The Fortune Cookie Chronicles (27 page)

The restaurant was a struggle. Business was slow now that the summer tourist season was over. There is only so much demand for Chinese food in a town of 850. John and Jenny had bought the restaurant during a peak season. Perhaps the sel ers had exaggerated its revenues, or perhaps the customers grew less loyal once they realized the food had changed.

It was hard running a Chinese restaurant.

Jenny had been a skil ed seamstress, but she had never worked in a restaurant. John had worked as a waiter, but now he was also a chef. Jolene joked that everything he cooked tasted the same.

The couple had a binder with them, an instruction book on how to run a Chinese restaurant. It came with recipes like General Tso’s chicken, and it taught them how to rol the napkins around the silverware. But stil they cal ed relatives to ask questions about proportions and ingredients.

They worked continuously until eleven P.M.

every night, then staggered home and col apsed into bed. Even when there were no customers in the restaurant, there was an unrelenting succession of tasks. They had to rol the egg rol s, fold the crab Rangoon triangles, coat and prefry the meat for General Tso’s chicken, devein the shrimp, simmer the brightly red sweet-and-sour sauce, chop the broccoli, prepare the fried rice. They didn’t have a babysitter, so they kept Nancy and Momo at the restaurant.

Jolene would come to help out after school.

Jenny’s sister, who came down to

Hiawassee to help out, told me, “In New York, you can stil work if you don’t speak English. Here, you can’t do anything.” She also noted, “You are worthless if you can’t drive.” But some of the neighbors were real y kind, including Jane, a retired New York City schoolteacher with an adopted daughter from China, who lived down the road from them.

A family-run Chinese restaurant is a seven-days-a-week enterprise. I came across many restaurant owners who had not taken a single day off for decades. But it was Jenny’s pregnancy in 2003 that made me realize the hard calculus of being the owner of a Chinese restaurant. She thought about having an abortion, which was what she had done with previous pregnancies when she was too busy working in New York City. Abortion in China does not involve the moral dilemma it does in the United States. The culture is not Christian, so life is not considered to begin at conception. Sometimes an individual life doesn’t even begin at birth. In certain parts of China, babies weren’t named until wel after they were born

—thirty days, one hundred days, or a year. It’s easier to deal with an infant’s death if the baby didn’t have a name.

Jenny calculated the amount of time needed to get an abortion in Chinatown. She didn’t trust the doctors in Georgia; nor were abortions readily available in the rural South. It would take her four weeks to travel there, recover, and get back to Hiawassee to work at the restaurant. If she actual y gave birth, she would be out of work for only two weeks. She decided to carry the baby to term.

The last names of the settlers who built Hiawassee, 150 years ago, are now thick in the town telephone book, having multiplied over many generations. There is a thin, invisible barrier separating insiders and outsiders—even for those who speak English and are from other places in the South.

Jolene made few friends among her high school classmates. After al , many had known each other since they were toddlers, and many shared the same last names. Occasional y they regarded her with mild curiosity, since she was from two places that were exotic to them: China and New York City. On Jolene’s first day of school, a boy asked her if she’d been in New York on September 11. She couldn’t understand the question. So the boy went up to the board and drew two buildings and a plane, a universal hieroglyphic for the ages. She nodded. Yes, she had been in the city.

Math class was the easiest for Jolene, but civics class, required by Georgia so that students would learn the rights and responsibilities of citizens, was the most difficult. There were so many words and concepts she didn’t understand, like “Congress,”

“citizen,” and “Constitution.” Her civics teacher started with the basics. On the Internet, he found the list of one hundred questions and answers from the United States citizenship test. It was the same list of questions that my parents had studied before they took the citizenship exam, after almost thirty years of living in the United States. For months before the test, my mom kept the three verses of “The Star-Spangled Banner” stuck to the refrigerator door. Though I was in my mid-twenties, until then I hadn’t even been aware there were three verses to the song.

Jolene hated living in Hiawassee. She loathed putting on the little black waitress vest and working in the restaurant, but her parents insisted because her English was better than theirs. Working at the restaurant became a never-ending set of chores. Among Jolene’s most dreaded tasks was deveining shrimp. If she was not careful, their sharp tails would prick her fingertips, causing them to bleed.

It was like Cinderel a, only with a deep fryer and a walk-in refrigerator.

In Powerbal restaurant after Powerbal restaurant, I found dutiful children helping out their parents—dealing with an English-speaking vendor, learning to handle a wok so the father could take a rest; taking orders by phone and at the tables. At the modest thirty-seat China Buffet in Caledonia, Minnesota (the “wild turkey capital” of the state), a ten-year-old boy with gold hoop earrings and dimples named Andy cleared plates, worked the cash register, and watched his baby brother in the corner.

“We could open a big store, but it’s hard if you don’t speak English,” Andy’s father explained to me in Mandarin. “In ten years, when the boys are older, we can open a larger restaurant. They can speak English for us.” Until then? They found other ways to survive.

After our conversation ended, he asked me to make a cal to an English-speaking vendor to get a new dishwasher instal ed.

At Lucky Garden in Dover, New Hampshire, teenagers Tony and Jenny had been helping out for as long as they could remember. The two spent more time in the restaurant than in their own living room; they even did their homework there. “It’s like home here,” said the daughter, who was stil helping out although she was now in col ege. The family loved cars. Their father had bought them each a BMW when they turned sixteen. If you didn’t know the family, you would be tempted to cal those cars the accoutrements of spoiled teenagers; if you knew how hard they worked, you wouldn’t. Helping out, in Chinese restaurant families, is simply part of the deal of being part of the family. But no one had explained the deal to Jolene. She would fal asleep in class after working nights in the restaurant. Her grades slipped, and she struggled to balance schoolwork and late nights at the restaurant. She resented having been dragged down to Georgia, forced to be the outsider.

