InTheAmericanSocietyGishJen

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1、Four short words sum up what has lifted most successful individuals above the crowd: a little bit more.-author-dateIn-The-American-Society-by-Gish-JenIn The American Society by Gish JenIn The American Society by Gish JenWhen my father took over the pancake house, it was to send my little sister Mona

2、 and me to college. We were only in junior high at the time, but my father believed in getting a jump on things. “Those Americans always saying it, “he told us. “Smart guys thinking in advance.” My mother elaborated, explaining that businesses took bringing up, like children. They could take years t

3、o get going, she said, years. In this case, though, we got rich right away. At two months we were breaking even, and at four, those same hotcakes that could barely withstand the weight of butter and syrup were supporting our family with ease. My mother bought a station wagon with air conditioning, m

4、y father an oversized, red vinyl recliner for the back room; and as time went on and the business continued to thrive, my father started to talk about his grandfather and the village he had reigned over in Chinathings my father had never talked about when he worked for other people. He told us about

5、 the bags of rice his family would give out the poor at New Years, and about the people who came to beg, on their hands and knees, for his grandfather to intercede for more wayward of their relatives. “Like that Godfather in the movie,” he would tell us as, his feet up, he distributed paychecks. Som

6、etimes an employee would get two green envelopes instead of one, which meant that Jimmy needed a tooth pulled, say, or that Tiffanys husband was in the clinker again. “Its nothing, nothing,” he would insist, sinking back into his chair. “Who else is going to take care of you people?”My mother would

7、mostly just sigh about it. “Your father thinks this is China,” she would say, and then she would go back to her mending. Once in a while, though, when my father had given away a particularly large sum, she would exclaim, outraged, “But this here is the US-ofA” this apparently having been what she us

8、ed to tell immigrant stock boys when they came in late. She didnt work at the supermarket anymore; but she had made it to the rank of manager before she left, and this had given her not only new words and phrases, but new ideas about herself, and about America, and about what was what in general. Sh

9、e had opinions, now, on how downtown should be zoned; she could pump her own gas and check her own oil; and for all she used to chide Mona and me for being “copycats,” she herself was now interested in espadrilles, and wallpaper, and most recently, the two country clubs. “So join already,” said Mona

10、, flicking a fly off her knee. My mother enumerated the problems as she sliced up a quarter round of watermelon: There was the cost. There was the waiting list. There was the fact that no one in our family played either tennis or golf.“So what?” said Mona. “It would be waste,” said my mother.“Me and

11、 Callie can swim in the pool.”“Plus you need that recommendation letter from a member.”“Come on,” said Mona. “Annies momd write you a letter in sec.”My mothers knife glinted in the early summer sun. I spread some more newspaper on the picnic table. “Plus you have to eat there twice a month. You know

12、 what that means.” My mother cut another, enormous slice of fruit. “No, I dont know what that means,” said Mona.“It means Dad would have to wear a jacket, dummy,” I said.“Oh! Oh! Oh!” said Mona, clasping her hand to her breast. “Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!”We all laughed: my father had no use for nice cloth

13、es, and would wear only ten-year-old shirts, with grease-spotted pants, to show how little he cared what anyone thought. “Your father doesnt believe in joining the American society,” said my mother. “He wants to have his own society.” “So go to dinner without him.” Mona shot her seeds out in long ar

14、cs over the lawn. “Who cares what he thinks?”But of course we all did care, and knew my mother could not simply up and do as she pleased. For in my fathers mind, a family owed its head a degree of loyalty that left no room for dissent. To embrace what he embraced was to love; and to embrace somethin

15、g else was to betray him.He demanded a similar sort of loyalty of his workers, whom he treated more like servants than employees. Not in the beginning, of course. In the beginning all he wanted was for them to keep on doing what they used to do, and to that end he concentrated mostly on leaving them

16、 alone. As the months passed, thought, he expected more and more of them, with the result that for all this largesse, he began to have trouble keeping help. The cooks and busboys complained that he asked them to fix radiators and trim hedges, not only at the restaurant, but at our house; the waitres

17、ses that he sent them on errands and made them chauffeur him around. Our head waitress, Gertrude, claimed that he once even asked her to scratch his back. “Its not just the blacks dont believe in slavery,” she said when she quit.My father never quite registered her complaint, though, nor those of th

