My Korean Deli_ Risking It All for a Convenience Store - Ben Ryder Howe [125]
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Occasionally over the last few years while writing this book I’ve gone back and interviewed people who might appear in the story. Once, I visited an old Brooklyn character named Carmine Cincotta, who used to sell us produce from his stand on Court Street. When I told Carmine I was writing a memoir, he laughed.
“You bought the deli so you could write a book, didn’t you? Admit it.”
I had to ask myself, Was he right? Could that have been one of my motives, secret even to myself? However, the truth is when we bought the deli, I was involved in an entirely different kind of writing project (a work of journalism) and way too hardheaded to even think about switching to something as self-selling as a memoir. So I didn’t begin keeping serious notes on the deli until we’d been in business for a while, which later complicated the job of writing considerably. I had lots of memories—vivid memories, painful memories—but it wasn’t always easy to sort them out or remember things like what happened when. In theory, having access to the memories of family members should have made things easier, except everyone remembers things differently, or not at all.
Ultimately it was the experience I wanted to capture, the feeling, and most of all to be honest about what had changed in me and why. And this occasionally required straying (though only slightly, I believe) from the exact verisimilitude of events. Some of the dialogue is an approximation of what people actually said, and some events appear a touch out of sequence. A few minor characters are composites. Except for family members, public figures, Dwayne and a few others, identities have been scrambled, including those of companies we did business with.
Finally, this book was influenced by many other books, but it could not have been written without Albion’s Seed by David Hackett Fischer, Changes and Conflicts: Korean Immigrant Families in New York by Pyong Gap Min, and above all, Nelson Aldrich’s Old Money. Eternal thanks to my editor, Gillian Blake; my agent, Heather Schroder; Meredith Finn at New Line; and family members on both sides.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ben Ryder Howe has written for The New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly and Outside, and his work has been selected for Best American Travel Writing. He is a former senior editor of the Paris Review. This is his first book.