“They think you’re strange because of the way you look,” she said. “I’d rather go back to my own culture so people don’t think of the way you look.”

To break the monotony, she painted. She painted pictures of cranes and of the mountains and the lake in Hiawassee. The paintings were placed casual y around the restaurant. A customer offered to buy one.

Instead of other girls, she found company among older women, Jehovah’s Witnesses. One woman bought her a Chinese Bible, and an alarm clock so she could wake up in the morning. On one visit, I was surprised when she informed me, matter-of-factly, that “God is named Jehovah.”

Whenever I visited Hiawassee, she wanted me to take her to Atlanta—or anywhere, as long as she could get away from the restaurant. For her first shopping trip, we drove to Atlanta for Chinese groceries. The winding roads were a shock to her system. Jolene vomited three times. Of course Atlanta, unlike many older cities, doesn’t have a Chinatown. We headed to Atlanta’s Buford Highway, the immigrant landing strip of the South, a giant multicultural jukebox fil ed with Mexican taquerias and Vietnamese pho houses. When we pul ed into the strip mal with the Chinese Ranch 99 supermarket, I shook her awake. Jolene emerged groggily from her motion-sickness-induced

nap.

Where

was

Chinatown? she asked. “Chinatown is straight. It has streets,” she insisted. She squinted at the U-shaped strip mal and sniffed, “It’s not round like this.”

On our way back that night, we merged from Atlanta’s Interstate 285 perimeter highway into the fourteen lanes of I-85. Jolene gazed out at the two rivers of densely packed car lights—one red, one white—that flowed to and from the horizon.

She was entranced. “They look like ants moving up a mountain,” she marveled. In her year and a half in America, she had known only the concrete of New York City and the mountains of Hiawassee, nothing in between. “It’s so beautiful,” she said, staring at the traffic-clogged highway ful of thousands of cars, Atlantans hurrying to get back to their homes in subdevelopments and cul-de-sacs. “It’s prettier than New York.”

The first overt signs of trouble came the February after they moved to Hiawassee. One night, Jenny phoned me, hysterical. The police had taken the children away, she said.

We found out that someone had reported that Momo and Nancy had been playing, without supervision, in the parking lot. After three days, Jenny and John got the two younger children back and promised not to leave them alone. But Jolene chose to stay with a foster mom for three more months. She had managed to escape working at the restaurant.

It was the next phone cal , one that came a year later, the night that John was arrested for the first time, that the big problems began. That night, the police took al three children away and arrested John on a curious charge of domestic abuse. The officers pointed to the burn scars from cooking oil on the parents’ arms and said that was evidence that the couple had a history of fighting. Someone had also reported that Jenny had a sprained finger.

In fact, the aggressor had not been John.

The two who’d been fighting had been Jolene and Jenny, everyone said. That day, as always, they’d fought over Jolene’s working in the restaurant. Jenny argued that it was the obligation of the daughter to help out, since her family had raised her. The fighting grew violent. At some point, Jenny fel and Jolene kicked her three times in the stomach. Jenny injured her finger in the process and had to be taken to the hospital. But that sprained finger raised people’s suspicions.

So the night after the police came, Jenny found herself alone. She walked back and forth between the restaurant and her apartment in the dark, too scared to go home by herself. Final y she knocked at the door of Jane’s house, down the road, and slept in her spare bedroom that night, alone.

In jail, John became friends with his cel mate, a twenty-two-year-old drug addict who worked at the local Burger King. Later he told me,

“When I was in jail for two days, it was real y relaxing.”

He was away from the restaurant and his wife.

This time, on the second offense, the children were not given back. Once a family is caught in the bul ’s-eye of the legal system, nothing is simple anymore.

The complaints the agency had compiled about the children were smal but numerous. Any one of them would have seemed patently ridiculous as a reason to take children away from their parents. But together, they gathered momentum. Momo had shown up at school dressed in girl’s clothing; Jenny told me he’d insisted on wearing one of Nancy’s shirts. The children were often late to school; the parents sometimes drove them in from Atlanta in the morning after a weekend away. Then there was the issue with the children’s teeth. Were they getting proper dental care? Jenny and John told me that in China, you take the children to the dentist only when there is a problem.

John and Jenny’s lives become consumed by something they cal ed
Difeh. Difeh
had taken control of their lives much more than the authoritarian regime in China ever had.
Difeh
could trigger police cars to come and take away their children.
Difeh
control ed when and where they were al owed to visit the kids.
Difeh
could ask the most private questions about

their

lives,

including

their

sleeping

arrangements and how often they hugged their children.
Difeh
could order them to see a psychiatrist.

“Isn’t this a violation of my human rights?” John once asked me in frustration.

Difeh

was

DFACS,

or

Georgia’s

Department of Family and Children Services—an overwhelmed bureaucracy in which government employees were trying to make bad situations a little bit better. On a visit to the office, I heard one worker say softly, apologetical y, to Jenny, “We don’t have the people or the resources to get everything right.”

The Chinese restaurant seemed empty without the sound of children’s laughter to break up the rhythmic swish and clang of cooking. The yel ow school bus no longer came after three o’clock.

Instead, every weekday between three and four P.M., John and Jenny brought home-cooked Chinese food to the DFACS office, located in a modest strip mal next to a “God Bless America” sign, in hopes that the food would be passed to the children. They worried that the kids would not be used to the American food.