18、e others who left. Even after Eleanor quit, then Tiffany, then Gerald, and Jimmy, and even his best cook, Eureka Andy, for whom he had bought new glasses, he remained mostly convinced that the fault lay with them. “All they understand is that assembly line,” he lamented. “Robots, they are. They want

19、 to be robots.”There were occasions when the clear running truth seemed to eddy, when he would pinch the vinyl of his chair up into little peaks and wonder if he were doing things right. But with time he would always smooth the peaks back down; and when business started to slide in the spring, he ke

20、pt on like a horse in his ways. By the summer our dishboy was overwhelmed with scrapings. It was no longer just the hashbrowns that people were leaving for trash, and the service was as bad as the food. The waitresses served up French pancakes instead of German, apple juice instead of orange, spilt

21、things on laps, on coats. On the Fourth of July some greenhorn sent an entire side of fries slaloming down a ladys massif centrale. Meanwhile in the back room, my father labored through articles on the economy.“What is housing starts?” he puzzled. “What is GNP?”Mona and I did what we could, filling

22、in as busgirls and bookkeepers and, one afternoon, stuffing the comments box that hung by the cashiers desk. That was Monas idea. We rustled up a variety of pens and pencils, checked boxes for an hour, smeared the cards up with coffee and grease, and waited. It took a few days for my father to notic

23、e that the box was full, and he didnt say anything about it for a few days more. Finally, though, he started to complain of fatigue; and then he began to complain that the staff was not what it could be. We encouraged him in this-pointing out, for instance, how many dishes got chipped-but in the end

24、 all that happened was that, for the first time since we took over the restaurant, my father got into his head to fire someone. Skip, a skinny busboy who was saving up for a sportscar, said nothing as my father mumbled on about the price of dishes. My fathers hands shook as he wrote out the severanc

25、e check; and he spent the rest of the day napping in his chair once it was over. As it was going on midsummer, Skip wasnt easy to replace. We hung a sign in the window and advertised in the paper, but no one called the first week, and the person who called the second didnt show up for his interview.

26、 The third week, my father phoned Skip to see if he would come back, but a friend of his had already sold him a Corvette for cheap. Finally a Chinese guy named Booker turned up. He couldnt have been more than thirty, but he looked as though life had him pinned: his eyes were bloodshot and his chest

27、sunken, and the muscles of his neck seemed to strain with the effort of holding his head up. In a single dry breath he told us that he had never bussed tables but was willing to learn, and that he was on the lam from the deportation authorities. “I do not want to lie to you,” he kept saying. He had

28、come to the United States on a student visa, had run out of money, and was now in a bind. He was loath to go back to Taiwan, as it happened-he looked up at this point, to be sure my father wasnt pro-KMT-but all he had was a phony social security card and a willingness to absorb all blame, should any

29、thing untoward come to pass. “I do not think, anyway, that it is against law to hire me, only to be me,” he said, smiling faintly.Anyone else would have examined him on this, but my father conceived of laws as speed bumps rather than curbs. He wiped the counter with his sleeve, and told Booker to re

30、port the next morning. “I will be good worker,” said Booker. “Good,” said my father. “Anything you want me to do, I will do.” My father nodded.Booker seemed to sink into himself for a moment. “Thank you,” he said finally. “I am appreciate your help. I am very, very appreciate for everything.” He rea

31、ched out to shake my fathers hand.My father looked at him. “Did you eat today?” he asked in Mandarin. Booker pulled at the hem of his jacket.“Sit down,” said my father. “Please, have a seat.”My father didnt tell my mother about Booker, and my mother didnt tell my father about the country club. She w

32、ould never have applied except that Mona, while over at Annies, had let it drop that our mother wanted to join. Mrs. Lardner came by the very next day. “Why, Id be honored and delighted to write you people a letter,” she said. Her skirt billowed around her.“Thank you so much,” said my mother. “But i

33、ts too much trouble for you, and also my husband is”“Oh, its no trouble at all, no trouble at all. I tell you.” She leaned forward so that her chest freckles showed. “I know just how it is. Its a secret of course, but you know, my natural father was Jewish. Can you see it? Just look at my skin.”“My

