By Su-Jit Lin-DeSimone
Photos By Ethan Stokes
This is a typical scene in my parents’ Chinese restaurant in Selden:
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My mom looks up as a man pushes open the foggy plate-glass door of my family’s restaurant and makes his way through the maze of small tables that crowd its entrance, rubbing his hands together from the cold.
“Hi, how are you?” she greets him, in a voice that’s naturally a little sharp. The choppy Cantonese and singsong Fuzhouhua she speaks have harder tones than Americans are used to hearing, and it bleeds through her speech in contrast to native Mandarin speakers, whose language is more fluid and soft.
The man ignores her as he stands at the glossy vinyl-topped counter, and instead surveys the stock photography of popular Chinese dishes illuminated overhead. After a moment’s pondering, he finally responds.
“Yeah, I want a pint of wonton, and gimme a chicken and broccoli dinner.” She marks down his selection on the menus stacked right in front of him. “Can I get shrimp fried rice instead?”
“Sure; it’s a dollar extra,” my mother responds.
“A dollar? Just to change from pork?” the man retorts, attracting the notice of my little brother, bundled up from the chill at one of the tables, who stops coloring to watch.
“Well, shrimp costs more…” my mom weakly replies, over strains of contemporary Chinese pop, seemingly emanating from a pile of boxes my father’s arthritic hands stapled together just hours ago.
“That’s ridiculous. Other restaurants don’t charge more to substitute. What kind of business are you running? I’m paying, like, $8 for dinner now!”
My father comes to the aid of his wife, wiping his hands on his grease-stained apron as he leaves the scorching heat of the broiler and the line of woks over open flames. With a diplomatic smile on his face, he asks, “Hi, can I help you?”
“Yeah,” snarls the man, “charge fair prices.” He storms out, presumably to visit another takeout just one shopping center over. Because Chinese takeouts…they’re all pretty much the same on Long Island, right? So similar and virtually interchangeable, they’ve become as much a Long Island icon as pizza places and bagel shops. Entering one takeout is nearly like entering any other: through a shopping center parking lot, past the sign on the plaza directory simply labeled “CHINESE,” as though the restaurants barely warrant a name.
After all, growing up as one of many Chinese on Long Island, it’s an unspoken philosophy that sameness is embraced, a deduction made just by looking at restaurant décor and design. It’s safe, formulaic, and time-tested, proven to endure.
One of the last true mom-and-pops in this ever-franchising world, the Chinese of the takeout industry gather unto themselves, staying under the radar and making it no wonder that this sub-community, iconic to Long Island’s culture as it is, still remains an enigma—even generations after the first Chinese became American. It’s why, after many years, I still remember the names of many of our clients, but they have never known the family behind the counter of their favorite takeout.
New Lease on Life
Behind the carefully placed façade of the restaurant storefront and the seemingly carbon-copied people, are the stories of different lives and different experiences…yet at the core, these stories are often much the same.
“It’s a hard life,” is the simple consensus of the many takeout owners I’ve known and spoken to throughout my years of interaction with people in the industry.
So why is it the life chosen by so many recent Chinese immigrants?
The older generation holds the key to this question. My grandma, the no-nonsense, sprightly Fun Sin Lam, retired owner of Yangtze Kitchen in Lake Ronkonkoma, tells me that choices were limited when she immigrated in her early 20s, about 50 years ago. “Your grandpa, he cleaned toilets and mopped floors when he came over. This seemed better,” she says over the dialogue of a Chinese soap on CCTV.
Hua Zheng, a seasoned chef—and a relative—at my parents’ restaurant, China East in Selden (like many Chinese restaurants in America, ours is owned and operated by family members) offers his own input while casually cleaving a chicken to make fresh broth for the day.
“Back then, you could work in a restaurant or wash clothes at a laundromat…this is good pay for an immigrant—you just can’t make as much in other industries,” he says.
Many immigrants, given their financial straits, language barriers and other obstacles, found fair pay and less demeaning jobs difficult to secure. When my grandmother Lam and the rest of the family first came to Long Island, eking out an existence was a challenge.
“Your grandpa used to walk to the train station every day from a house we shared with other families, to work and bring us imported groceries,” she reminisces, pride and pain mingling in her voice.
Tags: China East, Chinese Restaurant, Great Wall, Long Island
