My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store (36 page)

Not that we ever stopped trying; as soon as we had the financial means—after Gab went back to work, after my own income picked up again, and after the store stopped being such a money suck—we started looking for apartments again, and on more than one occasion came within an inch of signing on the dotted line. Things just got in the way. Fate didn’t want us to move. And the more we failed, the more resigned we became. (The more stunted our independence became, you might say—just as my parents had feared.)
It was as if we lacked the mass to escape Kay’s gravitational orbit. What we needed was to add weight.

Which should have been easy, because a few months before we sold the store, Gab finally became pregnant, and putting on pounds was not exactly a problem. It had been a year since we’d started trying, and our failure remained as mysterious as ever. (According to the results of the fertility testing, we shouldn’t have been struggling, which made me think it really was psychological.) When the biology finally clicked, however, the timing was perfect. We would soon be selling the store and getting back our money, Kay’s health was looking up (she’d gone nine months without smoking and had significantly lowered her blood pressure through exercise and treatment), and now we had the perfect excuse to at last get back to our independent lives.

But did we want to get back to independent lives? Were we even the same people we used to be before we’d given those independent lives up? Had the store not changed us? It almost would have been disappointing to think that after so much pain and drama, we could just slip back into our former existences, as if nothing had happened. I certainly wasn’t the same person. None of us was.

After we sold the store, Kay went through something of a dark period. For the first time in all the years I’ve known her, she started talking about taking a break from family.

“I’m old person now,” she said. “I’m finish being mother. You clean your own room, do own laundry.” If my mother-in-law had learned anything about herself as a result of the store, it was that she had limits (limits that had long been obvious to everyone else). Now that she was aware of them, she would have to make a choice: family or work, but not both if she wanted to remain healthy.

In the fall, she bought a ticket to visit her oldest sister, Kunimo, in Los Angeles. Before she left she told me she might stay there for a while, even past the birth of our child. Kunimo had recently
joined a retirement community and wanted Kay to look at some vacancies in her building. Kay was curious.

The trip was not a success, however. Kunimo’s friends in the retirement community were of a churchly bent common among Korean-Americans, but not Kay. After two weeks of ladling soup to the homeless and picking trash off the beach, she bolted home, and soon the black mood seemed to pass. She said she had decided not to go back to work, and wanted to know if Gab and I would consider staying in the house so she could help us raise the baby.

But Gab was ready to move out. She’d just spent the two hardest years of her life struggling to be a good daughter and measure up to her mother’s example. Whether she’d succeeded or not, she knew that she’d (A) tried and (B) suffered as a result. Therefore, she reasoned, she’d finally earned the luxury of escape and a guilt-free independent life.

And there was another reason to move out:
samchilil
.

Samchilil
is the traditional postpartum-care regime mothers undergo in Korea. Like everything in Korean medicine, it has to do with maintaining a sort of yin-and-yang balance between cold and hot. After the fetus leaves the mother’s uterus, traditionalists see the mother as dangerously vulnerable to cold; her body needs aggressive warming both from within and without; otherwise, she can suffer “loose bones,” soft teeth, and bouts of poor health for the rest of her life. The antidote is to eat nothing but steaming bowls of seaweed soup and several large glasses a day of “deer juice” (powdered deer antler mixed with savory medicinal herbs) for three weeks, during which time she must also remain confined to an overheated bedroom while wearing several suffocating layers of clothes, including a girdle. She isn’t allowed to shower, read (which supposedly damages the eyes) or eat anything tougher than baby food.

“It’s ridiculous,” said Gab, who normally takes an assiduously nonjudgmental view of her mother’s medical beliefs. “Hocus-pocus.”
I figured she was just cranky because it had been a difficult pregnancy. (By the eighth month she’d put on forty pounds, nearly a 30 percent increase of her body weight.) But when Kay came back from Los Angeles and started ordering things like the girdle (which looked as if it were made for a Barbie doll), the seaweed soup ingredients and the deer juice, Gab put her foot down.