34、husband,” said my mother. “Id be honored and delighted,” said Mrs. Lardner with a little wave of her hands. “Just honored and delighted.”Mona was triumphant. “See, Mom,” she said, waltzing around the kitchen when Mrs. Lardner left. “What did I tell you? Id just honored and delighted, just honored an

35、d delighted.” She waved her hands in the air. “You know, the Chinese have a saying,” said my mother. “To do nothing is better than to overdo. You mean well, but you tell me now what will happen.”“Ill talk Dad into it,” said Mona, still waltzing. “Or I bet Callie can. Hell do anything Callie says.”“I

36、 can try, anyway,” I said.“Did you hear what I said” said my mother. Mona bumped into the broom closet door. “Youre not going to talk anything; youve already made enough trouble.” She started on the dishes with a clatter. Mona poked diffidently at a mop.I sponged off the counted. “Anyway,” I venture

37、d. “I bet our namell never even come up.”“Thats if were lucky,” said my mother.“Theres all these people waiting,” I said.“Good,” she said. She started on a pot.I looked over at Mona, who was still cowering in the broom closet. “In fact, theres some black familys been waiting so long, theyre going to

38、 sue,” I said. My mother turned off the water. “Whered you hear that?”“Patty told me.”She turned the water back on, started to wash a dish, the put it back down and shut the faucet. “Im sorry,” said Mona. “Forget it,” said my mother. “Just forget it.”Booker turned out to be a model worker, whose bou

39、ndless gratitude translated into a willingness to do anything. As he also learned quickly, he soon knew not only how to bus, but how to cook, and how to wait table, and how to keep the books. He fixed the walk-in door so that it stayed shut, reupholstered the torn seats in the dining room, and devis

40、ed a system for tracking inventory. The only stone in the rice was that he tended to be sickly; but, reliable even in illness, he would always send a friend to take his place. In this way we got to know Ronald, Lynn, Dirk, and Cedric, all of whom, like Booker, had problems with their legal status an

41、d were anxious to please. They werent all as capable as Booker, though, with the exception of Cedric, whom my father often hired even when Booker was well. A round wag of a man who called Mona and me shou hou - skinny monkeys - he was professed nonsmoker who was nevertheless always begging drags off

42、 of other peoples cigarettes. This last habit drove our head cook, Fernando, crazy, especially since, when refused a hit, Cedric would occasionally snitch one. Winking impishly at Mona and me, he would steal up to an ashtray, take a quick puff, and then break out laughing as the smoke came rolling o

43、ut of his mouth in a great incriminatory cloud.Fernando accused him of stealing fresh cigarettes too, even whole packs.“Why else do you think hes weaseling around in the back of the store all the time,” he said.His face was blotchy with anger. “The man is a thief.”Other members of the staff supporte

44、d him in this contention and joined in on an “Operation Identification,” which involved numbering and initialing their cigarettes even though what they seemed to fear for wasnt so much their cigarettes as their jobs. Then one of the cooks quit; and rather than promote someone, my father hired Cedric

45、 for the position. Rumors flew that he was taking only had the normal salary, that Alex had been pressured to resign, and that my father was looking for a position with which to placate Booker, who had been bypassed because of his health.The result was that Fernando categorically refused to work wit

46、h Cedric.“The only way Ill cook with that piece of slime,” he said, shaking his huge tattooed fist, “is if hes frying on the grill.”My father cajoled and cajoled, to no avail, and in the end was simply forced to put them on different schedules.The next week Fernando got caught stealing a carton of m

47、inute steaks. My father would not tell even Mona and, me how he knew to be standing by the back door when Fernando was on his way out, but everyone suspected Booker. Everyone but Fernando, that is, who was sure Cedric had been the tip-off. My father held a staff meeting in which he tried to reassure

48、 everyone was so amazed that he was being allowed to stay that Fernando was incensed nonetheless.“Dont you all be putting your bug eyes on me,” he said. “Hes the crook.” He grabbed Cedric by the collar.Cedric raised an eyebrow. “Cook, you mean,” he said.At this Fernando punched Cedric in the mouth;

