Chinese Restaurant Kids Speak about Labor, Lifeways, and Legacies

“I have an accent in every language I speak,” my uncle Luhk Suk (Six Uncle) would joke with me when I expressed exasperation at my mother’s family members who did not identify as solely Chinese. ¹ We own Chinese restaurants, so of course we are part of the Sino-tribe, which has over 1.35 billion members in Mainland China and around 40 million in the diaspora. ² We have suffered for having Chineseness in our marrow. We had to flee Vietnam because my family was part of the Chinese business class ³ and all businesses were nationalized. ⁴ I guess Luhk Suk was trying to reassure me that we were not oddballs and that it was normal for our family to immigrate four times from four nation states in four generations. There are many peculiar things about my Chinese restaurant family: we compare food item deals incessantly, we predict the probability of the restaurant’s demise, we figure out how the dish was made, we order off-menu dishes, and we always tip well. Senior male family members are often friends with various waiters, which leads to further discounts. We often do not pay for tea services at Dim Sum houses where my family knows the restaurant managers. In our family, being ascetic and getting a good deal on food items is tantamount to sainthood. I asked my uncle why we kept migrating to different countries and he said, “We have always moved around.”