My Korean Deli_ Risking It All for a Convenience Store - Ben Ryder Howe [16]
But the big question wasn’t what Wasp values were; it was how to reconcile them with the wide-open embrace of the world my father seemed to encourage as an anthropologist. How did you get the two worldviews to mesh? Most of the time the conflict consisted in harmless skirmishes over politics or the culture wars, or I’d feel the tension internally, as in the realization that no matter how much you wanted to be a Rastafarian or a lobsterman, you’d never escape your inherited identity. Out-and-out conflict was a rarity, though, in part because while my parents had plenty of rules, they were against telling anyone what to do, especially their own children—even more so now that we were grown. And besides, the Wasp-Puritan morality is so good at getting inside people’s heads and turning them into mild-mannered, stability-oriented replicas of their parents, they didn’t really have to.
After I tell her about the deli, my mother sends me a gift: something from L.L. Bean called a “mountain town jacket” (“an updated, casual take on the classic chore coat”) and matching khaki pants. As mothers tend to, she is worried that I’ll be cold, and the outfit she sends actually turned out to be quite comfortable and warm, though instead of looking like a future deli clerk, I look like I’m off for a little trout fishing on the Beaverkill.
However, she then makes it clear—well, clear for people who, whenever possible, avoid saying anything directly—that there is one aspect of our new life she’d rather see end as soon as possible:
“So does finding a deli you’d like mean that you can start thinking about moving out?”
This is the real reason she’s excited about Salim’s deli. My parents have always been uneasy about us living with the Paks. “A young couple needs privacy,” my mother said to me recently, briefly terrifying me with the thought that she was going to start talking about our sex lives. “You need to be able to create your own identity as a couple and develop it inside your own space.” I could not agree more. Maintaining your own identity, let alone developing it, can definitely become a problem when you find yourself sharing underwear with your father-in-law. Maybe if I could get the Paks to not be so damn communal and occasionally knock on a closed door (there’s no point in even having doors in the Paks’ house; it’s like they’re not there), we could develop a modicum of personal identity, but I fear it will take longer to train them than I hope to be here.
In my family, cohabiting with elders after a certain age violates one of the basic laws of the universe. My parents sent me to boarding school when I was fifteen, and in case I didn’t get the message as to what that meant for our relationship, the school was eight hundred miles away, in Colorado. My parents had strong feelings about independence—they themselves, as children, had been sent on summer-long ordeals out West for toughening. It was simply part of childhood: the parents found the most oppressive summer experience imaginable (usually some nightmarish camp in the wilderness staffed by the recently deinstitutionalized), then waved good-bye. And when the time came to really move out, whether it was to boarding school or college, you knew you were never coming home—for instance, my parents let my room to a tenant practically the day after I was gone.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not complaining about the fact that my parents didn’t want me to live with them. And I would hate to create the image of them as stereotypically frigid Wasps, more interested in polishing the china than attending to the messy emotional