The Fortune Cookie Chronicles (25 page)

John hated New York City. He was tired of traveling hours by bus to work in Chinese restaurants every week. He hated the mind-numbing, leg-numbing hours waiting on ungrateful, scornful customers. He’d had it with the crowds, the clutter, the smel s. He was sick of their five-person family living in a single room and eating meals cooked in a makeshift kitchen in the bathroom. Life in America was not supposed to be this hard.

If they were successful in Georgia, he reasoned, they could buy a bigger restaurant and move away. If not, they could comfortably spend the rest of their lives there. With expansive mountains, trees, and clean lakes, Georgia was more like their vil age in China than New York ever would be.

Looking at the two, I guessed immediately who had been the aggressor in their courtship. Jenny had been a seamstress, and had taken a liking to her handsome, scholarly neighbor. She had converted to Christianity and joined John in the clandestine Baptist church services that were held in private homes, away from the watchful eye of the local government. During services the worshippers always harbored the background fear of being caught. When someone knocked, they scurried.

Now Jenny wanted to make money. A tiny restaurant in a tiny town was not going to lead to financial prosperity.

But the two did agree on at least one thing: the restaurant would be a chance to bring the entire family together. Their three children—al of whom had been raised in different households—and the parents would be in one home at last. And they could live as a family.

I believed that too, up until the moment I got the phone cal tel ing me about the first arrest. The price of the seven-table restaurant, set in a mountain town, had been listed at $60,000. In reality, the price was the stability of their family.

Jenny stil clearly remembers the night she left behind her oldest daughter, Jolene, in the vil age outside Fuzhou. Jolene remembers it too. “I cried for three days,” she told me. Even though she was only six years old at the time, she knew instinctively that her mother was not coming back. She chased her to the doorway and watched her mother being chauffeured away in a put-putting motor cart. It was the beginning of Jenny’s $30,000, il egal journey to New York City.

For years after, Jolene communicated with her mother through her drawings. From the time she could pick up a pencil, it was clear that Jolene had been blessed with the hands and grace of an artist. She mailed her mother sketches of the Beijing opera that her grandparents took her to see. She liked to copy Japanese anime characters, with big, luminous eyes like those Jolene herself had inherited from her dad.

The drawings always came folded inside handwritten letters from Jenny’s father. Jenny taped Jolene’s drawings to the wal above her bed so she could look at them as she fel asleep.

A few years later, Jolene also lost her father to America, but his journey was not as smooth as Jenny’s. His was a boat trip that took him past the Dominican Republic. The United States Coast Guard scooped up him and the other passengers as they were trying to get to shore under the cover of night.

For John, that ended up being a blessing. With the help of an immigration lawyer he applied for religious asylum. He had, after al , been raised Baptist. In the post–Tiananmen Square atmosphere of the early 1990s, the United States was generous in Chinese asylum cases. The Immigration and Naturalization Service tested his knowledge of the Bible: Who was Jesus Christ? What is the Holy Spirit? Who were the twelve disciples? He passed and was given asylum.

As his wife, Jenny was also granted asylum.

(In September 2000, the federal government handcuffed their immigration lawyer, Robert Borgas, and charged him with col uding with Chinese snakeheads to help more than six thousand Chinese il egal immigrants get papers so that they could stay in New York. The government estimated that Mr.

Borgas had earned $13.5 mil ion in fees. Sel ing the American dream can be a very lucrative business.) Jolene’s parents did eventual y send something back from New York: a baby sister who’d been born in Beekman Downtown Hospital, in Manhattan. They had given her an English name, Nancy; her Chinese name, Nanxi, had been chosen to match.

Her parents were too busy working in restaurants and garment factories, too busy to raise her. Nancy was taken care of by the other set of grandparents in China. Even though the two girls were sisters, they were hardly brought up as such.

The bonds of a Fuzhounese family are expansive yet fragile. At times they seem incredibly elastic, stretching across the oceans, and deep, as relatives can always be summoned from far corners to help out at a restaurant or with the kids. The same way that Eskimos have a multitude of words for snow, the Chinese have a multitude of ways to describe family relationships. In English, there is the single word “cousin,” but in Mandarin Chinese, there are eight words. There are at least four words for “aunt”

and five words for “uncle”; the fifth word indicates whether your uncle is older or younger than your father. Siblings, cousins, great-uncles, in-laws—in the end they are al
qinqi:
relatives. Many of John and Jenny’s relatives came to their aid when they were trying to get their children back. Some moved to Georgia, to help at the restaurant. There are few broken families among the Fuzhounese, few divorces or single mothers or foster children.

Yet I was discomforted by Fuzhounese parents’ wil ingness to send their children back as babies to be raised by other relatives. Once Nancy found a picture of her nanny, the woman who had raised her in China from the time she was a baby living with her grandparents until she left for the United States when she was old enough for school. She brought it to Jenny, who took it away from her. Nancy cried.

Only one child had stayed in New York with Jenny and John: the youngest, a boy named Jeffrey.

Everyone cal ed him Momo, for “nohair” in Fuzhounese, because he had been born with a big, round head that never seemed to fit his body. Among the Chinese, sexism is such an entrenched part of the culture that there is a common idiom for it:
Zhongnan
qingnu.
Translated literal y, it means to “emphasize boys and discount girls.”

I first met Jolene in the spring of 2002, about five months before the family bought the restaurant. A photographer and I had been exploring a New York apartment building inhabited by Chinese restaurant workers because he wanted to do a photo essay; I acted as his translator. We stumbled upon a group of children playing with a Hacky Sack on the eighth floor.

That is what children who don’t have playgrounds or backyards do: they play in hal ways and lobbies, under fluorescent lights and against the backdrop of peeling paint.

