The Fortune Cookie Chronicles (26 page)

Driving across the United States in my Powerbal quest, I came across a Chinese restaurant cal ed Golden Dragon in Spearfish, South Dakota, not too far from Mount Rushmore. The red vinyl booth and ornate dragons screamed a
Happy Days
–era Cantonese restaurant, but inside the owners were a Fujianese family with three children, the youngest of whom was a five-year-old named Nina. (A Chinese girl in America with a Spanish name?) They’d bought the restaurant from its Cantonese owner, Martin Yeung, who had moved to Denver, proudly leaving behind the business card for his son, who worked for a senator on Capitol Hil . For the new family, South Dakota was nothing like their Fujianese hometown, Changle, which was near the ocean. Michel e, the mother, said, “When I first got here, I felt like I was in Mongolia. There is a lot of grass. They eat a lot of meat. There is a lot of sky. There is lots of livestock.”

Before I left, I asked her husband if they had ever visited Mount Rushmore, the monument to four revered American presidents. They hadn’t. He shrugged, saying, “It doesn’t have much meaning to us. It’s just rock.”

The little restaurant in Hiawassee was also started by a Cantonese family, the Wongs; they had settled in northern Georgia for some undetermined reason and needed a family business. It then sold to another Cantonese owner, a Taiwanese owner, and a Fujianese owner before John and Jenny learned of it.

At that point, Jenny wasn’t even sure of the name of the restaurant. (It was then cal ed China Gril .) But she knew the name of the town: Hiawassee. She wasn’t able to spel Hiawassee, and she wouldn’t be able to find it on a map, but she knew it was about fifteen hours by bus from New York City, from Chinatown, from East Broadway—the origin of al things Fujianese in America.

For the Fujianese, there are only two places in America. There is New York City; then there is everywhere else. Places are not cal ed Indiana or Virginia or Georgia. Instead they are col ectively known as
waizhou
—Mandarin Chinese for “out of s t a t e . ”
Waizhou
is more than a geographic description. It is the white space left over where there is no New York, no Chinatown, no East Broadway.

Even upstate New York, including the state’s capital, Albany, can be considered
waizhou
to the Fujianese.

Waizhou
is where fathers and sons go for weeks and months at a time to sweat twelve-hour days in Chinese restaurants.
Waizhou
is crisscrossed by interstate bus routes and dotted with little towns, al of which either already have or could use a Chinese restaurant.
Waizhou
schools are better, and the paper towels there are cheaper. The bus system is the Fuzhounese connection to
waizhou.
If the Fujianese had a Saul Steinberg
New Yorker
cover to denote their vision of the world, it would show East Broadway, then the rest of New York City, fol owed by
waizhou.

Hiawassee, to Jenny, was as
waizhou
as you could get: a smal Georgia town, population 850, nestled in the foothil s of the Appalachian Mountains.

Located far away from the lush soil that once gave rise to plantations, Hiawassee was a white province of Georgia. It was in an area where the Ku Klux Klan gave out business cards with their Web site URL

embossed on it.

Yet there was little, if any, overt racism—just the subtle oppressiveness of shared experience. The current owner wanted to sel the restaurant because he and his two employees were going crazy with no one to talk to but each other. The Wongs, too, had left because they’d found the town too smal .

By the time I heard about the restaurant, John had gone down to Hiawassee to evaluate it. He found it on the town’s one main road, in a strip mal sandwiched between a Dairy Queen and a Subway shop that advertised “Senior discount every day.” The town is located some two hours of twisting, mountainous

road

from

anywhere:

Atlanta,

Chattanooga, Ashevil e. Lush green mountains and crystal ine lakes surround it. CNN rated it one of the best towns to retire in. Later on, the beautiful place became ful of sad memories, the root of a family’s nightmare.

Hiawassee is a place where residents keep police radio scanners on at home to stay abreast of the news more quickly than they can by reading the weekly newspaper. If someone needs an ambulance one night, the next day everyone asks around about their condition.

Chinese restaurants are so plentiful and so common, they’re priced and sold almost like commodities. One rule of thumb is that a single restaurant should sel for three times its monthly revenue. So if a Chinese restaurant brings in $30,000 a month, or an average of $1,000 a day, it should sel for roughly $90,000.

Knowing this, Chinese-restaurant owners wil sometimes try to artificial y inflate their monthly sales figures—or to sel in times when they are busiest. And as so much business is done in cash, it’s sometimes hard for the buyer to discern what the true figures are. Due diligence includes asking the suppliers how much the restaurant orders each week or month, though restaurants preparing for a sale wil often beef up their orders. So shrewd buyers watch something that is hard to fake: the number of bags of garbage that are produced.

A restaurant sale is not like a home sale, where one family empties the house before the other family moves in. The transition is gradual. The buyer arrives, checks out the restaurant, and works for a few weeks to learn the ropes before deciding whether to buy. It’s like two families sharing the house before one family decides to make a bid. Then, if the sale is made, one family moves in as the other leaves.

John liked Hiawassee. The landscape reminded him of the mountainous vistas of home. On the phone, he told Jolene that she could go fishing in the nearby lake. They could scoop smal live crabs right out of the water.

Since moving to New York, she hadn’t seen any natural bodies of water—no oceans, no ponds, no lakes. (Glimpses of the gray urbanized East River didn’t count.) Only buildings and streets and subways.

Jenny hated the idea of living in the middle of nowhere, but she relented. Hiawassee seemed safer than a big city, where stories of men being beaten or kil ed while delivering food were common among the Chinese immigrants. A relative of Jenny’s had been shot and kil ed in a restaurant holdup a few years ago in Philadelphia. Hiawassee wouldn’t present those problems. Smal towns come with different problems.

