Chop Suey Nation

by Ann Hui

  Now in front of him—entire platters covered with meat. Platters filled with flavours and textures and colours he’d never known existed. On slow days, they’d wind up giving away the unused food to hotel staff. The rest they would throw out in the garbage.

  * * *

  One night in late July of 1983, Mom and Dad were just getting home from work when Mom began to feel a familiar aching in her stomach. By then, she was nine months pregnant with me, and recognized the pain right away as contractions. They jumped into the car, heading toward the hospital. Mom was admitted right away and prepped by the nurses for labour.

  While they waited, Dad turned to Mom. “What do we do now?” he asked.

  Pansy and Amber, then just four and two, were still at home with the babysitter, whose shift was long over. She had agreed to stay at the house while they dashed off to the hospital, but someone needed to go back to the house to relieve her. Dad suggested calling Po Po. But by then it was past midnight. Mom didn’t want to wake her. Besides, Po Po didn’t drive, meaning Uncle Zachary would have to drive her all the way from Vancouver. Mom didn’t want to disturb them both. They didn’t know what else to do. So Dad went home to take care of the girls. Mom stayed at the hospital, alone.

  That night, she lay in her hospital bed, feeling scared and small. The contractions tore through her, causing her to convulse and scream out in pain, and there was no one to console her but the nurses. She had never before felt so alone.

  I was born the next morning.

  * * *

  In 1984, the year I turned one, Mom and Dad decided to close the Park Inn restaurant for good.

  That night at the hospital had left a lasting impression on them. They’d had enough of the isolation of living in Abbotsford. With three kids to care for, Mom yearned to be closer to Po Po and to Uncle Zachary and his three kids.

  They handed the keys back to the Park Inn’s owner. Dad got a job as head chef at a fancy buffet restaurant in Vancouver. And they put a down payment on a seventy-thousand-dollar house in East Vancouver.

  As they packed up the Chevette to leave Abbotsford for the last time, they turned and tried to remember how strange and scary this place had initially seemed.

  The little restaurant they’d built together had grown and grown.

  Now, all they wanted to think about was where they were going. They talked excitedly about their new lives in Vancouver. Where they would go, and what they would eat first. It was time to move on.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Fogo Island, NL.

  Spring 2016

  We settled into Lloyd’s purple Hyundai, Anthony adjusting quickly to the driver’s seat. Just as he had with the little Fiat, he seemed to know by instinct where all the controls and levers would be placed. He paused before moving his foot onto the gas pedal, glancing over with a grin.

  The entire island is about twenty-five kilometres long. Much of it is uninhabited, kilometre after kilometre of untouched boreal forest, weathered granite and roaring coastlines. Every direction we looked was another sweeping view, another epic landscape. I kept tugging on Anthony’s sleeve to pull over.

  “Look,” I said, pointing at the waves crashing onto the jagged shore.

  “Look.” The giant frozen puddles.

  “Look.” The empty road, as if the entire island had been deserted. It felt as if we’d reached the end of the world.

  But then we’d see, from off in the distance, a car on the approach. This would jolt us back into reality. Reminding us that, yes, this is a real place. We’re not alone here. Our cars would pass, the other driver lifting his hand in a friendly wave. Anthony would return the wave, but a split second too late. By then, the other car had already passed into our rear-view mirror.

  He turned and gave me a sheepish smile. I knew what he was thinking. We’re not used to this.

  Every so often, we’d pass a tiny cluster of faded saltbox cottages. I tried to imagine living in one of those homes, with kilometres-long stretches between my house and the next. I thought about all the steps it had taken to get here: a ferry to Newfoundland, a long drive to the northeast coast. An airplane to Fogo Island.

  Eventually the cottages and fishing shacks edged closer and closer together. The highway was reaching an end. We had reached the village of Fogo.

  We turned left onto the main street, passing a small inn and a pharmacy. The road curved to follow the shoreline. So too did the buildings, facing in every which direction. It was the largest town on the island, but really, was just a ramble of white-washed buildings—a few dozen at most, clustered around the harbour.

  Consulting his GPS, Anthony turned onto an even smaller road that stretched out to the edge of Fogo Harbour. We were inching along now, gawking at the remoteness of it all.

  Even so, I didn’t even notice it at first. With its white clapboard siding and dark gabled roof, the restaurant looked like all of the other buildings that made up the village. But just as we were about to pass it, I spotted the faded Pepsi sign hanging above the door. It was the same sign I had seen before in pictures. “Kwang Tung Restaurant,” it read in black wonton-style font.

  We parked out front and I paused for a moment, looking at the building. It was almost noon but there was no “Open” sign on the door. The windows, dressed with simple lace curtains, looked dark from the outside. The restaurant looked like it might be closed. But I reached toward the door and the knob turned easily in my hand. The door opened with a start and I walked inside.

  The dining room was empty. The room felt stark, with linoleum floors and walls painted light grey. The only attempts at decor were the red tablecloths covered with sheets of clear vinyl, as well as a few wooden hangings on the wall. In the front room, a small window had been cut out of the drywall, for passing takeout orders through.

