This Is My Brain in Love: List 2

By Tuesday, I feel like someone should be playing “Eye of the Tiger”: It’s time for the “Training Montage” trope.

Basically, everything he knows about restauranting, he learned on the job. He definitely didn’t have any pro forma sheets or business plans in any of his files.

Jos is wearing flip-flops, a Hufflepuff shirt, and cutoff jean shorts that are so revealing that in my attempt not to ogle my new boss, I’m rendered completely unable to remember the greeting I rehearsed.

Five seconds of standing there taking in the sights, sounds, and smells of the kitchen gives me more fodder than a dozen e-mails, more detail than I’d be able to pick up with hours of online research.

There’s the baseline hum of the refrigerator units, the on-and-off susurration of the dishwasher, the woodpecker sound of chopping.

“You’ll want to marry those dumplings when you’re done.”
When I bite into the finished pot sticker, which is still piping hot, sublimely crispy on the outside and juicy and bursting with flavor on the inside, I can’t say that she’s wrong.

Finally, after what feels like decades of scrutiny, Mr. Wu lets out a breath through pursed lips and waves at me dismissively.

No amount of research, no phone interview, could ever prepare me for how hard it is to run a restaurant. Behind the curtain, the action never ends. If you’re not prepping for a meal, you’re cooking it, or serving it, or packaging it up. Then you’re cleaning and closing out the register, and then it’s time for another service. Rinse and repeat. It’s never-ending and exhausting and humbling.

I took the job practically on a whim, but after just a day I want to stay because of how I might be able to help out.

Rob only gave me a cursory “Hey, happy birthday” before beelining to grab a seat next to Peggy.

You and I could run the booth. I think the focus should be your grandma’s pot stickers. The smell alone will have hundreds of people following their noses, and when they come by we can hand out samples. I’m sure we’ll sell at least a thousand dumplings—and people are going to be ready to pay concessions prices.

“What, you can get them to waive the fee?”

He’s ditched the wing tips he wore his first day, thank God, and is wearing black-and-white Adidas tennis shoes that look pristine except for one foot’s front edge, which he is currently dragging back and forth across our already threadbare carpet.

“At one dollar a pop, we’d probably have to sell about one hundred and twenty orders of five to break even, assuming we spend about two hundred dollars in ingredients and supplies,” I muse.

“The fairy godmother. You know, the deus ex machina that allows the plot to progress?”

"Your first few jiaozi are going to look like lumpy little bags of crap,” she says bluntly.
“Wow, tell me what you really think about my fine motor skills,” I joke. It’s okay that she’s candid.

It just makes you that much more likely to peel off your own buffers against the world, to let yourself breathe.

He jabs his thumb to end the call, his mouth twisted in a rictus of frustration.

Within minutes she’s shepherded Jocelyn and me to the front and laid out plates like the staff do for their end-of-the-day meal, with side dishes that don’t show up on the menu: smashed cucumber salad, sautéed bok choy, and stir-fried “glass” noodles that Jos says are made from mung beans.

Surreptitiously, while Jocelyn’s taking a phone order, I google “average restaurant margins” and find that they average from 3–6 percent.

Javier waves his hands excitedly as he throws a blue shell and rubber-bands into the lead with an outraged shout from Manny. I laugh out loud as Tim hoots at Manny’s comeuppance and gets so distracted by his gloating that I use a Mushroom and race into first myself.

“Well, it wouldn’t be, like, a documentary. The story would still be original. It’d make it so much easier for you to be involved—you wouldn’t have to take time away from the stuff you’re already doing, and we could set shots up when things are slow. This is what I’m thinking.” Priya puts on what I call her “auteur look.”

Plus, it’s not the fault of the kids in the Mohawk Valley Chinese Association that their families wanted to assimilate.

For a couple of months, I hovered on the fringes of Peggy’s social scene like a shriveled, misshapen pea in a pod, until the day when I overheard Sarah Martin say, “I don’t know why Peggy is friends with that Wu girl. She’s so negative. Does she ever smile?”

She attaches a picture of herself gazing rapturously at a dumpling.

Then the first taste of warm, velvety jiaozi hits my tongue, salty slick, and I bite into the wrapper that gives away effortlessly, releasing that incredible synergy of pork and cabbage and green onion that does not disappoint.

After my attempt at telepathy fails, I try not to sound too annoyed when I ask, “You done?”
She has the gall to look innocent when she scrolls through the images on her phone and says, “Just a couple more shots. J’s eyes were closed.”

She’s a whirling dervish of efficiency: talking while frying, tossing the perfect amount of oil into pans straight from the bottle, wielding the spatula as if she’s a fencer, shouting out orders like she was born to do it, which I suppose she was.

“If you’d like them panfried it will be an extra ten minutes, but it’s actually healthier without all that oil,” I reassure any customers who look askance at the pale boiled dumplings.

Will is silent for a minute, like he’s thinking of the old adage: If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.

Last fall, Mr. Evans had a whole unit on the journalist’s role in a “post-truth” society. He had to explain the term—named the 2016 International Word of the Year by the Oxford Dictionaries!—to us: “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”

Nothing triggers my guilt and filial piety more than my formal title of “Big Sister.”

She pinches my belly fat and I give an indignant yelp.

It’s like my grandmother thinks she can use mind control to wish away my mother’s rude breach of etiquette, that she would dare to fete a potential suitor with instant noodles, even if they were spruced up with yam, carrot, and egg.

There’s the burly middle-aged man who looks skeptical when his wife hands him a dumpling on a fork (heathens).

When Will comes in on Monday, he’s carrying two green Tupperwares and looks faintly tentative, almost nauseated.

“I get a kick out of eighties movies. I think it has something to do with the fact that movies weren’t digital yet, so all the special effects are so... earnest.”

Jocelyn’s brown eyes are impossibly dark and liquid. I can feel myself begin to flush.

It takes Jocelyn a moment to parse out my meaning, but when she does she giggles.

And almost ominously, I hear Mr. Wu’s first admonition to me: “No hanky-panky.”