Part 1 expands on my journey leading up to college and what it all means to me. Part 2 covers the conflicts, triumphs, and emotions I experience once I come to college.
For most of my life, all I knew was the mural of sauce-covered walls, the song of banging woks, and the perfume of fresh Chinese food. The restaurant was essentially where I lived: it was where I did homework, where I ate, and where I played. It was even where I did online school during the COVID pandemic. While I eventually learned to appreciate what it was, I also had almost a sense of bitterness for it—especially when I was younger. I was the Chinese restaurant kid, but I knew that I had to build an identity and life beyond it.
Ever since I began manning the register, the biggest question I got about myself was always: “So, what happens when you get older?”
“Will your parents pass this restaurant down to you?” “Will you go to college?” “Will you stay close to home?”
With a chuckle, I would say “Run away from this place”. While it came out as a joke, it was always the truth. It was always my truth. I couldn’t live the way that my parents did, and if I didn’t go to college, I would be stuck in the restaurant.
It was hard to weigh if my fear of being trapped were realistic or if it was just in my head.
As a woman, I felt especially trapped at times. The constant messages telling me that “there’s no point when you’ll just get married”, “you’re bound to get distracted by love and fail”, “women aren’t smart enough to make their own decisions”, and more made me feel afraid that I would never make it out the restaurant. These emotions weren’t helped by the fact that the very first person in our family to go college, my cousin worked so hard for her degree in architecture just to go back to the restaurant.
College was never a given to me. Despite my hard-earned 4.0 GPA and my dedicated work in my extracurriculars, I always had the looming thought in the back of my mind that in the end, I would still be stuck in the same place anyway.
Yet, I allowed the thought of college to be my escape.
I romanticized the Pinterest dorm I would live in, the mind-expanding classes I would take, and the drool-worthy foods I would eat. I spent hours upon hours dreaming and dreaming about this life that would be so different from the one I was living, where I could be the person I wanted to be and live the life that I wanted. I knew that college and moving away wouldn’t be rainbows and sunshine, but it didn’t matter. I wanted out.
My romanticization of college was only exacerbated by my siblings and my teacher.
My brothers would talk to me about their lives in college and their newfound freedoms. Their college lives weren’t perfect, but they were beginning to live on their terms. My twin sister and I would watch their college lives unfold and countdown the days until we could be like them.
Like many, my teachers were like parent figures to me. They knew more about my dreams, aspirations, likes, dislikes, and habits than my parents even. Because of just how different it was from the restaurant, the classroom was my escape.
In one of the many discussions about my hopes and aspirations with Ms. Pearson, my psychology and civics teacher, she told me, “One day, you’ll get out of here, whether it’s in New York—where you dream of going—or somewhere else, and you’ll realize that a bigger world exists. And one day you’ll look back at this and see how far you’ve come.” She was good at giving me arousing, uplifting pep talks. You can say that it worked.
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In my senior year of high school, I began to realize what going to college would actually mean for me and the people I loved.
Over the past few years, I had slowly become my mother’s main emotional support system. As college got closer and closer, I became increasingly anxious about leaving my mother. I also became increasingly worried about my parent’s struggle to find replacement employees for my sister and me. My worries were worsened by the complicated, inconsistent situation with money, the student organizations that also struggled to replace me, and my shrinking confidence in my abilities to thrive independently. But no one was going to fix my problems for me, and I owed it to my childhood self to make out a plan for myself and the things I was preparing to leave behind.
At my busiest, I picked up four jobs at once over the summer. To me, staying busy with jobs would show my parents that I was set on leaving the restaurant life behind and had the determination to make something of myself. I had to prove to myself and them that I was someone that took advantage of opportunities and could make the most out of my time. It also gave me the pride to make my own money and not ask my parents for things. But more importantly, I wanted an excuse to not be home to let me begin to feel independent and force my parents to address the worker shortage that would come without me or my sister in the house. Over the summer, I would help when they needed it, but I wanted them to finally stop avoiding the issue.
They tried to find people to replace my sister and me, but the kids in the family were such a critical force in the restaurant that they realized just how much they relied on us. Finding someone bilingual in Chinese and English who worked well under pressure and could handle the demands of my father and the customers was grueling and painful. At the time I left, my parents hired a seemingly promising couple, but they would eventually only last a month.
Between my sister and I, she was the first to go. She was accepted into a summer program for first-generation minority students at her school. Initially, she wanted to scrap the offer in fear that the restaurant would suffer from her early departure, but in a heartfelt conversation, I told her “Transitioning into college is hard enough —especially in a school that’s known to be very rich and very white, you might struggle to find your community. This will help you find where you belong. Don’t worry about the restaurant. You’ve worked hard enough; it’s time you put yourself first.” While those words were for my sister, I also realized that they were what I needed to hear too. Problems in the restaurant will always exist, but I have to learn to let go.
I was the last of four to finally leave for college. Remembering how my mother had avoided sending my sister off by pretending to be asleep to avoid being vulnerable, I made her promise that she would be at the door when I left. Because after everything that’s happened over the last 19 years between us, she was still my beautiful, strong mother, and I would miss her. She followed through. Even though she never said it and sometimes acted in a contradictory way, she was proud that I made it out of the restaurant.
My relationship with my father was more complicated. I had resented many of the decisions he made and, frankly, held an unforgiving grudge toward him. When we drove to the airport, I expected him to lecture me about being too naïve and foolish, but he didn’t. He was excited for me. And when we got off at the terminal, I unloaded my baggage from the trunk. As he began to go back to the car, I asked him to turn around, and for the first time in my whole teenage life, I embraced him. And when I let go, I felt like a life–the only life I really knew–was already beginning to disappear.
The restaurant had defined my whole life before college. I spent more time there than anywhere else. When I was younger, I wished my parents weren’t restaurant owners, but the restaurant gave me experiences that needed to happen for me to become who I am. Not only am I now an expert at talking to strangers and working under demanding bosses, but I also became a more resilient person that makes the most out of her relationships and time. My experiences are what makes me passionate about things I care about: social issues, food, business, and family. The restaurant is not where I belong, but it did use to be my home. Now, I’m building a new home for myself and figuring out who exactly I am without being defined by the hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant life that followed me for so long.
My experience because of my life and identity as a Chinese restaurant kid is an inseparable component of my identity, but my story is not that unique. We Chinese restaurant kids are everywhere, yet we’re all so different. Some of us want to run from the restaurant; some of us want to stay. Some of us liked being entangled with the restaurant; some of us wanted nothing to do with it. Life because of the restaurant was not made necessarily a bad or good thing on its own. It’s what we make of it.