“We have to move before the baby is born,” she announced. “There’s no way I’m going three weeks without a shower.”

This was really a change. For years I’d watched Kay force-feed Gab giant glasses of deer juice, which Gab hated (I couldn’t even stand to be in the same room as it, the stuff smelled so awful), and never once did Gab resist or try to run away. Holding her nose, she’d say, “It’s easier just to do it and not think about it,” an attitude that seemed to capture more than just her feelings toward foul-smelling potions.

But now Gab seemed increasingly of a mind to decide for herself what was best for her. So she told Kay we were leaving, and Kay, though disappointed, reluctantly canceled the order of deer juice and returned the girdle. Soon Gab and I were on the hunt again, prowling the real estate offerings in Bay Ridge and Sunset Park. We were on the verge of signing a contract for an apartment in Bushwick when
wham-o!
The guilt hit her like a sledgehammer.

“I can’t,” she said dejectedly in a Park Slope Mexican restaurant. She’d been thinking about
samchilil
and worrying that maybe she was being too dismissive. “I’d hate to be wrong.”

“You mean, you think if you don’t drink deer juice for three weeks you’ll have loose bones?” I asked, now a bit exasperated by the whole thing.

“Hey, my mother knows people who had that happen,” Gab said defensively.

“And you’re willing to spend three weeks dressed like a mummy not to be one of them? Not shower? Pee in a bedpan?”

Gab looked stricken. “You don’t understand,” she said, lowering her voice. “They’re in my head.”

“Who?”

“The voices of my mother and Emo.” (Emo had been enthusiastically gearing up for
samchilil
too.) “I keep thinking that I know better, but there’s nothing I can do to ignore them. And what I keep dwelling on is the baby—if I’m not healthy, then who’s going to take care of her? Who’s going to provide milk and who’s going to sleep with her and …” Her voice trailed off.

“And I don’t want soft teeth,” she added almost pathetically. However, now that this had come out and the choice was clear, I knew that she would be feeling better, the way she always did after she made a decision. And indeed soon she was, at which point her mood became downright peppy. I watched in amazement as she summoned the waiter and ordered yet another appetizer, “something with melted cheese.”

“But you realize,” I said forcefully, trying to make a stand, “that if we stay in the house past the baby’s birth, we won’t be able to start looking for apartments again until you’re back on your feet, which might take a few months, and then your maternity leave will end and we’ll become dependent on your mother for child care, and she’ll become emotionally connected to the baby, all of which will embed us in the house more than ever.” I leaned across the table and fixed her with the most unwavering, soul-penetrating stare I could muster—and for a moment it seemed to work. Gab looked at me wide-eyed and seemed unable to swallow. But then she returned to her normal expression.

“I know,” she said cheerily. She seemed impervious to the point I was making. Her eye was on the waiter, who was bringing her more fried cheese.

“But don’t you remember how miserable we’ve been?” I asked, practically pounding the table. “Don’t you remember how stressful
living with your family can be, how desperately we’ve wanted our own space?” I threw the book at her, recounting every painful incident I could think of, until I had run out of breath.

Gab wiped away a little hot oil that had squirted from the fried cheese onto her chin.

“Do you have any evidence for that?” she said. “Because not that I’m questioning your memory or anything, but honestly, I’m having trouble remembering it that way. Did you write any of that down?”

It occurred to me then that Gab and Kay were both doomed. Even after coming to an understanding of themselves, they remained largely powerless to do anything about it. And this I envied them for, as I always had. After we went home Gab told her mother that we had decided to stay, and she could get the things she needed for
samchilil
.