49、and the words he had just uttered notwithstanding, my father fired him on the spot.With everything that was happening, Mona and I were ready to be getting out of the restaurant. It was almost time: the days were still stuffy with summer, but our window shade had started flapping in the evening as if

50、 gearing up to go out. That year the breezes were full of salt, as they sometimes were when they came in from the East, and they blew anchors and docks through my mind like so many tumbleweeds, filling my dreams with wherries and lobsters and grainy-faced men who squinted, day in and day out, at the

51、 sky.It was time for a change, you could feel it; and yet the pancake house was the same as ever. The day before school started my father came home with bad news.“Fernando called police,” he said, wiping his hand on his pant leg.My mother naturally wanted to know what police; and so with much coughi

52、ng and hawing, the long story began, the latest installment of immigration sending an investigator. My mother sat still as a whalebone as my father described how the man summarily refused lunch on the house and how my father had admitted, under pressure, that he knew there were “things” about his wo

53、rkers.“So now what happens?”My father didnt know. “Booker and Cedric went with him to the jail,” he said. “But me, here I am.” He laughed uncomfortably.The next day my father posted bail for “his boys” and waited apprehensively for something to happen. The day after that he waited again, and the day

54、 after that he called our neighbors law student son, who suggested my father call the immigration department under an alias. My father took his advice; and it was thus that he discovered that Booker was right: it was illegal for aliens to work, but it wasnt to hire them.In the happy interval that en

55、sued, my father apologized to my mother, who in turn confessed about the country club, for which my father had no choice but to forgive her. Then he turned his attention back to “his boys.”My mother didnt see that there was anything to do.“I like to talking to the judge,” said my father.“This is not

56、 China,” said my mother.“Im only talking to him. Im not give him money unless he wants it.”“Youre going to land up in jail.”“So what else I should do?” My father threw up his hands. “Those are my boys.”“Your boys!” exploded my mother. “What about your family? What about your wife?”My father took a l

57、ong sip of tea. “You know,” he said finally. “In the war my father sent our cook to the soldiers to use. He always said it the province comes before the town, the town comes before the family.”“A restaurant is not a town,” said my mother.My father sipped at his tea again. “You know when I first come

58、 to the United States, I also had to hide-and-seek with those deportation guys. If people did not helping me, Im not her today.”My mom scrutinized her hem.After a minute I volunteered that before seeing a judge, he might try a lawyer.He turned. “Since when did you become so afraid like your mother?”

59、I started to say that it wasnt a matter of fear, but he cut me off.“What I need today,” he said, “is a son.”My father and I spent the better part of the next day standing in lines at the immigration office. He did not get to speak to a judge, but with much persistence he managed to speak to a judges

60、 clerk, who tried to persuade him that it was not her place to extend him advice. My father, though, shamelessly plied her with compliments and offers of free pancakes until she finally conceded that she personally doubted anything would happen to either Cedric or Booker.“Especially if theyre needed

61、 workers,” she said, rubbing at the red marks her glasses left on her nose. She yawned. “Have you thought about sponsoring them to become permanent residents?”Could he do that? My father was overjoyed. And what if he saw to it right away? Would she perhaps put in a good word with the judge?She yawne

62、d again, her nostrils flaring. “Dont worry,” she said. “Theyll get a hair hearing.”My father returned jubilant. Booker and Cedric hailed him as their savior, their Buddha incarnate. He was like a father to them, they said; and laughing and clapping, they made him tell the story over and over, sortin

63、g over the details like jewels. And how old was the assistant judge? And what did she say?That evening my father tipped the paperboy a dollar and bought a pot of mums for my mother, who suffered them to be placed on the dining room table. The next night he took us all out to dinner. Then on Saturday

64、, Mona found a letter on my fathers chair at the restaurant.Dear Mr. Chang,You are the grat boss. But, we do not like to trial, so will runing away now. Plese to excus us. People saying the law in America is fears like dragon. Here is only $140. We hope some day we can pay back the rest bale. You will getting intrest, as you diserving, so grat a boss you are. Thank you for every thing. In next life you will be burn in rich family, with no more pancakesYours truley,Booker + CedricIn the weeks that followed my father went to the pancake house for crises, but