Spit and Sizzle
photo by jayla jones
Spit and Sizzle
third-year Meghan Hawley
You’ve been here before. You come here all the time. You could close your eyes and know it by the spit and sizzle of the hot oil in the wok, the shouts in jumbled Spanglish begging to be heard over the clanging metal pans. You could breathe in and be instantly aware of the smell of chopped cilantro or the dust of gochugaru suspended endlessly in the air. Inhala. But not too much or you’ll cough. The kitchen is where you go to sneak bites of chicken, the walk-in is where you go to cool off, the dishwasher is where to go when the customers piss you off (no mames). Both food and friends are made here.
Your boss is a good man. On the day you started working here he told you he was apprehensive about hiring you, but come three years and he’s calling you his daughter. On your Saturday shifts—the ones that are twelve hours long and leave your feet sore and your back aching—he makes you lunch. Sometimes it's tacos con carne y cilantro, sometimes it’s tamales. One time it was stew made from a cow’s stomach. You eat it, but to be honest, you like the tamales more. The days he brings his son in are better than the others. He curls up with his iPad in the back office. Your boss pretends not to notice when you sneak him some Pocky or Hi-Chews from the front.
Chinitos what they call you in the kitchen. They tell you it means Curly; you don’t tell them you know it also means Chinese. The double entendres don’t bother you though. To be honest, you think it’s funny that you’re the only Asian person working at an Asian restaurant. It’s a running joke in the back of the house that the best Chinese food is made by Mexicans. Es la comida americana, una mezcla de todo, they say.
They teach you their language, but not the words you learn in school. It’s the only place you need to use the tongue you didn’t grow up with, but you thrive in the confusion; it means learning, adapting, every day picking up new words and phrases that you slowly learn to know by heart. Spanish is a slowly broken-in pair of shoes, uncomfortable but every day less so. The language barrier makes you appreciate the strength of the people who don’t speak the majority tongue. You empathize at the most basic level what it takes to come here and be thrown into an unfamiliar and unkind world.
When you walk out the back door at the end of your Monday nights, your favorite woman from the back of the house greets you with a smile. The smell of burning tobacco and cooking oil hangs in the air. There’s an adios, me voy returned with an cuando trabajas esta semana? You figure out when you’re going to see her next and hop into your car with a smile. You know that on Thursday you’ll be eating good.
This is the place you made your first money, but it’s more than that too. Here you learned never to mix hot oil and water, that crushing on your coworkers never ends well, and that when someone pays for $9.59 worth of noodles with a crisp ten it makes the best kind of change. Pero las cosas más importantes que te daba este trabajo eran los recuerdos de las personas que dejaste detrás. Y, por supuesto, la comida gratis.