My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store (6 page)

In my family, cohabiting with elders after a certain age violates one of the basic laws of the universe. My parents sent me to boarding school when I was fifteen, and in case I didn’t get the message as to what that meant for our relationship, the school was eight hundred miles away, in Colorado. My parents had strong feelings about independence—they themselves, as children, had been sent on summer-long ordeals out West for toughening. It was simply part of childhood: the parents found the most oppressive summer experience imaginable (usually some nightmarish camp in the wilderness staffed by the recently deinstitutionalized), then waved good-bye. And when the time came to really move out, whether it was to boarding school or college, you knew you were never coming
home—for instance, my parents let my room to a tenant practically the day after I was gone.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not complaining about the fact that my parents didn’t want me to live with them. And I would hate to create the image of them as stereotypically frigid Wasps, more interested in polishing the china than attending to the messy emotional needs of their children. While they shipped me off to boarding school during a phase when I wasn’t the most pleasant teenager to have around (at the time I had decorated every inch of my room’s walls with Richard Avedon’s pictures of severed cow heads), I think they thought holding on to their children was selfish, because it would prevent us from growing up and moving past adolescence. Being a kid in the suburbs was too easy in some sense; moving out was the necessary challenge to spur growth. It was their duty to let go, whether they liked it or not.

For a family like Gab’s, however, nothing could be more normal than parents living with their adult children. Koreans, like many Asians, have a strong tradition of filial piety—that is, of dutifulness to one’s parents. In America, kids are supposed to antagonize their parents: they’re supposed to torture them as teenagers, abandon them in college, then write a memoir in which they blame them for all their unhappiness as adults. But in Korea they serve them forever, without a second thought. They take care of them, support them, and frequently orient their entire existences around them. For instance, almost all of Korea’s elderly cohabit with one of their children, usually the first son, whose wife is expected to essentially become a live-in servant to her in-laws. These obligations aren’t etched on a tablet. It’s not like Gab ever said to me, “I am a dutiful daughter from a Confucian-based society and must honor my parents,” the way she would in a Hollywood movie. She just did things that to me seemed above and beyond the call of duty, even for a devoted daughter, like bringing Kay and Edward
on vacation with us, or sharing our income with them even when they didn’t need it.

Of all people, I assumed my father, the authority on culture, would understand this, but he seemed as baffled as me. “You mean, Gab
wants
to do all those things for her parents? She’s not being forced? What a system.” At the same time, it’s not as if the Paks don’t value independence. When Gab was growing up, her mother pushed her to become as financially independent as she had been forced to become at her age. “Never depend on a man,” she would say. “Always be able to take care of yourself.” And the Paks
are
independent—they’re the ones living in a foreign country, after all, while my family stays as immobile as Plymouth Rock.

THE NEXT NIGHT I COME BACK TO BOERUM HILL SO I CAN
inspect the neighborhood and make sure the store isn’t near any slaughterhouses or toxic waste sites. It appears as if dealing with the challenges inside Salim’s building will be more than enough.

Before I do that, though, I stop by the store so I can meet Salim.

The first time I see him he’s standing at the checkout counter, a tired-looking Arab-featured man not that much older than me watching a TV show and eating his own inventory.

“Salim?” I say, sidling up the counter.

“Yes?” He guiltily puts away the BBQ-flavor chips. “How can I help you?” His voice has a Middle Eastern accent, but not very strong.

I introduce myself as Gab’s husband, and behind his heavy-lidded eyes I can him trying to retrieve information from his memory about Gab, like
Wasn’t she Korean? What are you?
, before he cautiously extends a BBQ-chip-stained hand.

“Yes, she called and said you’d be coming by.” There’s a hint of relaxation, but the suspicion lingers.
Who calls the shots—you or your wife? Or that mother-in-law of yours?

“So have you owned the store a long time?” I ask, trying to make conversation.

“Ten years,” Salim says, seemingly wincing at the thought
. And you? What were you doing the last ten years? Brushing your pony?

“Are you familiar with the neighborhood?” he asks.

I explain that Gab and I used to live in Fort Greene, just a mile or so away.

