My Korean Deli_ Risking It All for a Convenience Store - Ben Ryder Howe [80]
“What if we make the store so successful that your mother doesn’t have to work there anymore?” I asked Gab the other day. She shook her head. “She’d still come in and kill herself. When it comes to work, she doesn’t trust anyone else, not even me or Emo. She wants to do everything herself.”
I think about that remark a lot, because it suggests that self-reliance is a compulsion, not a skill you acquire because you or your parents thought it would be good for character development. You acquire it by being scarred, and becoming incurably suspicious that if you don’t take care of a job yourself, no one will. Which is a harsh statement, if true, because how many of us are lucky enough to be immigrants, war refugees or single parents? (Maybe being a shopkeeper comes close?)
In order to convince Kay to slow down, I need to know what makes her tick. But how do you even begin to understand someone whose origins are so distant? Sometimes I look at her the way I look at a musician or an athlete and think I could never do what they do.
Don’t get me wrong—I’m not suggesting that Kay’s an automaton. In Korea, her generation experienced some awful things during the Korean War—massacres, aerial bombardment, forced relocations—which she doesn’t talk about. And as immigrants the Paks went through plenty of other dramas, which similarly aren’t discussed. The sum of those experiences, I’m certain, tended to numb as well as focus the mind.
After the paper towels and the pet food, she and I move on to the personal hygiene section, above which Jetro’s corrugated steel roof, now popping in the late morning heat, has sprung a leak, resulting in a flood that even a lifetime supply of Bounty can’t soak up. Naturally, Jetro’s management acts as if the thigh-deep puddle isn’t there. Kay and I look at each other. Should we have brought our own inflatable canoe? The Black Pond of Aisle Seven is filled with pigeon feathers, floating Optimo cigars and other crud, and as I wade in I worry about it carrying some electric current too. But since the warehouse is now roasting like an oven, it actually feels refreshing, and with the cases of tampons and Huggies perched on my shoulders as I make one sortie after another into the muck, I can easily imagine the studio audience for Shop to Death! cheering in appreciation—not to mention the denizens of Boerum Hill. Of course, wet pants become something of a liability in Jetro’s frozen section (“Gotcha!” the producers scream), and as I run around frantically fetching frozen logs of baloney while icicles of sweat form on my eyebrows and pneumonia develops in my lungs, the studio audience breaks into nervous laughter. I would laugh too, if only these sorts of tasks weren’t the ones gradually killing Kay.
AFTER JETRO ONE task remains, a brief stop at Jetro’s little cousin, a Yemeni-owned place called Screaming Eagle.
Unlike Jetro, I look forward to going to Screaming Eagle. It’s smaller and even grubbier, but its young owner, Walid, is right down there in the squalor with you, and it’s one of those obscure but integral parts of the city whose existence I would never even have known about had we not gone into the deli business. Nevertheless, as soon as we get there, I always have to fight the urge to run. The place is forbidding. You park on this lifeless industrial block of truck bays and warehouses without a pedestrian in sight—just different shades and textures of concrete covered with broken glass. One of the truck bays belongs to Walid, though I can never figure out how Kay knows which one, since there’s no sign. After parking next to a car with no wheels, we approach and, finding a half-open side door, enter without knocking.
“Yoo-hoo!” says Kay, stomping out a Parliament before waltzing blithely into the darkness of a crumbling stairway. “It’s me, old Korean lady. Anybody home?”
There’s no buzzer or waiting room. You