My Korean Deli_ Risking It All for a Convenience Store - Ben Ryder Howe [3]
We follow Gloria Yu to the store’s basement, where things get dingy pretty fast. The space is cramped, the light dim, and as the temperature starts to climb, the smell of American chop suey becomes as overpowering as a trash can full of baby diapers. In the basement we find a gang of six Mexicans dressed in thick fire-retardant gloves and steel-toed boots—work gear more appropriate to a steelworks than a kitchen. Evidently you don’t cook the food that gets served at a steam table. You attack it with extreme bursts of heat from an oven that looks like a smelter. And you don’t prepare it, either. You buy it premade from an offsite mass producer of cafeteria and hospital fare somewhere in Connecticut.
The whole experience is rather shocking, and I think Kay feels bad for me. On our way home, I expect the usual barrage of scorn, like sitting too close to a nuclear reactor, but instead she’s quiet. And then as we drive over the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, the gateway to Staten Island and the traditional summing-up point for any of our family’s journeys, she tells me she’s changed her mind.
“We need small place, for family only. That one too big. Besides, I’m not really trusting that woman anyway. If store be making eight thousand dollars every day, how come she and her husband still working there?”
A few minutes later we pull into the driveway of our home and find Gab outside. Instead of having just snubbed out a cigarette, which is what she was really doing, she pretends to have been waiting for us. She does have news, after all.
She bends over and sticks her head through the passenger window, maintaining just enough distance so that we won’t smell the smoke on her breath.
“I found the perfect store,” she says.
IT WASN’T MY idea to buy a deli. The idea came to my wife at the time of her thirtieth birthday. Thirty can be an uncomfortable turning point for those inclined to measure their own accomplishments against those of their parents. Gab took it especially hard.
“What have I done with my life?” she asked me.
I reminded her that she had graduated from one of the best colleges in the world (the University of Chicago, where we met almost ten years ago) and obtained both a master’s degree and a law degree. She’d even had a burgeoning career as a corporate attorney at a Manhattan law firm, until she’d decided to chuck it all so she could open this deli for her mother.
“And?” she retorted angrily. “Do you know what my mother had accomplished by the time she was thirty? She had three kids who she had raised with no help from my father. She had her own business, which she ran by herself. And she was about to immigrate to America, a country she knew nothing about. All by thirty!”
I thought of reminding Gab that her mom never finished college—Gab was beating her three to none in the degree category—but it didn’t seem like what she wanted to hear.
Over the course of the next few months, Gab’s thirtieth-birthday paranoia transformed into an obsession with repaying her mother’s sacrifice. Mistakenly, I had thought that she had already done that by being successful herself. But as the year went on, it became clear that Gab would not be satisfied without a sacrifice of her own. So her goal became to give back some of what Kay had given up in coming to America.
She was going to give her back her business.
And sacrifice her husband.
Kay’s old business had been a bakery serving typical Korean desserts. She spoke of it so lovingly one wondered how she had ever coped with its loss. However, unless Americans suddenly developed a taste for mung bean balls and glutinous rice cakes, doing the same kind of business was not going to be an option. Kay knew how to run a deli, having twenty years of experience clerking at 7-Elevens and Stop’n Gos across America. Yet she was no longer the same person she had been in her twenties.