“I hate my job, Rachel,” my mom said nonchalantly on our phone call. As always, a pang tugged at my heart, but the sharpness of the pang has long since dulled from the years of hearing her say that exact same phrase. My mom turned 60 last year, and her body is worn down from three decades of menial work at our family restaurant. Day after day of flicking her wrists over a wok to fry rice, along with endlessly making wontons, chopping vegetables, and painstakingly peeling shrimp left her with carpal tunnel syndrome in her wrists and arthritis almost everywhere. My dad, now 64, also has physical trauma on his body. It still lifts heavy pots and overflowing garbage bags, but at half the speed and three times the winding. 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 brick building in the red Chevrolet Lumina. Like so many other Chinese families who have settled in small towns across the country, our path to the Canadian Dream intersected with 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 of their own after years of sweating in other people’s kitchens and evenings collecting worms to sell as fishing bait. For two people who survived bombs and starvation during a pointless war in Vietnam, it was a dream come true. As for me, I became a lifelong “restaurant kid.” In my childhood, we would play 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 dad translated Cantonese to English for me while smoking a cigarette in between the lunch and dinner rush. These days, when we help out in the restaurant on family visits home as adults, it’s the sound of sports and Canadian assimilation that fills the air as my mother screams, “Go Leafs Go!” Rachel Phan, left, and her mom stand back to back inside the family restaurant to see who is taller. (Submitted by Rachel Phan) As a girl, I patiently waited every day for 10 p.m. to move around, because then the restaurant shifted from being the main focus to the setting of our family dinners. Someone would say, “Dai gah sik fan” — which roughly translates to “everyone eat rice together” — and for a very brief moment, we’d focus on each other. Once the guy and the western were packed and refrigerated, we sat down to enjoy our people’s food: Mom’s braised pork belly with canned vegetables in a rich, slippery sauce that I wanted to drink with the salty spoon. green choy sum or gai lan stir-fried with garlic; and Dad’s lobster is traditionally prepared with onion and ginger or, my favorite, with evaporated milk, butter and onions. With our family now spread 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 ribs and baked potatoes for Thanksgiving or Christmas. I try not to get upset 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 feature the restaurant in some way. I fondly remember how I once hosted a sleepover at the restaurant. My friends and I pushed the chairs together to form a makeshift bed, and to protect us from any would-be intruders while we slept, I held a butcher knife next to our heads. We ate fistfuls of fortune cookies until we were sick and my friend, clutching her stomach, exclaimed, “I can never eat any more!” Then there were my tumultuous teenage years. Wanting to hang out with friends instead of helping out at the restaurant, I forced my parents to endure many terrible acts of contempt. I used to shout and break dishes and once I purposely ruined a batch of rice. I try to suppress these memories because remembering the defeated, tired look on my mom’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 during their kitchen blowouts. Now, after decades of pressing the same bruises and screaming the same Chinese epithets at each other, the fights have changed form – more evidence of how jaded my parents have become. When they fight now, it’s through frozen silence. “Your dad has been cranky and hasn’t spoken to me since Friday,” Mom will say on 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 tension. Rachel Phan, centre, regularly travels back to see her parents and spend time at the family restaurant, now located in Leamington, Ont. The family poses in front of their parents’ favorite aquarium. (Submitted by Rachel Phan) I’m sick of the restaurant keeping me from connecting with my parents. I desperately want to get to know them as people — not 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 keep the demons of their past from haunting them today – the sounds of bombs overhead and the memories of their bloody feet from so much walking, running and running. I want to know if it was worth it after all to come to Canada and spend decades doing this work of body destruction. In my weakness, I know I won’t ask. Not yet. I can’t bear to see them cry or be in more pain than I already am. I’m not ready to get to know them on a deeper level. However, my parents sometimes show me their secret dreams. “Dad wants to go back to Vietnam when we retire,” Mom once told me. “But Rachel, when we shut down, I don’t know what to do,” she told me after the pandemic forced them to shut down for a month. “Maybe when I retire, I’ll get a little puppy to walk with me. Or maybe I’ll move in with you.” I could push 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’s universe, but we’re not going there yet. While others are celebrating New Year’s Eve, the Phan family is working. Each year, Rachel makes hundreds of wontons to serve at the restaurant. (Rachel Phan) This means that when I call my mom this weekend, I’ll inevitably take the conversational path of least resistance and ask, “How’s the restaurant? Was it busy?” Mom will sigh and say, “She’s been so busy,” before rummaging through her purse for a crumpled piece of paper that lists how much money they’ve made each day since we last spoke. She watches, not for herself, but because she knows the youngest “restaurant kid” will call her and ask, every time. Do you have a compelling personal story that can bring understanding or help others? We want to hear from you. Here is more information on how to submit to us.