“FORT GREENE?” he virtually explodes.

“Yes … I … but it wasn’t for a long time … and I really didn’t like it.”
What could Salim possibly have against Fort Greene?

“YOU MEAN FORT GREENE,
BROOKLYN?”
he repeats, leaning across the counter.

I nod fearfully.

“Tell me, if you lived in Fort Greene,” he demands, “then you must know the store over by the park—the one on the corner. Yes?”

“Oh, sure, I know that place.”

“That’s my cousin’s store—Ibrahim’s!” Salim cries joyfully. “Do you know Ibrahim?”

“I, uh, sure. Doesn’t everyone?”

Salim starts looking for the phone and threatening to call Ibrahim right away. “Where’s that damn phone?” he mutters, while tearing through piles of newspapers, receipts and other garbage around the register.

“Salim, you don’t have to do that, really. I don’t think Ibrahim will remember me …”

Salim has now located the cordless phone, but no matter how hard he jabs it, he can’t get it to dial, perhaps because it’s encrusted with enough mustard to dress a hot dog. “I swear, this place is becoming a pigsty,” he says, as if it weren’t his own store. But then he forgets the whole business and turns his attention to the lottery machine, where a customer is waving a piece of paper at him, which Salim absentmindedly scans.

“No money this time, my friend. Better luck tomorrow.” The customer walks out without a trace of a reaction. Salim turns back to the checkout counter.

“Now, where were we? Oh yes, you were thinking about buying my store. You want to see the books? Meet the landlord? Have a look at the basement? How soon can you buy?”

“We’re not there yet,” I say. “I just wanted to come by and introduce myself. We like the store a lot.”

Salim looks unimpressed.

“That’s good,” he says, “but if you make me an offer, don’t insult me. This store may not look like much, but I promise you it is worth more than you think. I am not the first owner. There are people in this neighborhood older than both of us who have been coming here their whole lives. They have spent more money in this place than they have on their own apartments, their own savings. I will not sell to just anyone.” He folds his arms across his chest.

“Well, that’s good to know.”
Is this some kind of bargaining strategy?

“Make me a good offer,” Salim continues, “and on your way out of the store, take anything you like.”

“Anything?”

“Anything.”

So I ask for a pack of Parliament Lights, Gab’s brand of cigarettes.

“That’s too much money,” Salim says. “Pick something else.”

Why do I have the feeling that doing business with Salim won’t be easy?

BACK OUTSIDE IT
is a warm December night, so I start walking toward Smith Street. Boerum Hill still has blocks that are visibly poor, and it is more industrial, with housing projects that seem a lot bigger and more intimidating than those in Fort Greene, where Gab and I used to live. At the same time, Boerum Hill has Smith Street, maybe the trendiest place to open a restaurant or boutique in the whole city. Smith Street is a good place to live even if your idea of paradise isn’t a neighborhood packed with stores selling hand-printed baby kimonos and touchless cat massages. You can almost forget that the housing projects, the Wyckoff Gardens and Gowanus Houses, which have so many buildings they essentially form a neighborhood unto themselves, are only a block away. Ditto the Brooklyn House of Detention and the general seediness around State Street, with its hot-sheet motels, job centers and stores like 99¢ City. They are there if you want them to be.

Like all the surrounding neighborhoods of brownstone Brooklyn, Boerum Hill started out as a middle-class community, and despite its disrepair, you can see that background in a building like Salim’s. Probably just a single family had lived in that entire four-story building once. The second floor held a dining room with a parquet floor, a chandelier and special side rooms for entertaining. The backyard contained a patio or a garden, and the garage was where a horse-drawn carriage was once parked. Or so I imagined.

At some point, though, Boerum Hill fell on its luck. Maybe it was the Gowanus Canal, a festering, reportedly body-filled outlet for factories and junkyards, that set off the decline. Or maybe it was after the city decided to plant a pile of public housing and social services in the neighborhood. In any case, at some point those
gorgeous brownstones such as Salim’s went through a long and dark period of decay, which some of them still hadn’t come out of.

