There’s this stereotype of Chinese takeout restaurants where if there’s a kid taking your order, then you know the food there is delicious. Well, I was once that kid. Around 30 years ago, my parents immigrated to the United States from Fuzhou, China. Despite speaking barely any English and lacking college education, both of them worked extremely hard to open a successful American Chinese takeout restaurant in upstate New York.
I was born in Queens, but I was raised in China by my grandmother for the first five years of my life. When I finally moved back to the states, I lived with my parents and my brother in a small apartment in Miami. My parents owned a restaurant there as well, but business wasn’t good so it wasn’t long before they sold the place and we packed up and moved away. For my first few years in America, this was the way it was. We would move somewhere new, my parents would open or work at a restaurant of some kind, and before long we would pack up and move again. From Miami, it was Tennessee, then Philadelphia, then finally Cortlandt Manor, New York.
I was in first grade when we took over Oriental Express. My mother worked in the front, my father cooked, and my cousin helped him in the kitchen. I spent a lot of time at the restaurant through elementary school, as my parents worked all day and we didn’t exactly have the means to hire a babysitter for 12 hours every day of the week. My dad would come drive me to the restaurant after school, and I would spend the rest of the day there.
I started working there when I was 10. I was resistant to it for a long time , because the last thing I wanted to do in my childhood was work hours of unpaid labor at the restaurant. Regardless, I was too old to have any excuses by 10 years old and in Fuzhounese culture, there is too much of a significance on filial piety, which is a virtue originating from ancient Confucian China that emphasizes respect and obedience for parents, elders, and ancestors, for me to have resisted. Before I knew it, I was taking orders and managing transactions alongside my mom everyday after school.
For a long time, I hated working at the restaurant. It felt so unfair to me that in fifth grade, while everyone was hanging out with their friends doing whatever they wanted to, I was stuck doing unpaid labor for my parents. Throughout middle school, it only got worse as I started receiving more work from teachers and instead having the whole day to study, hours would be taken up by this responsibility that I wish I didn’t have. Not only that, it was the most embarrassing thing when my friends would make plans and I would have to pass on them because I had to work.
By the time high school rolled around and I turned 16, getting my first actual job outside of the restaurant was a relief. For the whole summer from sophomore to junior year, I worked at a frozen yogurt place in town. Finally, I felt like I was actually being appreciated for the work I put in.
Looking back on it, I was so trapped in this angsty pre-teen to teenager mindset that I never even realized what my parents’ intentions were. The reality is, I would’ve never even gotten that first job if I hadn’t cited my experience working at my parents’ place on the application. I thought my parents were so cruel for making me work, but the whole time, it had taught me responsibility and work ethic.
Today, I owe absolutely everything to my parents. They came to America with nothing, and they managed to get to a place where I can attend college without the burden of debt. My mom and dad are easily the hardest working people I have ever known and working at the restaurant taught me how it was to work just a sliver of how hard they did. Not only that, it taught me how hard work can pay off. I am who I am today because of them, and I cannot thank them enough. Because of that, I wouldn’t trade the unorthodox childhood I had for any other in a million years.
Whenever I’m home from college now, I still try to help out at the restaurant whenever I can. It allows me to spend some time with my parents and take away from their stressful work days. And to any Chinese kids reading this from their parents’ restaurants, just know that it’s all going to work out. Next week on Tuesday, tell your parents happy Chinese New Years, enjoy all the money you’re gonna get, and of course, appreciate their delicious authentic cooking.