chinese restaurant industry so accurately. I love the opening of Chapter 1:
"There are some forty thousand Chinese restaurants in the United States - more than the number of McDonald's, Burger Kings, and KFCs combined.
Tucked into exurban strip malls, urban ghettos, and tiny midwestern towns that are afterthoughts for cartographers, Chinese restaurants have spread nearly everywhere across America - from Abbeville, Louisiana, to Zion, Illinois, to Navajo reservations, where, in a distinction shared with only a handful of businesses, they're exempted from tribe-member ownership. Old restaurants, clothing stores on Main Streets, and empty storefronts have been reborn as Chinese restaurants. The Washington, D.C., boardinghouse where John Wilkes Booth and his accomplices planned Abraham Lincoln's assassination is now a Chinese restaurant called Wok n Roll."
This was (and still is) my life. I first started working at parents' restaurant when I was old enough to ride a bike. I would go from table to table, refilling water glasses. I've spent countless evenings in the tiny office near the kitchen, watching TV as my parents ran around like crazy during the dinner rushes. Now when I go back on the weekends to work, it feels like home. My parents are creatures of habit, and the restaurant hasn't changed much over the past 30 years.
The Chinese restaurant gives and it takes. I have much to be thankful for, and a lot of that is due to how hard my parents work at the restaurant. But, I also know the sacrifices they made to give my siblings and me the things they thought we ought to have. But at the end of the day, kids just want their parents to spend time with them.
My parents did the best they could. Every year, our small town in Illinois hosts a festival with local food, concerts, and carnival rides. I must have been about seven or eight at the time when my dad came home early in the evening, an odd time for a chef to leave his kitchen. It was a Sunday, the last day of the festival weekend. He wanted to take us to the fest to ride some rides. My sister, my cousin, and I were ecstatic. We were three little girls jumping with joy the entire way there. Tickets were $7 a person, which was pretty expensive. "You can go on one ride," my dad said. Clearly, the best ride at the time was the big purple half-shells that spun us around until we felt like barfing (not unlike the teacup ride at Disney).
My sister, my cousin, and I climbed into our purple half-shell, stoked for the ride to start. The ride operator started the ride. We squealed with delight. Round and round we spun, laughing our heads off. I looked over at the crowd of parents standing near the ride. I saw my dad standing against a brick wall, arms crossed but grinning from ear to ear. The late summer sun was slowly setting, and one of its golden beams lit my view of him. It's one of my favorite childhood memories.
It's also one of the few times I recall my dad genuinely happy. For the most part, my dad shows his love through food. I can tell when my dad has simply put food on the table to sustain us versus when he puts food on the table that has taken him a long time to cook. I once asked my dad if he remembered a Korean stew I liked. It had braised beef, carrots, and potatoes. "Huh?" he grunted as I did my darnedest to describe the stew in my broken Chinese. A couple weeks later when I came back to the restaurant, he had the exact stew made and ready for me to eat. Now that is love.
