Category: Uncategorized (Page 325 of 1031)

Even in 1975, Yung Man’s was the oldest restaurant in Little Aleppo. A mile into the Downside on the Main Drag, it had been open for over a hundred years and the goldfish in the tank along the back wall were rumored to have been there the entire time. There was a desk up front with a woman who would mispronounce your name loudly when your table was ready; she was also rumored to have been there the whole time. The Xi family owned the place now; they were anywhere from the 12th to 17th family to run the restaurant, depending on whose story you believed. (Early records are not available because nothing was recorded in the first place. Also, the joint burned down twice.)

Yung Man arrived in Little Aleppo from Guangdong province in March of 18– to work in the mines peeling the gold out of the Turnaway Lode, and by very slightly later in March of 18–, he realized he did not want to work in the mines. It was pretty much the first day, actually. Before lunch, even. Mining sucked, he thought. Owning a mine seemed wonderful, but working in someone else’s was no way to get ahead. He thought about moving on and staking his own claim somewhere, but the other Chinese told him that the gold was drying up.

His roof leaked every 18 days. Chinatown was a fetid grouping of lean-tos and dirt-floor shacks off to the East of the Main Drag. Pig sties and pimps and Whites strolling through confident of their place in the world. Some of the Chinese hated the Whites. How dare they treat us as inferiors, that they’re better than us? They’re our inferiors! We’re better than them! Yung Man did not think as poorly of the Whites as some did, but nor did he think too highly of them. Especially their food. They just threw slabs of meat on a fire and ate it. With their knives, no less! Or–heaven help him–their hands. Fucking savages.

Still, they had money, and Yung Man wanted some of it. Money seemed very important in America. Money meant quite a bit back in Guangdong, but there simply wasn’t any of it. Plus, there a civil war going on that had already killed a couple million people. Yung Man was happy to be in America and away from civil wars, but he wasn’t happy to be living under a roof that leaked every 18 days and was downright miserable at the prospect of ever crouching into that damn mine again.

After his shift one day, he walked through the neighborhood. The Wayside Inn loomed over the Main Drag. He bought an apple from a vendor named Stumpy and polished it on the front of his long-sleeved shirt that went to his knees. Samperand’s Hardware was on the corner; they sold everything a young man about to make his fortune would need–picks and shovels and pans–at a healthy profit. The Norwegian Hotel had twelve rooms, two with their own bathrooms, and a dining hall on the ground floor that sat 20. The Chinese were not permitted to eat there, but Yung Man had seen the food through the windows and was astonished at how colorless it was. Brown and gray, with the occasional flash of beige. Next door was a brand-new venture: a newspaper. A daily newspaper, at that. (Mostly.) Little Aleppo was coming up in the world; there was a reporter to lie to now. The First Bank of Little Aleppo, which was built from stone and brick, and the First Church of the Infinite Christ, which was made of wood. He had a long black braid called a queue that swayed like an attentive cat between his shoulder blades as he walked, and a deep blue round hat called a jin.

The Whites had the money.

And they had terrible food.

Yung Man smiled as he bit into his apple.

All immigrants have stories. Some they tell, and others they don’t. Yung Man told the same story as the rest of the Chinese in Little Aleppo–no jobs, civil war, whatnot–but his story was a lie. Yung Man did not immigrate to America so much as he fled Guangdong. Even the best Mah Jongg cheats get caught eventually.

On the boat ride over, he had given himself many stern talkings-to. He asked himself, Is this how your father raised you, Yung Man? (Overlooking the fact that it was his father who taught him the graft in the first place.) Do you want to spend your life gambling and drinking? (That actually sounded fine to Yung Man, but he pretended that it didn’t.) No more cheating. In fact, no more Mah Jongg at all. He swore to his ancestors that he would change his ways once he got to America.

But necessity is the mother of recidivism, and so Yung Man joined the Mah Jongg game in Chinatown, which had been running continuously since enough Chinese were in the neighborhood to get a game going. He was careful not to bleed his countrymen too quickly, but soon he had enough cash to buy a small plot of land on the Downside. Stove. Plates and bowls. Tables and chairs.

Yung Man roamed the valley that still had wilderness within it; he found wild scallions and onion and he trapped ducks and caught fish from the harbor. He bought a whole pig, and a cleaver. A trip to C—–a City for rice. Pigeon and stoat, too, and he prepared the dishes he knew from home, which he was sure the Whites would love as much as he did.

They did not.

Yung Man leaned against the door of his restaurant and willed the customers in. He zapped passersby with his mind: YOU! YOU’RE HUNGRY! he thought at them, but it never worked. A week went by without one meal paid for.

Finally, on the eighth day, a drunken White walked in. Yung Man brought him tea and the menu that had been printed in the newspaper office. Yung Man’s English was getting better, but slowly, and so the menu was a mess. You could order Oink Back or Bird With Sauce or Feet From Several Animals. The White, who could not read anyway, pushed the menu away and told Yung Man about a dish he’d had in a Chinese Restaurant in San Francisco.

