My Korean Deli_ Risking It All for a Convenience Store - Ben Ryder Howe [124]
“I know,” she said cheerily. She seemed impervious to the point I was making. Her eye was on the waiter, who was bringing her more fried cheese.
“But don’t you remember how miserable we’ve been?” I asked, practically pounding the table. “Don’t you remember how stressful living with your family can be, how desperately we’ve wanted our own space?” I threw the book at her, recounting every painful incident I could think of, until I had run out of breath.
Gab wiped away a little hot oil that had squirted from the fried cheese onto her chin.
“Do you have any evidence for that?” she said. “Because not that I’m questioning your memory or anything, but honestly, I’m having trouble remembering it that way. Did you write any of that down?”
It occurred to me then that Gab and Kay were both doomed. Even after coming to an understanding of themselves, they remained largely powerless to do anything about it. And this I envied them for, as I always had. After we went home Gab told her mother that we had decided to stay, and she could get the things she needed for samchilil.
AND THUS WE embarked on the only endeavor more likely to blow up a family than co-managing a business: child rearing. As any parent knows, no issue connected with child rearing is too petty to get into a knock-down, drag-out screaming match over. When kids are involved, everything matters, everything is life or death, everything is the future. And the more people who are involved, the more viewpoints there are on what the future should be. Not to mention the fact that in a household like ours, the views tend to be as far apart as, well, Seoul and Boston. In all too familiar ways we were recapitulating the battles over the deli: issues of taste and discernment, high versus low, what’s popular versus what’s good for you. Television time, sugary snacks, plastic toys—you can all too easily imagine the issues, I’m sure. Once again every decision was a showdown of cosmic significance (for me, anyway), and once again we were in a situation where Kay, perhaps because she wasn’t living too much in the future or the past (or perhaps because her only goal at all times seemed to be to make a child grow bigger, bigger and bigger), seemed to know exactly what she wanted.
But now so did I. Inhabiting the body of an immigrant entrepreneur, however temporarily, had thrown my own values into relief, highlighting tendencies and beliefs that, when viewed as a whole, had a certain consistency and cohesion. As a result, when I looked in the mirror, more and more I knew what I saw: a villain from a 1980s ski movie. (Literally. Since the deli had opened I’d noticed myself dressing, not always consciously, like someone named Lance who wore long scarves draped over white turtlenecks and crested blazers.) I accepted that. There was no escaping being a Wasp, but I was okay with that. I’d be a chaperone on the great global field trip into the future, a shusher in the movie theater, a terminally ambivalent, hyperaware, hopelessly inward control freak with a sphincter so tight it threatened to invert on itself and create a black hole, and I’d be content. Call me acquiescent, but if I had learned anything from Kay, Dwayne and George (who, you’d think, should have had nothing in common) it was that (A) they seemed to know exactly who they were, and (B) they cut their own path, venturing (in different ways, of course) from the world they’d been born into, as if self-knowledge gave them the confidence to take on unfamiliar situations. The store hadn’t started out that way for me—it wasn’t an adventure or even an attempt at self-discovery, but more of an accidental voyage into highly foreign territory. However, for someone lacking the kind of confidence Dwayne, Kay and George had, it was a good—maybe the perfect—way of finding it, for which I feel lucky indeed.
And now I