  I walked farther into the dining room and could hear the sound of a range hood roaring, a metal spatula clanging against steel. The kitchen started about halfway through the dining room. It was separated from the dining room with just a sliding accordion door.

  From there, I could see a middle-aged woman with short black hair, dressed in a red sweater and a pink crocheted vest. It was the owner, Feng Zhu Huang. With her back turned to me and the range hood roaring in the background, she was frying up a plate of chow mein. Her gold earrings swayed back and forth as she worked.

  * * *

  She held my business card in her hand, rubbing the thick paper between her fingers. She could talk to me, she said, but only between customers.

  By then, a pair of women had followed us into the restaurant and sat at a table at the back of the dining room. Ms. Huang wandered off to take their orders. I could hear them talking, the two white women speaking quickly in easy, casual English. Ms. Huang, in response, was sparing. “Yes,” “no” and “okay.” She never used more words than necessary.

  Meanwhile, Anthony and I sat at a table just outside the kitchen, waiting. She returned to our table a few minutes later.

  “Why do you want to talk to me?” she asked. With each answer I gave her, she seemed more and more puzzled. She spoke in Cantonese with a Toisanese accent—that singsong lilt that made every sentence sound like a question.

  “You came all the way to Fogo Island—to see me?” She scrunched her forehead. The idea that I was interested in her story was baffling to her. She left us with a chuckle, and returned to the kitchen to cook the women’s orders.

  For a few minutes, Anthony and I sat in silence. I fiddled with my tape recorder while he played with his phone. From the back of the dining room, we could hear the two women talking quietly.

  A few minutes later, Ms. Huang walked by with two plates heaping with food. She placed them in front of the two women, then passed us again to return to the kitchen. As she walked by, she glanced at us again, amused. Again, she chuckled quietly.

  A few minutes after that, she returned to our table, this time with our food. By this point, we had had at least a dozen variations of Canto
nese chow mein. I leaned in, inspecting the various components: the glistening water chestnuts, the candy-coloured shrimp, the bright red barbecued pork. Anthony dutifully reached for the knife and spoon, heaping a mountain of noodles onto his plate. I thought I detected a small sigh as he leaned over to take his first bite.

  Ms. Huang lingered at our table instead of rushing back into the kitchen.

  “Okay,” she said, “what do you want to know?”

  She stood there for a few minutes like that, alternating between answering my questions and making clucking noises at Anthony for not eating quickly enough.

  “Who helps you run this restaurant?” I asked.

  “Nobody.”

  “Who lives here with you?”

  “Nobody.”

  “How is your English?”

  “Not great.”

  “Are you the only Chinese person on Fogo?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “How did you wind up here?”

  To this point, she had responded to all of my questions matter-of-factly. But to the last question, she scrunched her face and sighed. “It’s a long story,” she said.

  Another customer walked in, a tall man with a ruddy face and muddy boots. She wandered off to seat him and to take his order.

  This time, as she passed us, I asked to follow her into the kitchen.

  She shrugged. “Sure, why not?”

  The kitchen was laid out in a square room. The woks and the refrigerators were along the edges, and Ms. Huang’s workspace in the middle. She talked as she worked, pulling seafood out of the freezer to defrost. Stirring a bubbling red sauce on the stove. Washing some vegetables in the sink.

  She described the house she grew up in back in China. Just like my family, she was from Toisan—the same siyup county where Ye Ye, Dad and so many of the Gold Mountain men had been from.

  It wasn’t a bad house she grew up in, compared to some of the others. Hers had tile floors, not concrete or dirt, like Dad’s. She too worked as a farmer. She figured that would be her life.

  By her mid-twenties, Ms. Huang was married with two daughters. But one day, her younger daughter, Stacey, got sick. They weren’t sure what was wrong with the toddler. The doctor at the medical centre near the village thought maybe a blood vessel or an artery was infected. Then Stacey fell into a coma.

  They didn’t have money to send her to a proper hospital in a city like Guangzhou. For days, they agonized in the village medical centre, feeling helpless. Even after Stacey eventually gained consciousness and recovered, they were still shaken by the incident.

  “We have to do better for our kids,” Ms. Huang said to her husband.

  His brother was already living in Canada, running a restaurant in a place called “Fogo.” So they decided to follow in his footsteps.

  * * *

  When Ms. Huang arrived at the St. John’s airport with her husband and two daughters, she felt as if they’d landed on another planet. She couldn’t understand what anybody was saying. She couldn’t understand the signs posted everywhere.

  They went to retrieve their suitcases from the young baggage handler. The man rubbed his fingers together, the universal sign for “tip.” They stared awkwardly at him until Mr. Huang realized, a few moments too late, what the man wanted. He fumbled around in his pockets for his wallet, too embarrassed to study the crisp bill before handing it to the young man.

  In Fogo, Ms. Huang followed as her brother-in-law led them toward the little weather-beaten wood house where they would be living. She hadn’t known what to expect of this place, but she had expected more than this. The little house was barely a step up from their place in Toisan. But once inside, she said, “it was so nice.” She laughed. There was wall-to-wall carpet. Walls finished with drywall. “It was so beautiful,” she said. “So strange.”