The best Yung Man could make out was that the White wanted a bunch of bullshit with noodles. He kept saying “chop suey” very loudly and slowly; Yung Man did not know why the White was asking for leftovers, but the customer was always right so Yung Man went in the kitchen and threw some chicken and pork in a wokful of noodles, dashed it with salt and sesame oil, brought it out.

“Chop suey,” he said with a smile.

The White stabbed his fork–Yung Man could not find anywhere to buy chopsticks yet–into the meal, jammed it in his mouth, wiped his lips with his sleeve. Nodded. Took another bite and said with his mouth full,

“That’s fucking delicious.”

Yung Man smiled and bowed, and by the end of the night there was a sign outside the restaurant that read NOW SERVING CHOP SUEY. Yung Man was not an artist: he was a Mah Jongg cheat, and so he could read the room and pay the angles. They want a bunch of bullshit with noodles? Done. Give the people what they want, he figured.

And the people wanted chop suey. The Whites beat a path to his door, even though his fellow Chinese couldn’t understand what the hell he was serving. Some of them accused him of “betraying Chinese cuisine,” and he tried to figure out what that meant as he counted the till in his head. He expanded the restaurant and built himself a small, tidy apartment upstairs that quickly became untidy as his relatives came over to work for him, so he expanded the apartment. Yung Man was sleeping there with his brother and two cousins the night Chinatown was razed and raped and burned. He opened the restaurant the next day expecting to be killed as well, but was not. Usual crowd came in. None of the Whites mentioned what had happened the previous night. Yung Man did not, either.

120 years later, the center table at Yung Man’s was occupied by homosexuals.

“To Yung Man’s,” Manfred Pierce said, holding up his drink.

“Everyone’s favorite taste,” the table responded as one, except for Lower Montana, who made a face like “eww” that Manfred caught and smiled. Everyone had Coca Cola in a frosted Tom Collin glass with too much ice; the sweating cans sat beside their plates. Lower was the only one with only Coke in her Coke, though. Yung Man’s does not have a liquor license, but if you could refrain from setting the bottle on the table, then you could pour whatever you’ve brought with you into your glass. The waiter would add five bucks to your bill. It was the Downside’s version of corkage fees. (Unless, that is, you tried to be clever and hide the bottle from the waiter. Then you’d be thrown out.)

Manfred had brought Kentucky bourbon–Lower smuggled it in in her canvas shoulder-bag with all the rock and roll pins on it–and the round table in the middle of the dining room passed the bottle around from lap to lap.

In order to break the law in Little Aleppo, you had to follow the rules.

“I call this meeting of the Sylvester Street Irregulars to order,” Finster Tabb said, rapping his knuckles on the table. He was still wearing a beret–dark red–no matter how much everyone made fun of him for it. His friends loved him, and knew that the next step after a beret was an ascot, so they hoped to avert that crisis before it occurred. Finster just screwed the floppy French wool tighter on his bald head.

“Is that really our name?” said Steppy Alouette.

“What’s wrong with it?”

“I don’t appreciate being referred to as irregular.”

“It’s from Sherlock Holmes.”

“I wasn’t consulted.”

“Is the name even important?”

“Ask Gertrude Stein.”

“She would say no.”

“Fuck her, then.”

The problem with being a minority, Steppy thought, was the “minority” part. There just weren’t that many gay people in Little Aleppo, so you kept seeing the same faces over and over. You were stuck with each other. Heterosexual didn’t like someone at the bar? Heterosexual could just mosey on down to the next bar. Only one gay bar in the neighborhood, though, and so you had to see fuckers you couldn’t stand constantly. Steppy took a big slug of her whiskey and coke and loosened her tie.

“Can we discuss the matter at hand?” Manfred said, remembering his Navy days. Orders. He wished he could give orders.

“The matter at hand is survival,” Laurel Dorsey said. He stabbed his finger into the white tablecloth in emphasis. “Survival. They want us dead. Dead. We are engaged in a battle to save our own lives and nothing–nothing–is out of bounds. They started this, but we need to end it. Or it will end us.”

Laurel Dorsey was short and skinny and hunched and political. He needed a haircut; his Levi’s were bell-bottomed; his heels were Cuban. Laurel was convinced the world was out to get him–in his defense, it was–and wouldn’t shut up about it. If he grew up Catholic in Belfast, he would have planted bombs for the IRA, but he grew up gay in Little Aleppo and so he wrote novels. His first was called Cocksucker; straight people hated it because of how graphic it was, and gay people–at least the ones in the Wayside Inn–hated it because they were all in it, barely-fictionalized and rather unflattering. Laurel didn’t give a shit: he was incapable of feeling shame when he thought he was right, and he was always right. Just ask him.

“They will put us in camps!”

“Laurel,” Manfred said.

“CAMPS!”

Lower Montana’s eyes widened. She did not want to be put in a camp. She had, in fact, not even considered it as a possibility before then. A week ago, she slept in a bed in her parents’ house with a teddy bear named Lucy. And now there were camps? Like, sleepaway camps? Lower was sixteen and had not been eased into adulthood like most, and Manfred saw her face and took her hand and squeezed; he whispered,

“He’s a crazy person.”