Jolene had arrived in the United States just a few months earlier. It had taken that many years for her immigration visa to be approved. In the meantime she had been treated like a princess by her grandparents, who doted on her and al owed her to get by without doing many chores around the house.

Like many teenage girls, Jolene was shy, lonely, and awkward. Unlike many teenage girls, she had just been thrown into a foreign country where she barely spoke the language and did not understand the social hierarchy. The family lived on the ninth floor of the building in a one-room apartment with a bathroom and without a real kitchen; but it rented for less than $550 a month, an unbelievable bargain by Manhattan standards. For a fourteen-year-old girl, however, the problem with living in a single room is that there are no doors to slam when you fight with your mother.

Nancy had arrived three months after Jolene, brought in the arms of her grandmother. The grandparents stayed in the apartment for a three-month visit, but they were eager to return to China.

Despite the rivers of money that were sent back home to build new houses and pay for new appliances, the quality of life in New York City was miserable, the grandparents thought; let their children slave away at the restaurants and in the garment factories if they wanted to. I liked Jolene and the somber way she held herself. I liked the confidence in her drawings, which was sometimes absent in the girl herself. So I offered to teach her English. That’s when she told me she liked the English name Jolene.

Although Jenny had lived in the United States for over a decade, she’d been unable to help Jolene improve her English. When I met Jenny, I was surprised that someone could maneuver so adeptly in American society without speaking the language. And I don’t mean she spoke broken English—she didn’t speak English at al ; nor could she read it. She and others like her paid various Fuzhounese individuals to fil out forms for them: $200 for visa applications, $70

to renew refugee status, $30 to help with FEMA applications after September 11, and so on. Back then, I never saw John. He was always off somewhere, working at a Chinese restaurant.

One day Jenny surprised me by saying they were going to buy a smal restaurant in Hiawassee, Georgia, that cost $60,000.

Chinese restaurants are like gas, in that they expand to fil a vacuum. They have an enviable ability to take root in any community—urban or rural, cosmopolitan or isolated. If an environment can support life, then, like bacteria, a Chinese restaurant wil find it.

A century and a quarter ago, the Cantonese spread eastward from San Francisco, carried by railroad, over dirt roads, and on foot. Today, the Fuzhounese spread westward from New York City, carried by interstate highways and airplanes.

Before telephones and automobiles, they were guided by word of mouth—rumors about which towns were virgin territory for Chinese restaurants. At the turn of the twentieth century, a Chinese man walked into a Chinese-goods store in the Twin Cities and mentioned that there was money to be made in Des Moines for a restaurant that had good food, good prices, and good cleanliness. A man named Lee Din took his suggestion, traveled south, and opened the first chop suey restaurant in Des Moines. King Ying Low, Lee Din’s restaurant, celebrated its centennial in 2007, having passed through numerous owners.

Outside, a large sign stil draws customers with the words CHOP SUEY.

Today,

restaurateurs

have

become

shrewder, and more technical in their approach. Every year,
Chinese Restaurant News
and its editor, Betty Xie, publish an inch-thick booklet listing the top places to open a Chinese restaurant. By cross-referencing zip codes, census data, and their own database of existing Chinese restaurants, the magazine’s staff generates a long list of markets with the greatest growth potential. The booklet notes the ratio between the local population and the number of Chinese restaurants. It also cites income growth as one of the best predictors for demand. Its recommendations range from very broad (best states) to general (promising towns) to pinpoint (specific zip codes). In 2003,
Chinese Restaurant
News
generated a list of three thousand zip codes that didn’t have Chinese restaurants, including 23024

(Bumpass, Virginia), 38852 (Iuka, Mississippi), and 99022 (Medical Lake, Washington).

In 2001, if you were looking for a good smal city, the top choice was Rochester, Minnesota, which, the magazine noted, was home to the Mayo Clinic and IBM facilities. As for the top states, it suggested that readers consider Indiana, ranked third, pointing out that there had been a lot of manufacturing growth there, specifical y in Kokomo, where both GM and Daimler-Chrysler had opened factories.

Today, the driving force of restaurant growth is the Fuzhounese. They were behind a striking number of the Powerbal restaurants I visited across the country—more than half. In Boise, a Chinese restaurant manager named Peter wryly explained to me, “First they learned East Broadway and they became familiar with the rest of New York City. Then they kept on going: New York State, New Jersey.

Then we went to Tennessee, Missouri, Montana, Idaho.” Peter was the manager of No. 1 China Buffet in Ontario, Oregon, just over the Idaho border, where a woman named Jackie Mangum had gotten a fortune cookie with a number that won $100,000 in the Powerbal drawing. Peter, who himself was Fuzhounese, had an epic perspective on the saga of his people and Chinese restaurants. “It’s the reverse of the Chinese movement after the gold rush,” he said. “We are going from the East Coast to the West Coast. After that, what are we going to do?”

In the meantime, the patterns of Chinese migration have crossed in the middle of the country.

The Cantonese who came a generation or two ago are now retiring and sel ing their restaurants to the Fuzhounese, who are eager to take their turn at a wok-fueled American dream.

The Fuzhounese have been converting many of these restaurants into al -you-can-eat buffets or building their own places from scratch. The al -you-can-eat Chinese buffet is an interesting phenomenon in the South and the Midwest, an economic product of the shifts of capital and labor skil s. The food costs for a buffet are significantly higher, but the labor costs are lower. In particular, buffets place a low demand on workers in one important way: you don’t need as much English to serve a buffet. There are few waiters and waitresses, and they essential y only have to ask you what you want to drink. (“Diet Coke?”) Meanwhile, Americans don’t have to fumble through the names of Chinese dishes. They can simply take what looks good.