I walked inside and strangely I felt I belonged. I’ve never been here before. In fact, I don’t come to this neighborhood much; in the past the need to walk or take the subway, which involved waiting and spending $2 each way (it’s $2.25 now) discouraged me a lot. But I was in this restaurant for breakfast. I have never had Chinese breakfast outside. I didn’t know there was really a formalized set of food that comprised Chinese breakfast, like cereal and bagels and English muffins, among other things, that comprise the options for a Western breakfast, or at least American. So I wasn’t sure what people got, but I felt at place, and I just ordered what my parents usually made for me. The waiter was superfriendly, surely got up on the right side of the bed this morning. He was obviously balding, because he made an obvious attempt to brush his hair on one side over to cover the baldness. But he wasn’t shy; he seemed very energetic. He asked what kind of tea I wanted. I asked for “flower tea”, which I thought would be herbal, but he brought me jasmine instead. I didn’t complain; I learned something about how to order tea. I asked him, in the attitude of someone who must have come here a lot, what sort of congee he had today. He told me two kinds only, and I picked the one that I was familiar with: preserved eggs with pork. He asked if I wanted scallions, and I said, sure.
A lady walked by carrying a tray of freshly made dimsum, the kind I would be buying later to bring to my Grandmother. I didn’t want any, and she walked away without feeling insulted. She did her job and she did it the normal, non-chalant way that is the best you could hope for from Chinese restaurant staff that you didn’t come to know deeply. The women waiting at tables were all wearing red aprons. One, however, matched her red apron with a red Yankee’s hat. I don’t know if she knew that it was a Yankee’s hat, or even what Yankee meant. She just thought it matched what . Why not make something creative today when your job is to wait on people all morning for their dimsum orders.
The place is spotless but rather dreary, nothing interesting in the décor, and the room next door is even more depressing with the fluorescent lamps. Reminded me of Chinese eateries in China, with the only difference that here they bothered to close the door when it was cold outside.
When my congee came I saw how small a bowl it was. I was used to eating huge portions that I could hardly finish. This was more like a bowl, an appetizer. Although I might feel and want to look like I am a regular here, I obviously don’t know a lot. Not tea ordering, not the size of congee. So I asked another waitress to come, one of three or four milling around, and I ordered one of my favorite dimsums, ground beef wrapped in rice noodle then steamed. Finally it was enough. But one more strange misunderstanding: when the man asked if I wanted scallions, I expected scallions, but instead I got cilantro in my congee. It’s quite common to put cilantro in congee, and I wasn’t upset by it, but it was funny how I was surprised again.
I had my book with me, but I didn’t read it. I just decided to observe the people around me. This isn’t one of those fancy Chinese restaurants with swimming creatures on display (and to be eaten) or even with a window full of hanging ducks and chickens and sliced up pig bodies. It’s not small, but its food is more dimsum. The people who were sitting and coming in are all men. Except for the table in front of me. There were two women, one in her late eighties, probably, the other in her fifties. Daughter and mother? Not sure. She was serving her food, explaining things to her, so probably. I wasn’t paying attention to what they were saying, just that they stood out being the only table of women. The other tables are occupied by men taking a break from their work. Their faces were all worn out. Tired already. Tanned, like peasants, which is probably who they used to be before coming here. Their hair was not washed, no surprises there, but they seemed ready to work. If it were China, they would have been smoking already.
I went back to my congee, avoiding the huge amount of cilantro that had crossed the limit of how much I could tolerate. Then I heard the waiter started talking to some customer who had finished but for some reason didn’t want to leave yet. They were chatting. They were chatting about the Great Wall of China, how it was built. The waiter was talking most of the time. He started by saying that those workers must have gotten no pay. Imagine you could make someone do hard labor without paying them. His attitude was thus, as if we should be grateful that we live in an age where we get paid for what we do. His tone remained animate and excited. He said talked about the emperor who started the wall, how cruel he was, how easy it was to die back then under tyranny. “If you were sick, they would just throw you off the wall!” he declared. Then he started talking about some battle that happened around that time, how soldiers were forced to march to a certain point and if he failed, he would lose his head, literally.
I was amused by how this was the topic people talked about. It wasn’t the first time; whenever people, especially waiters, talked in the restaurant while business wasn’t so stressful, they talked mostly about history. They didn’t talk about love, rarely about current politics, but they loved talking about things that had happened hundreds of years ago, thousands. I looked at the waiter again. His face didn’t look like the ones on the faces of the men having breakfast now. His stature is a bit puny, face is lighter, hardly any lines. I wonder how he knew all these things about Chinese history, though I can’t say it was all true. I wondered if he was a professor, or teacher, a learned person plucked from China with the dream of a new, wealthier life in this country, still living the American dream? I don’t know.
But my congee was over and so was the other plate. So like a good regular, I gestured for that waiter to come, tapped on the bill so he could total it, and I thanked him before leaving four dollars on the table. It’s true that I don’t really speak the language so well, that I have only been to this neighborhood maybe four times in my life, that I wouldn’t remember any of the names of the people here no matter how many times they told me just because it was too foreign a sound for my memorization brain cells, that when I was looking for this place recommended by my aunt I wasn’t sure if I found it because its Chinese characters were unfamiliar to me. But somehow I felt I belonged. No one looked at me any differently, just assumed I was from around here, that no matter how complex my history was, it couldn’t be so different from theirs, the immigrants’. After I parked my car and started looking for this place, the first shop I saw had Arabic scripts written on its awning, and almost instantly I realized it wasn’t Arabic, but Urdu, and that I could read enough to know that it was a clothing shop. I wondered how many people here in this breakfast place populated by your average first generation immigrants had any notion of what Urdu was. Even that possible scholar of Chinese history, the waiter, I wondered too. I am so different from them, from even their children, and yet, as I paid for the dimsum to take to my Grandmother who helped us all immigrate here, I felt we had something in common that was deeper than I thought, deeper than our separate set of knowledge about the world.