AND THUS WE
embarked on the only endeavor more likely to blow up a family than co-managing a business: child rearing. As any parent knows, no issue connected with child rearing is too petty to get into a knock-down, drag-out screaming match over. When kids are involved, everything matters, everything is life or death, everything is
the future
. And the more people who are involved, the more viewpoints there are on what the future should be. Not to mention the fact that in a household like ours, the views tend to be as far apart as, well, Seoul and Boston. In all too familiar ways we were recapitulating the battles over the deli: issues of taste and discernment, high versus low, what’s popular versus what’s good for you. Television time, sugary snacks, plastic toys—you can all too easily imagine the issues, I’m sure. Once again every decision was a showdown of cosmic significance (for me, anyway), and once again we were in a situation where Kay, perhaps because she wasn’t living too much in the future or the past (or perhaps because her only
goal at all times seemed to be to make a child grow bigger, bigger and bigger), seemed to know exactly what she wanted.

But now so did I. Inhabiting the body of an immigrant entrepreneur, however temporarily, had thrown my own values into relief, highlighting tendencies and beliefs that, when viewed as a whole, had a certain consistency and cohesion. As a result, when I looked in the mirror, more and more I knew what I saw: a villain from a 1980s ski movie. (Literally. Since the deli had opened I’d noticed myself dressing, not always consciously, like someone named Lance who wore long scarves draped over white turtlenecks and crested blazers.) I accepted that. There was no escaping being a Wasp, but I was okay with that. I’d be a chaperone on the great global field trip into the future, a shusher in the movie theater, a terminally ambivalent, hyperaware, hopelessly inward control freak with a sphincter so tight it threatened to invert on itself and create a black hole, and I’d be content. Call me acquiescent, but if I had learned anything from Kay, Dwayne and George (who, you’d think, should have had nothing in common) it was that (A) they seemed to know exactly who they were, and (B) they cut their own path, venturing (in different ways, of course) from the world they’d been born into, as if self-knowledge gave them the confidence to take on unfamiliar situations. The store hadn’t started out that way for me—it wasn’t an adventure or even an attempt at self-discovery, but more of an accidental voyage into highly foreign territory. However, for someone lacking the kind of confidence Dwayne, Kay and George had, it was a good—maybe the perfect—way of finding it, for which I feel lucky indeed.

And now I’m going to go eat some Chessmen. Thanks to the store, our new apartment has a lifetime supply.

Occasionally over the last few years while writing this book I’ve gone back and interviewed people who might appear in the story. Once, I visited an old Brooklyn character named Carmine Cincotta, who used to sell us produce from his stand on Court Street. When I told Carmine I was writing a memoir, he laughed.

“You bought the deli so you could write a book, didn’t you? Admit it.”

I had to ask myself, Was he right? Could that have been one of my motives, secret even to myself? However, the truth is when we bought the deli, I was involved in an entirely different kind of writing project (a work of journalism) and way too hardheaded to even
think about switching to something as self-selling as a memoir. So I didn’t begin keeping serious notes on the deli until we’d been in business for a while, which later complicated the job of writing considerably. I had lots of memories—vivid memories, painful memories—but it wasn’t always easy to sort them out or remember things like what happened when. In theory, having access to the memories of family members should have made things easier, except everyone remembers things differently, or not at all.

Ultimately it was the experience I wanted to capture, the feeling, and most of all to be honest about what had changed in me and why. And this occasionally required straying (though only slightly, I believe) from the exact verisimilitude of events. Some of the dialogue is an approximation of what people actually said, and some events appear a touch out of sequence. A few minor characters are composites. Except for family members, public figures, Dwayne and a few others, identities have been scrambled, including those of companies we did business with.

Finally, this book was influenced by many other books, but it could not have been written without
Albion’s Seed
by David Hackett Fischer,
Changes and Conflicts: Korean Immigrant Families in New York
by Pyong Gap Min, and above all, Nelson Aldrich’s
Old Money
. Eternal thanks to my editor, Gillian Blake; my agent, Heather Schroder; Meredith Finn at New Line; and family members on both sides.

Ben Ryder Howe has written for
The New Yorker
, the
Atlantic Monthly
and
Outside
, and his work has been selected for
Best American Travel Writing
. He is a former senior editor of the
Paris Review
. This is his first book.