Free Chinese Cooking for Diamond Thieves by Dave Lowry Page B

American lunch fare to everybody from accountants to shoe sellers. Dinner, on the other hand, when most of the lunch customers had returned to homes out in the suburbs, comprised almost exclusively Asian diners. There were two different menus for dinner: one in English, the other in Chinese. I’d worked in Chinese restaurants like this. I was always irritated by the two menus. A lot of Chinese restaurants were still treating non-Chinese customers as if they were eating back in the sixties, when moo goo gai pan and chop suey were considered exotic. There were dishes on the Chinese side of the menu that weren’t included in the English version. I thought there were a lot of non-Chinese diners who would have been adventurous enough to try some of the authentic stuff, if it was offered to them. On the other hand, I hadn’t seen many Chinese restaurants go broke. So maybe the owners knew something I didn’t. Nobody in management had ever asked any of us in the kitchen how to run their places. That was probably for a reason.
    We went in the rear door off the alley, into the kitchen of the Eastern Palace. It was, like the kitchens of every Chinese restaurant where I’d worked, small. The average American living room was bigger. Under the soft buzz of fluorescent lights, three guys were working. One was scrubbing a wok the size of a kid’s sledding disc. Another was turning a chunk of beef into mouthful-size strips. The third was clattering a spatula against another wok where a thick cloud of steam was boiling up. I’d never been here, of course. But it all looked familiar.
    Langston introduced me to Jao-long, who told me to call him Jim; and Kuo, who told me to call him John; and to Li, who said I might as well just call him Li since he couldn’t figure out any way you could Americanize a name like that to make it easier. Then Langston took me into the owner’s office and introduced me to Ting Leong, who didn’t tell me to call him anything. As we stood at its door, he sat in his office, peering at a shopping list like it was the directions for defusing a bomb strapped to his own waist. His attention on the task was completely focused. Finally, he looked up at us. He was skinny, in dark pants with a short-sleeved white cotton shirt and under it a white wife beater. A long strand of silver and black hair was thoughtfully swirled over the bald spot on the crown of his head. His glasses were so smudged I didn’t think he could see me all that well. Apparently he saw I wasn’t Chinese, though. He turned to a woman, and the Cantonese was so rapid it was hard to even make out words—and it wouldn’t have done me any good if I had been able to catch them. I heard
gwai lo,
the Cantonese equivalent of
laowai,
except instead of “old foreigner” it mean something like “foreign devil.”
    â€œYou look for work?” he said to me in English once Langston had introduced us. He was in his late forties, I was guessing. He crossed his skinny arms and absently rubbed both elbows with his palms.
    â€œExactly,” I said.
    â€œYou wash dishes?”
    â€œI do,” I said. And I did. Or at least I was about to. Leong wheeled his chair around and reached to a shelf behind him. He tossed me an apron and pointed back through his office door into the kitchen toward the sink.
    â€œKnock you-self out.”
    Â 
    I washed dishes all through the noon and dinner shifts. I must have done okay; Mr. Leong told me to show up the next day. I did. And the day after, and about 2,768 dirty plates later, rendered clean and sparkling under my ministrations, a week had gone by and I had enough money to pay Langston for my half of the rent with a little extra left over. It wasn’t something I’d want to make a career of. Still, it was nice to be back in a Chinese restaurant kitchen again. Being in a Chinese restaurant kitchen for me was like going back to my bedroom in my