She felt better hearing that, and squeezed his hand back. She sipped her Coke through the straw.

“Don’t call me a crazy person, Manfred,” Laurel Dorsey pointed his finger.

“Oh, you heard that?”

“My voice is an important one.”

“Your voice is a vocal one,” Finster Tabb said.

“I’d agree with that,” Steppy said.

Lower Montana nodded sagely.

And then a great tray full of food. The waiter had a stand that went from flat to x-shaped, and he kicked it into position and laid the tray upon it. Sweet and Sour something, and an alternative protein in snotty lobster sauce. That miracle of capitalism, the boneless sparerib. Pan-fried pork dumplings with pinched-off ends. Wonton soup–two wontons per cup–with greens floating in the yellowy broth. White rice in hand-sized bowls; fried rice on a platter with flecks of onion and scallion and shrimp mixed in. Crunchy noodles in a thin wooden bowl. And egg rolls.

“What the fuck is this?”

“An egg roll,” Yung Gai said.

Yung Gai was Yung Man’s cousin, and he had been sent to San Francisco to see what the Chinese restaurants there were cooking. He had come back with food wrapped in handkerchiefs that Yung Man had never seen before. Whatever it was, it wasn’t Chinese food. The egg roll had gone hard, but Yung Man still held it up to his nose and tried to smell it.

“What’s in it?” he said.

“Two cents worth of food that sells for a dime.”

And so Yung Man put up a new sign in his window in 18–: NOW SERVING CHOP SUEY AND EGG ROLLS. They had sold well ever since.

The walls were red with raised gold scenes all over: lions and dragons and boats that would never return to their home ports. Lined up on the front desk were brown paper grocery sacks with one neat fold held together by a single staple, soldiers marching out to slaughter hunger. The cooks were short and sweaty and drank water from the quart-sized plastic soup containers that sat on the shelves above their steaming woks. At a table in the back corner, an old women shelled peapods while a young boy did his homework.

There was a mid-level drug deal being set up in a booth over Peking Duck. (They had called ahead.) Teenagers out on a grownup date–she had her shoeless foot in his crotch under the Moo Shoo–and unhappy families arguing over the last dumpling. The Libertarian Party of Little Aleppo was having their monthly meeting at a circular table in near the front window, and they had requested separate checks.

“I don’t know how any of you can eat at a time like this,” Laurel Dorsey said with his mouth full of chicken and stringbeans. “This is the first step. This Brannie Dade woman and her Nazi goons. They’re first, and it all goes downhill from there.”

“She is within her rights as an American, Laurel. First Amendment and all that. It’s a public sidewalk,” Finster Tabb said.

Laurel spooned fried rice into his mouth and narrowed his eyes at the older man in the elaborately-shawled sweater.

“Do you know what a kapo was?”

“Please don’t accuse me of collaborating with Nazis, Laurel.”

“I call them as I see them, Finster.”

Steppy Alouette was a vegetarian and had been eating around the meat in everything; she said,

“He was literally quoting the Constitution, Laurel. Don’t call him a Nazi.”

“Pass the dumplings,” Laurel said.

“Retract your statement,” Steppy said back.

“Dumplings first.”

“Nope.”

“Pass the fucking dumplings.”

Lower Montana reached over to the off-white oval plate that had two slighty-congealing dumplings left on it, grabbed both with her fingers, shoved them in her mouth. Smiled while she was chewing. Manfred squeezed her knee under the table. She made three lifelong friends and one sworn enemy with one move.

Laurel Dorsey rocketed from his seat, knocking the chair back. His napkin dropped from his lap and he raised his finger at the table like a prophet from the Old Testament. Everyone in Yung Man’s turned around. (Except for the Libertarians, who were minding their own business.)

“They are COMING FOR US. You think this is FUNNY, and I PITY YOU for it. You’re gonna LAUGH and fucking LAUGH until they COME FOR YOU with the NOOSES and the fucking KNIVES. You think this is about some ACTRESS with a SIGN? They want our BLOOD and you won’t take it seriously until you’re DEAD IN THE GUTTER.”

And then Laurel Dorsey stormed out of the restaurant. Had he not cruised the delivery boy on the way out, it would have been very dramatic.

There was quiet in the dining room. Manfred Pierce held up his glass and said,

“God bless America.”

And the rest of the patrons held up their glasses and agreed. Seemed rude not to.

Manfred turned back to the table.

“So. What the fuck do we do? And should we get more dumplings?”

The first question required discussion, but the second did not. Hatred might persist, tho it be forever tamped down, but more dumplings were surely a balm. You spooned brown sauce that had shallots floating in it over them, and then swirled the whole deal around in your white rice and stuffed the gooey mess  in your mouth; it tasted just like it did the last time, and the time before that, and the first time you ever ate at Yung Man’s, which is the oldest restaurant in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.