So in September 2002, they bought the restaurant for $60,000, borrowing money from friends and family. They paid cash, as is usual for many of these restaurant transactions, which tend to be handled discreetly. John also bought a bumbling blue Cutlass Ciera for $1,300. Then he learned to drive.

I watched the family make the journey by Greyhound in pieces. Jenny’s older brother moved down to work as the restaurant’s cook. Nancy and Jolene were brought down to Hiawassee in October by an aunt.

It would be a long time before they saw their mother and brother. Jenny kept dragging her feet.

She was reluctant to leave New York. She wanted to catch a thief who had burglarized her home. In August, they had been robbed of a lockbox that contained $10,000 in cash, the family jewelry, and many legal papers—including birth certificates, passports, and work visas. Jenny was convinced that the culprit was a Malaysian Chinese woman with a big mole on her face to whom she had once lent money.

Jolene had been home alone at the time.

She received a telephone cal saying there was someone who wanted to meet her downstairs. She went down, saw no one, and came back up. When she returned to the apartment, it was too late.

Someone had broken in and dragged out the safe.

When Jenny found out she yel ed at Jolene for being stupid. Jolene was frozen with guilt. Jenny became obsessed with catching the woman. She had an artist draw the woman’s picture, complete with the mole; then she made flyers offering a reward and hung them on lampposts al around Chinatown. Occasional y she would drag me to the police precinct, where I would act as her translator.

Meanwhile, John was in Hiawassee running the business and trying to raise two daughters who rarely talked to him because they barely knew him.

John urged Jenny to hurry up and get down to Hiawassee. He had no idea how to raise children.

The children agreed.

Packing to leave a city after a decade, to move eight hundred miles away, is hard. Leaving via Greyhound gives one extra pause. Life has to be col apsed into bags that do not exceed seventy pounds—careful y and cleverly, so that it can be expanded at the other end. Jenny stuffed their belongings into the durable red, white, and blue plaid plastic bags that feel like rice sacks. They are made in China but are the universal symbol of the transience of the developing world: you see them tied with cord to the tops of buses, looking dusty and frayed. In went the rice cooker, clothes, a washboard, frying pans, oranges, even a VCR. Jenny went to Chinatown to stock up on supplies, returning home with orange and red shopping bags teeming with pickled radishes, dried mushrooms, shredded pork, and soy milk. She considered the fourteen video cassettes of a popular Chinese serial drama. The tapes were bulky, but Jolene had complained about boredom in the mountains. Jenny put them in the bag. She took them out. She put them back in.

When the Lincoln Tunnel spit the bus into New Jersey, Jenny held her son, Momo, and looked back at the fading Manhattan skyline. She had paid $30,000 to snakeheads to move to New York. Now she had paid $59 to Greyhound to leave. What was supposed to be a fifteen-hour bus ride stretched into twenty-four when she missed a connection in Danvil e, Virginia. She arrived in Atlanta after midnight, at the start of Thanksgiving Day.

In Atlanta, an accented voice rang out in the bus terminal. “Hel o! Hel o!” It was John. He grabbed Momo and swung the boy around. Jenny stood by, watched, and smiled tightly.

Arriving that late meant that Jenny wasn’t able to appreciate the sweeping landscape surrounding Hiawassee. But she could see the points of light scattered across the night sky.

Stars. It had been a long time since she had seen stars. New York’s luminescence was so competitive,

it

had

long

drowned

out

the

constel ations.

The 1984 blue Ciera crept down the two-lane road and turned left into a plain strip mal . It was nearly three A.M. by the time Jenny saw the restaurant for the first time. At one end of the strip mal was an extinguished neon sign that read CHINA GRILL in chop suey–style writing.

She opened the glass door and stepped into the darkness. The lights came on. She was struck by how much red there was: red carpet, red chairs.

As of that moment, Jenny had never seen a fortune cookie, never eaten General Tso’s chicken, and never heard of crab Rangoon. Those things would soon become a central part of her livelihood.

They continued down the road to the three-bedroom apartment John had rented. He turned on the second bedroom’s light and shook his daughters, who were sleeping on a mattress on the floor. Jolene woke up and immediately hugged her brother. She hadn’t seen him in two months. “He smel s,” she said.

“He vomited and peed on himself on the bus,” Jenny explained.

The mother looked at her stil -sleeping younger daughter. “She’s gotten chubbier,” she observed. Nancy’s uncle had been feeding her snacks from the restaurant. It was the most she had been doted upon since moving to America.

Jolene dragged the bags in from the car.

She eagerly seized the videotapes; they would break the monotony of days split between school and work at the restaurant. For the first time in their lives, al the pieces of the family puzzle were together. Only in Hiawassee was the family final y ful y assembled: a mother who had immigrated il egal y to work in garment factories, a father who’d been often forced to live apart from his wife to find work as a waiter outside New York City, a teenage daughter raised from the age of six by her maternal grandparents, an American-born preschool daughter who’d been sent back to her paternal grandparents in China, and a toddler who had always lived by his mother’s side.

It was a family of strangers, but now, in Hiawassee, al they had was one another, and the restaurant.

That was supposed to be the end of the story, a happy ending. Later on, it would become hard to untangle the strands of responsibility for the complications that fol owed. It is tempting to run one’s finger down a chronology and try to pick out the decision that could have changed everything afterward. Did the fault lie with Jolene, for kicking her mother in the stomach and then laying the blame for the injuries—either inadvertently or purposely—on her father? Or did it lie within an overzealous child welfare agency stymied by language and cultural barriers? Or with the anonymous neighbors who reported Momo and Nancy playing in the parking lot, unsupervised, while their parents worked in the restaurant? Or with John and Jenny, whose marriage had become somewhat tenuous? It was watching a car wreck in slow motion. You could not pul your eyes away even though you expected it to end horribly.