The Fortune Cookie Chronicles (28 page)

It was a sad ritual. Sometimes, if no one answered the door, they would just hang the plastic bag on the office’s doorknob.

Jenny’s weight dropped to eighty-six pounds, a massive loss given her original, already slight 110-pound frame. She began wearing multiple pairs of underwear, including men’s boxers, in order to keep up her once-tight jeans. John became haggard-looking.

Business at the restaurant trailed off, in part because the parents had to close it so many days of the week in order to go to counseling and deal with the agency.

As wil happen in a smal town, rumors clouded the restaurant. At the courthouse, I overheard a group of lawyers talking about the family. One remarked that the Chinese-restaurant case was going on. Another replied, “Oh, I can’t eat there anymore—

that’s the DV case.” DV? Domestic violence.

Trying to get the children back was a tangled process involving translators, lawyers, caseworkers, and psychiatric evaluations. It turned out that John and Jenny needed separate lawyers, in part because of the domestic abuse charge. Neither of their lawyers spoke Chinese.

Newspapers are always fil ed with accounts of how child welfare agencies ignored the warning signs and failed to protect the life of some fragile kid who ended up dead. It’s less common to hear about the flip side, when the government intervention makes things worse. Outside observers agreed that the family had its share of problems: parents who had barely been parents and were overwhelmed with running a restaurant, a rebel ious teenager who loathed the rural Appalachian town where she had few friends, a Chinese culture that favored sons over daughters. Tempers often flared. Yes, the family had its problems, acknowledged friends and neighbors.

But enough so that the children should be taken away for months? One of the neighbors later observed,

“You know, it’s like the lion looks for the easy mark, the ones that can’t defend themselves.” Jenny, pregnant during the ordeal, miscarried; the stress of running the restaurant, combined with other health issues, had proved too much for her constitution.

When the doctors removed the fetus, they told her it had been a boy.

The courts wanted the parents to attend counseling classes, but that meant they would have to drive to Atlanta and back. They would have to close the restaurant for the whole day. Grudgingly, they agreed to attend a limited number of sessions.

In the agency’s eyes, Jenny’s mental stability was in doubt. She would sob hysterical y during meetings. From her perspective, she was becoming unstable because the agency had kept her children away from her for months upon months. But Jenny was also infuriated with the sheer unfairness of it al , and she resisted as retaliation. When they were due at a counseling session and the car happened to break down and they missed it, she was gleeful.

Over time, everyone gradual y realized that it was not only Jenny who was resisting but Jolene. It was taking so long to get the children back in part because Jolene didn’t want to go home. In her own way, she was using the family court system to punish her mother by keeping the other two children away.

Final y, during a weekend family visitation, John took Jolene outside. “It’s my fault,” he said. The restaurant had been al his idea, he explained. Come back and we’l sel the restaurant, he told her. He pleaded with her.

Jolene was confused. She didn’t know what to think. “I don’t think I can ever work this out with my mother,” she cried. She picked up Nancy and held her.

Jenny placed an $88 ad in the Atlanta edition of the
World Journal.
A Chinese couple from Birmingham responded. They appeared suddenly one day to help out at the restaurant. It was the first step in the transition.

The situation seemed to be slowly improving. Then one day at work, I got a cal from Jane, the neighbor.

John and Jenny had been arrested. They had violated court rules by driving near their children’s foster home.

Because they had sold their restaurant, they were considered a flight risk. Their bail was set exorbitantly high. This time, John and Jenny couldn’t afford to bail themselves out, and neither could their neighbors.

Guardian angels come in strange forms. Jim Crawford was a land developer with a salt-and-pepper beard who rode a Harley-Davidson and had found religion late in life. He’d skipped col ege because he was too focused on making money when he was a young man. But slowly, as he had more time (and more money), he had come to find God. He was never sure if he should cal himself Christian or just religious.

He had first seen John and Jenny at McConnel Baptist Church, where they went to pray for the return of their children. From the back of the room, their dark hair stood out against the silvery heads lining the pews. Jim had heard the whispers about their family problems. One day, he rode his Harley to the restaurant. “I’m here to see if I can help you,” he told John, who was behind the counter.

What made him step in when so many people didn’t or couldn’t help? He shrugged. He couldn’t explain it. It was an odd thing for him to do, he admitted. He had never been particularly charitable, but there was something about the sadness of this story that drew him in. John and Jenny started visiting him regularly. Sometimes Jim would come home from work and find them there, waiting in their car.

It was weeks into this routine when Jim rode his motorcycle to the restaurant and asked the woman behind the cash register where John and Jenny were.

She hesitated. Then she picked up a little computerized dictionary, punched a couple of keys, and held it up so he could read the screen.

“Jail.”

Jim was shocked. He headed over to the county jail—a stark, boxy building on the outskirts of town. John and Jenny looked forlorn in their orange jumpsuits. He bailed them out, posting a bond with his property as col ateral.

Jim helped John make an impassioned plea in stilted English in front of the church congregation, tel ing their story with a speech he had laboriously written out in English. Soon church members deluged the judge and the child welfare agency on behalf of the family. There were letters, and Jim personal y lobbied the district attorney. Slowly, DFACS’s grip on the children loosened. Afternoon-long visits became overnight visits and then weekend visits. In late October, seven months after they were taken away, the kids were returned home. When I met them again at their apartment, Momo and Nancy barely spoke Chinese anymore. At their welcome-back party at the restaurant, a neighbor brought a cake she had bought. The children’s names wouldn’t al fit, so instead she’d had the supermarket clerk write,

“Welcome back, y’al .”