  For the first while, the family stayed together in that house. Mr. and Mrs. Huang helped to run their brother’s Fogo restaurant. And the couple had a third child, a son—Richard, their very own “Fogo boy.” But then Ms. Huang’s husband heard about an opportunity to own their own restaurant in Twillingate. This was their chance to start their own business. The whole idea of coming to Canada was to invest in themselves, to take advantage of new opportunities. So the family moved to Twillingate.

  But a few years after that, Ms. Huang’s brother-in-law decided he was ready to retire. He asked if they wanted to take over the Fogo restaurant. The couple talked it over. The restaurant in Twillingate was doing well, so it didn’t make sense to shut it down. But the Fogo restaurant was a good investment too. It was one of the only restaurants on the island and there was always a steady stream of customers. They knew it would be profitable.

  So they decided. Two restaurants meant two incomes. Mr. Huang would stay in Twillingate and keep running the restaurant there. Ms. Huang and the children would move back to Fogo, and she would run the restaurant there.

  It wasn’t ideal, but they grew accustomed to it. Like the families of the Gold Mountain men, the Huangs would live apart. Only instead of being split across continents, the Huangs were split by the harbour.

  Mr. Huang would come to visit his family when he could—the odd weekend for a day or two. The rest of the time Ms. Huang was kept busy running the restaurant and taking care of the three kids. As the kids grew older, they would help out at the restaurant too, doing their homework in the dining room and taking breaks to help Ms. Huang take orders, or clean dishes.

  Eventually, it was time for the kids to leave too. Kacy moved to Halifax, where she works as an accountant. Stacey moved to Vancouver, then to Toronto to work as a physical therapist at a private health clinic. And then even Ms. Huang’s “Fogo boy” went off to university in St. John’s.

  Now, she was alone.

  I still couldn’t wrap my head around it. What did she do all day to pass the time?

  She shrugged. “I work,” she said. Matter-of-factly.

  Each day, from morning until night, she worked at the restaurant.

  When the restaurant closed, she’d do some preparations for the next day—making sure the ingredients were defrosting in the refrigerator, checking to make sure the supplies were all there.

  Then she’d cook herself a simple meal, some steamed vegetables and white rice, and eat it quickly in the empty restaurant, or take it into her apartment.

  Sometimes she’d watch television. Or take a shower.

  And then it was time for bed.

  “Every day is like this,” she said.

  Did she have friends on the island?

  She thought about it.

  “One friend,” she said. A man who dated a woman who used to work in the restaurant. Sometimes he would come by and help fix things around the restaurant. Like the water filter, when it was acting up and the taps filled the water glasses with green-looking water. It tasted fine, but was alarming to her customers, so she called him and he took care of it.

  And there was that one time she got sick. It was the one and only time she had to close the restaurant. He was the one who came and found her. “I saw the restaurant was closed,” he said to her. “I knew right away something was wrong.”

  She chuckled, shaking her head as she recalled his alarmed expression. “I knew right away something was wrong,” she repeated.

  “So what do you do on your days off?”

  She gave me a strange look. “The restaurant is open every single day,” she said. “Three hundred and sixty-five days a year.” There were no days off.

  The longer we talked, the more baffled I felt.

  She didn’t have a cellphone.

  She rarely left the restaurant.

  She had no car, so she hardly left the tiny village.

  There was no sadness in her voice. Every response she gave was just a statement of fact.

  Even after the Fogo Island Inn opened a few years ago, with its daily room rates of over $1,600 suddenly thrusting the tiny island into the spotlight, Ms. Huang still hadn’t made
it to the other side of the island to see it.

  She just shrugged.

  “My husband showed me a photo of it once,” she said. The sparkling steel-and-glass box sitting atop stilts and overlooking the ocean.

  “I thought it looked pretty nice,” she said.

  She took in the astonishment on my face and laughed. “My life is simple,” she explained. “But for me, it’s satisfying.”

  * * *

  The two women at the back of the restaurant signalled for their cheque, and Ms. Huang shuffled off toward them. For a few moments I was left alone in her kitchen.

  I glanced around the room where she spent so much of her time. The room was dimly lit. The sink, where a bowl of frozen seafood was defrosting. The sound of the range hood, still roaring in the background.

  In the kitchen there was a can of root beer sitting on the table. As Ms. Huang walked, she would wander over to the table every so often and take a long sip from the can. Each time, she let out a contented sigh.

  “My life is simple,” she had said. Simple pleasures.

  I remembered the peanuts my dad would rustle out of a bag and into a bowl some nights after dinner. He’d sit in his lounger, one eye on the TV, another on the bowl. He’d crack the peanuts one at a time with his teeth. That satisfying pop ringing in our ears. He’d tilt them out of their shells and into his mouth, chewing slowly. The crumbly shells he’d discard into a paper napkin. The salt he’d lick off his fingers. Looking back, it was one of his only indulgences that I can remember.

  * * *

  After a while, the restaurant picked up again with customers, and I rejoined Anthony in the dining room. He was still picking away at the plate of chow mein. I picked up a fork and began eating too. The noodles had grown cold, but they were still crunchy.