May 3, 2007 by Storyteller.

A full time Chinese restaurant worker works 12 hours a day and five and a half days a week.  Day in and day out they show up at their job, which is either a small take out store, a restaurant with about 20 tables or more, or a restaurant plus bar.  At Tung Shing Dragon, the Chinese restaurant I used to work at there were three cooks, a couple of waitresses depending on how busy the day is, a couple of baggers, a delivery man, two people working at the bar and a grandmother doing a little of everything. Maybe it is a coincidence for some reasons the cooks are always Chinese men and the delivery person is always a man.  This restaurant has 20 tables for dinning. Take out and delivery services. By the front entrance there is a bar serving scorpion bowl, mai tai, mostly bottled beers and occasionally wine.  A group of regular customers come in after work and sit at the bar playing Keno games every 9 minutes.

In the kitchen there are two cooks who work at the stir fry section handling gigantic woks over blue gas flames.  There is a section where all the fried and grilled food are made.  On busy days like Friday, Saturday and Sunday there is an extra guy who work as a golfer running around helping the main cooks making sure that all the things are easily ready for them.  Lunch time and dinner time is the busy rush hours.  During these busy time the kitchen is loud with waitresses and baggers yelling out orders in Chinese and and English.  Since the cooks have been there for so long they memorized what’s in which luncheon and dinner combination specials.  In the background are the noises of sizzling fryer, gas flame roaring high, metal spatula on metal wok, ceramic dishes clashing on the counter and the telephone ringing off the hook.

During down time each staff has several assigned tasks.  Some will make duck sauce which is mostly apple sauce, sugar and water mixed together.  The cooks are usually responsible for chopping vegetables by the boxes for stir fries, make fillings for egg rolls and then roll them up, marinate meat in sauce and battering chicken finger.  The waitresses have to wrap wontons and fold crab rangoons.  While their hands are busy at work the staffs chit chat about current events news they read in the Chinese newspaper, or about Hong Kong soap opera which they record from the original and pass it from one person to another.  They would talk about their luck or lack of it at Foxwood Casino or Mohegan Sun Casino which, most restaurant workers go on their days off.

This is the work life of many Chinese restaurant workers.  Limited skills and English, lack of an American education, the Chinese network creates only a few choices of how to make a living.  Many older restaurant workers who have children often displace their hopes of better jobs and bigger salary onto their children.

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April 4, 2007 by Storyteller.

Chinese food has become a big part of the American culture.  According to Chinese Restaurant News there are three times more Chinese restaurants than there are McDonald’s.  Next time you are driving or walking on the street pay attention to how many Chinese restaurants you pass by.  On my 15 minutes drive home from work I see four Chinese restaurants and one McDonald’s.  Greasy Pu Pu Platter, general Tao’s chicken and pork fried rice is a part of the American diet and American life as well. How often do you and your friend stay in on a Friday night to watch a Blockbuster movie and ordered Chinese food take out.  Many Americans know how tasty the food is but do they have any clues about the lives and stories of the people behind the food?

As much as 80% of Chinese family are somehow directly or indirectly related to Chinese restaurant work and life.  Almost every single members of my family had one time or another waitress, bartend, packed orders, cooked or washed dishes in a Chinese restaurant.  Personally I started in the kitchen taking phone calls and packing orders.  By the time I left I had waitress and bartend.  Working at a Chinese restaurant was temporary for my family and I, we were there until something better comes along.  For my sisters and I it was a place where we can make some spending money for ourselves during our weekends home or summer off from school.  After graduation from college my sisters and I never went back there.  When we first came to the U.S. my father worked a second job washing dishes at a Chinese restaurant to make some additional money to raise a family of four children.  He quit about five years into the job because we were settled in the U.S. and financially stable by that time.  For many middle age or older Chinese immigrants who does not have any professional skills and who can’t speak enough English to interact with society they are stuck in the restaurant industry until old age.

Chinese restaurant is also a wide form of networking and connection for Chinese immigrants.  Workers can introduce their friends or family members to their boss and get them a job that way.  That’s how I got mine.  Some workers in the suburbia are recruited from big city Chinatowns.  Managers and owners would find waitress and cook through the temporary work agency  postings in Chinese newspaper.  I met a woman who was recruited to a Western MA Chineserestaurant from New York City.  She came from Malaysia to the U.S. trying to find a job and hoping to make a bundle of money and then return to herhome country.  The owner provides housing for workers like her who aren’t from the area.

In my next blog I will go into details on the lives of individual and family working in this industry.

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April 2, 2007 by Storyteller.

On my days off I love going to Chinatown. Being in Chinatown is like returning home, coming back to a place of comfort and familiarity. Prior to moving here to the Greater Boston area I lived in Springfield, MA. About every two or three months my family would drive one and a half hour across the Mass Pike to Boston Chinatown for special birthday meals, dim sum, Chinese New Year grocery, hair cuts and Traditional Chinese medical doctor visits. Those were the personal memories I have of this place. Chinatown is also a place where I can live my culture with food that I grew up eating, faces that reflects mine, mouth that speaks my native language, cultural phrases and behaviors that I understand. And, it is a place of meshing and colliding of the Asian American experience.

Dim sum at China Pearl is the thing to do, a walking buffet with an assortment of Chinese specialty treats. My friend and I would get to China Pearl between nine or ten in the morning, early enough to miss the crowd. Regardless of going there with an Asian or nonAsian friend the host always greet my friend and I in English. In response to his, “How many people?” I would say in Cantonese, “A table for two please.” This interaction usually disappoints me, because I want to speak Cantonese when I come to Chinatown. Don’t I look Chinese? I have East Asian features, I’m petite with black hair. I even have a jade rooster good luck charm tied to my purse with red strings. Seeing that I’m young in my 20s he automatically assumed that I’m a jook sing who lost her native tongue to speak Cantonese. The stereotyping continues once we sit down at our table. Without asking what kind of tea we would like to drink, like they would ask other Chinese customers the waiter brought over a teapot of jasmine tea. Which, is the one of the two types of Chinese tea that American knows about, the other one being green tea. Living the double identity that I do as a 1.5 generation American who comes to Chinatown enough to know the difference I always ask for the half chrysanthemum and half ti kuan yin tea with sugar. Even the lady pushing the dim sum cart announces the dim sum items in English, “Shrimp dumpling, beef ball, stuffed tofu…” A part of me is disgruntled by being stereotyped by my own people but a part of me understands that this is the reflection of the Asian American experience. Asian Americans are inherently Asian but to know the degree of Asian or American in each of us requires a deeper understanding of each individual in order to tell.

My relationship with this place is similar to my love hate relationship with family. “I hate you, you don’t know me at all. I speak Chinese, can’t you tell?” Then, there are little practices that provide comfort and meaning to me. Such as the communal aspects of sharing a table with strangers, the nonverbal gesture of asking for more tea when the tea pot lid is uncovered half way, the gathering of old friends once a week over dim sum and nicknamed by the waiters as the four heavenly kings.

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