The first time artists, writers and activists started coming back to Boerum Hill was in the 1960s, as part of the so-called brownstoner movement. Not all of these people were trying to make a political point by moving to a “slum”; some were just looking for old, affordable apartment buildings with character where they could raise families. Nonetheless, the movement helped foster an image of the borough as a kind of ideal community where classes and races mixed. It was the dawn of a new era in urban living, exemplified by the appearance of
Sesame Street
, featuring a neighborhood that looked a lot like brownstone Brooklyn. This image depended on the brownstoner movement not being
too
successful, however. That is, it couldn’t attract so many middle-class newcomers that the old-timers, the working-class Puerto Ricans and blacks, were totally pushed out. And in fact it wasn’t too successful, thanks to the race riots, the crack epidemic and the sky-high homicide rate that characterized the County of Kings in the late seventies and eighties. The area around the Wyckoff Gardens and Gowanus housing projects became one of the most violent parts of the city. Much of Boerum Hill remained bombed out, and property values stayed relatively low.

But then The Big Change happened. New York as a whole saw crime plummet in the nineties, making neighborhoods like Boerum Hill ripe for another “discovery.” That’s when Gab and I moved to Fort Greene. As the second generation of brownstoners, we were attracted by the trees, the beautiful old buildings and the open skies—but also by that vision of Brooklyn as a place where people from different classes and backgrounds mixed. It was strange: even though I was a year or two out of college the first time I stepped foot in Kings County, I felt like I had been there many times before, and my experiences had always been pleasant, and I had friends
waiting to see me. In fact, one weekend I was walking to the subway when I passed a group of children playing in Fort Greene Park. They were wearing cardboard hats and beating a piñata—it was a birthday party—and among them stood a special visitor whose presence made my heart surge, because everything then made sense. It was Big Bird, as comforting a sight as a doting uncle or beloved pet. I was in the land of Mr. Hooper, Guy Smiley and Snuffleupagus. And tonight as I walk through Boerum Hill’s streets I think, What bad could happen in a place where the solution to every problem is to sing a song, plant a vegetable garden or put on a puppet show?

OVER THE NEXT
few days things gradually become more tense. Kay announces that she wants the store before Christmas so we can capitalize on holiday sales of beer and lottery tickets. This is impossible. Christmas week is less than a month away. Not only do we still have to convince Salim to sell us the store—to prove to him that we’re worthy—but then we have to agree on a price and a contract, get landlord approval, hammer out a payment schedule and so on, then get our licenses and insurance policies in order, and then, only then, after what I would imagine to be a lengthy period of renovations, move in.

Only I forgot one thing: this is a convenience store, and making money comes before anything as trivial as fixing a hole in the ceiling. Also, this is my mother-in-law talking, the most impatient person on the planet.

“If Salim not say yes before Christmas, then
no deal,”
she insists.

Kay also announces that she wants to underbid Salim by fifty thousand dollars, which, given how sensitive he appears, strikes me as unwise. But Kay has her own ideas about strategy. “I never pay full price,” she says, and it’s true: I’ve seen my mother-in-law try to bargain with everybody from car mechanics to waiters. She’s
incorrigible—to her, price tags are mere starting points in a negotiation—and I suspect that more than half the time she does it just for fun. But this time she says it’s important.

“If we offer Salim full price,” she says, “he not respect us,” which will have repercussions later.

So Gab offers Salim one hundred and twenty thousand dollars, and rather disturbingly, he accepts.

“He what?” I stammer. “Should we have gone even lower? What if the store isn’t even worth one hundred and twenty thousand?” This is not a pleasant feeling at all, but after resisting Kay’s low-ball offer, I can hardly take a position against it now that it’s been accepted.

Salim seems rather pleased. “I like your mother-in-law,” he says. He promises to vacate the store by December 23.

Now the process begins to gather speed, another worrisome development. Gab’s family seems comfortable banging from decision to decision, but I’m more circumspect. I come from an academic family, and we like to think things through—then think about whether the process of thinking them through was as thorough as it could be, then write a book about it. (A book that takes twenty years.)