With the family whole again and the restaurant sold, the family had to decide where to move next. Jenny’s cousin had a restaurant in Augusta, Georgia. John’s sister had a takeout on Long Island, east of New York City. With no sense of permanence and only a car’s worth of belongings, the family could head anywhere the car could take them. The kids would go to school in whatever neighborhood they ended up in.

Jenny briefly spoke about the possibility of running another restaurant, but Jolene reminded her parents that they’d promised there wouldn’t be any more Chinese restaurants. “It’s like a big hole. A lot of people jump into it and can’t get out anymore,” she said angrily. “First generation does it and second generation does it again and third generation. They do it because they think they don’t have a choice.”

Never again, she told herself. She wanted to apply to an arts program at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

That night the family packed up the car. They returned books to the library and bade cursory farewel s to their neighbors. After this two-year-long, tumultuous, failed experiment in owning a restaurant, they decided to head back to New York.

“Let’s go! Let’s go!” John said, ushering everyone into the car. With the engine roaring, they left in the middle of the night, the car’s headlights cutting through the fog. The car sped off, as though to escape the demons that had plagued the family. If they drove fast enough, perhaps the demons would be left behind in Hiawassee.

They stopped only once during the night, so that John could nap in the parking lot of a convenience store in Virginia. The clerk there wore a cap with a Confederate flag on it.

The next time they stopped was to eat at a McDonald’s in Hagerstown, Maryland. Jenny peeled the golden crust off her McNuggets and fed it to Momo. “Wherever there are people, there is McDonald’s and a Chinese restaurant,” she observed.

When the Empire State Building appeared on the horizon, the entire family cheered. They were home. They were uncertain about where they would go once they got to the city. First they tried to find Jenny’s brother in Chinatown. He wasn’t home, so they headed out to Long Island to find John’s sister at her family takeout, which had a red Christian cross taped to the wal near the cash register.

I haven’t seen them since they made that drive home. John found a job at a restaurant in Princeton, New Jersey. He hinted once that they were separated—though given how often Fuzhounese husbands work apart from their wives, I wasn’t sure if there was much of a lifestyle difference. Jenny told me she’d seen the thief, the Malaysian woman with the big mole, on the street and had attacked her. She also told me they had bought a house in Philadelphia.

The Fuzhounese were moving to Philadelphia in droves—it was close enough to New York, only two hours away, but had cheaper real estate.

They changed their cel phone numbers.

Jane, their neighbor from Hiawassee, cal ed me once to ask if I had heard from them. I hadn’t. Neither had she.

I suppose it’s a good thing that the frantic phone cal s stopped. This is a family where no news can be interpreted as good news. As the months, then years, passed by, I wondered about them, imagining that they had found their happy ending somewhere.

The Greatest Chinese Restaurant in the World

Chinese food is served on al seven continents, even Antarctica, where Monday is usual y Chinese-food night at McMurdo Station, the main American scientific outpost on the icy continent. It is arguably the most pervasive cuisine on the planet—and beyond: NASA offers its astronauts thermostabilized sweet-and-sour pork and hot-and-sour soup. In order to understand Chinese food in America, you have to understand Chinese food around the world.

My editor came up with a suggestion about how I might do so. “You should find the best restaurant in the world,” he told me in his office one day.

I was dumbfounded. I resisted, with a litany of excuses. It was not the best use of my time. I was not a restaurant critic. The world was impossibly vast.

How does one define “best” anyway? Could there even be one such restaurant for the entire world? It was insane. Plus, it would cost a fortune. He shrugged al my objections off and told me I would figure it out in time. “It wil be great,” he assured me as he escorted me to the elevator. “Trust me.”

After several weeks of denial, I cal ed up a map of the world on my computer. Could I real y pick a single Chinese restaurant? How was I to judge?

Finding good restaurants around the world, it turns out, is not dissimilar to finding great local restaurants: I used word-of-mouth recommendations and restaurant reviews. Only I was compiling my list across borders, on a global scale.

I needed to set some criteria. First, as the idea was to see how Chinese food had been adapted around the world, I would focus my searches on Chinese restaurants outside China and areas that China thinks of as China—so that excluded China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Second, the restaurant had to identify itself as Chinese. Nothing too “Pan-Asian,”

nothing “fusiony.” Third, I decided to go with the criteria of “greatest” instead of “best.” “Best” made me nervous. Somehow I felt like I could handle

“greatest”—lots of things could make a restaurant great, which made that designation seem less subjective than “best.”

Looking at the world map, I devised five categories of places that were most likely to breed great Chinese restaurants:

1) Areas where

there

was

significant

middle-class

Chinese

immigration.

This

meant,

essential y,

cities

where

there

was

a

strong demand

for

quality

authentic

Chinese food by

people

who

could pay for it.

The list of such

cities

was

manageable. In

the

United

States:

New

York City, the

Bay Area, Los

Angeles.

In

Canada:

Vancouver and

Toronto.

In

Britain: London.

In

Australia:

Sydney

and

Melbourne.

2) Industrialized

Asian

economies

where

China

has historical y

had

a

great

cultural influence

—with

enough