This first-person column is by Rachel Phan, who lives in Toronto. For more information on CBC’s first-person stories, please see FAQ.
“I hate my job, Rachel,” my mom said suddenly during our phone call. As it always did, pain tugged at my heart, but the sharpness of the pain had long since been dulled by the years of listening to her utter that same phrase.
My mother turned 60 last year and her body is worn out from three decades of hard work at our family restaurant. Day after day of swinging her wrists over a wok wok to fry rice, along with endlessly making wontons, chopping vegetables and meticulously peeling shrimp, left her with carpal tunnel syndrome in both wrists and arthritis almost everywhere.
My father, now 64 years old, also has physical trauma in his body. It still lifts heavy pots of soup and overflowing trash bags, but at half the speed and triple the wobble.
My parents—who are ethnically Chinese but born and raised in Vietnam—were among the hundreds of thousands of “boat people” who fled after the Vietnam War.
Ten years after landing in Canada in 1981, my family of five pulled up to the back of a red brick building in our red Chevrolet Lumina. Like so many other Chinese families who have settled in small towns across the country, our path to the Canadian dream was through a humble restaurant serving Chinese-Canadian cuisine that was as foreign to us as it was exotic to our customers.
The restaurant became ours 10 years after my parents landed in Canada. My parents finally had something that was theirs after years of days spent sweating in other people’s kitchens and evenings picking worms to sell as fishing bait. For two people who survived bombs and starvation during a senseless war in Vietnam, it was a dream come true.
As for me, I became a “restaurant kid”.
In my childhood, we would blast the music videos of my dad’s favorite songs in the kitchen and work our way through piles of Chinese dramas on VHS tapes. My father would translate Cantonese into English for me while he smoked a cigarette between lunch and dinner.
These days, when we help out at the restaurant on family visits home as adults, it’s the sound of sports and Canadian assimilation that rings through the air as my mom yells, “Onward, leaves, onward!”
Rachel Phan, left, and her mother stand back to back at the family restaurant to see who is taller. (Submitted by Rachel Phan)
As a girl, I waited patiently every day for 10:00 PM to roll in because that’s when the restaurant shifted from the main focus to the background of our family dinners. Someone would say “Dai gah sik fan” — which roughly translates to “everyone eat rice together” — and for an all-too-brief moment in time, we focused on each other.
After the sous-vide and western food were wrapped and chilled, we would sit down to try our people’s food: Mom’s braised pork belly with preserved vegetables in a rich, slippery sauce that I wanted to drink with a salty spoon; green choi sum or gai lan stir-fried with garlic; and Dad’s lobster cooked the traditional way with onions and ginger or, my favorite, with evaporated milk, butter and onions.
Since our family is now scattered all over the world, the five of us eat together as a full family only a few times a year, usually when we get together for Western food like prime rib and scallops for Thanksgiving or Christmas. I try not to be sad about it.
Rachel Phan spent the night after her 8th grade graduation in 2002 at the family restaurant. (Submitted by Rachel Phan)
Not surprisingly, almost all of my childhood memories involve the restaurant in some way.
I fondly remember once hosting a sleepover at the restaurant. My friends and I pushed chairs together to form a makeshift bed, and to protect us from potential intruders while we slept, I held a butcher knife to our heads. We ate handfuls of fortune cookies until we were sick and my friend, clutching her stomach, exclaimed, “I can never eat another one!”
Then there were my dark teenage years. Wanting to hang out with friends instead of helping out at the restaurant, I forced my parents to endure many horrible acts of disobedience. I screamed and broke plates, and once I purposely ruined a batch of rice. I try to repress these memories because recalling the defeated, tired look on my mother’s face could tear me in two.
As much as it serves as our living room, the restaurant is also our battlefield. I remember Mom and Dad throwing chicken balls at each other while cursing in Cantonese while having a blast in the kitchen.
Now, after decades of pressing the same bruises and shouting the same Chinese epithets at each other, the fight has changed shape – further evidence of how jaded my parents have become. When they fight now, it’s in icy silence.
“Your father has been cranky and hasn’t spoken to me since Friday,” Mom will say over the phone. “Can you tell him we have to close next Sunday?” I’m 34 and live four hours away, but I’m still expected to diffuse the tension.
Rachel Phan, center, makes regular trips back to see her parents and spend time at the family restaurant, now located in Leamington, Ontario. The family poses in front of her parents’ favorite aquarium. (Submitted by Rachel Phan)
I’m tired of the restaurant preventing me from contacting my parents. I desperately want to know them as people – not as tireless restaurant owners.
I want to know what life was like in Vietnam and if they are happy with where their lives have taken them. I want to know how they don’t let the demons of their past haunt them today – the sounds of bombs overhead and the memories of their bloodied feet from so much walking, running and running. I want to know if coming to Canada and spending decades in this body-destroying job was worth it in the end.
In my weakness I know I will not ask. Not yet. I can’t bear to see them cry or hurt any more than I’ve already seen them. I’m not ready to get to know them on a deeper level.
Still, my parents sometimes show me glimpses of their secret dreams. “Dad wants to go back to Vietnam when we retire,” Mom once told me.
“But Rachel, when we closed, I don’t know what to do,” she told me after the pandemic forced them to close for a month. “Maybe when I retire I’ll get a little puppy to walk with me.” Or maybe I’ll live with you.”
I could get her to tell me more about what she wants to do and who she hopes to be when the restaurant isn’t the center of our family universe, but we’re not going there yet.
While others are celebrating the New Year, the Fan family is working. Each year, Rachel makes hundreds of wontons that she serves at the restaurant. (Rachel Phan)
This means that when I call my mom this weekend, I will inevitably take the path of least resistance and ask, “How’s the restaurant? Was he busy?’
Mom will sigh and say, “It’s been busy as hell,” before rummaging through her bag for a crumpled piece of paper that lists how much money they’ve made each day since we last spoke.
She keeps track, not for herself, but because she knows her youngest “restaurant kid” will call and ask every time.
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