Yesterday was a rainy day and I wasn’t feeling well, so I decided to have my own Top Chef Marathon. It was wildly entertaining for me, since my roots are firmly planted in food. Love, love love food.
I grew up in the back of a kitchen of a Chinese American restaurant in a blue collar city in the midwest. My earliest memories are surrounded by images of asian cooks and waitresses from various places abroad. Once in a while there would be the token caucasian – usually in the form of a waitress or hostess. Everyone else was from the fringes of society. Of course I did not realize this as a child. It only dawned on me as an adult, when I would go home and visit from my studies at the university. That was when I realized where I came from. I came from the womb of the restaurant world and I would spend the rest of my life trying to run away from it.
Instead of growing up playing with the neighborhood kids, most of my days were made up of hanging around the kitchen, prepping food and listening to the cursing and yelling of the cooks in a mixture of English and the various asian languages I was unfamiliar with. Sometimes my cousin Sophia and I would find a cook to pick on by shooting rubber bands or by sabotaging his take-out station. But most of the time we stayed out of the way or made ourselves useful by doing whatever needed to be done. I mean, what could kids really do in the kitchen? We ate shrimp chips and fortune cookies galore. We would remove the prefabricated fortune from the cookies and insert our own crude comments. We’d walk around and kill flies, keeping count and with a running tally for the winner. On hot days we’d hang out in the walk-in fridge until we got busted and sent back to work. We watched Popeye on a small black and white television in the closet. We’d make ourselves root beer floats. Not a bad place for a kid, really.
I remember doing work as soon as I was old enough to be told what to do. Some of my earliest memories are of making wontons with my brother and cousins in the back of the kitchen with my great grandmother. When I think about it, it was a great place for a family to be together, even if it was hard.