My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store (20 page)

“That’s so … selfish of you” is all I can think to say.

Before Gab can answer, the door to our bedroom swings open and Kay strides past us toward the laundry room, where the Paks have not one but
two
extra refrigerators for storing food when relatives move in.
Curious
, I think. Is someone else coming?

Kay, sensing the tension, stops, puts down the grocery bags she’s carrying and asks if something is wrong.

“Did you tell your mother?” I ask, thinking Kay will put a halt to this nonsense. She’s not ready to manage the deli without Gab, is she? What about our personnel issues? What about Bienstock and the sales taxes?

“I’ve been invited to apply for a job,” admits Gab.

“Oh really?” says Kay. “How much they pay?”

Gab rolls her eyes. “Jeez, Oma, couldn’t you at least ask me which company it is first?”

“When you start?” says Kay, who doesn’t seem perturbed in the slightest.

“I have to be interviewed first. The job hasn’t been offered yet.”

“I have to start cooking,” Kay says, already planning a feast in her head to celebrate Gab’s new job. “What you want me to make?”

“Wait,” I say, interrupting. “Am I really the only one here who thinks this is a bad idea? The store is in crisis. How are we going to get by without Gab?” I look at Kay. “Aren’t
you
worried?”

“Worried?” she replies blankly, as if it’s a strange question. “Worried because why? I have
you
. And now Emo coming.”

“WHAT?” Gab and I both gasp. Emo is Kay’s older sister and lives in Los Angeles. She used to live with Kay; however, the last time we saw her was two years ago, when she and Kay got in an argument and Emo moved out.

“When?” I exclaim.

“She be here Friday. I talk to her yesterday. You go pick her up at airport,” she says, before disappearing into the laundry room with the food she’d brought down. As Gab and I stand there, now both struck dumb, I can hear her filling up the refrigerator and singing softly.

THE AROMA STARTS
invading our bedroom an hour later. Kay had been to Hanyang, a Korean supermarket in Flushing, and brought home some of the family’s favorite dishes: pickled young radishes, salted squid, seasoned cuttlefish and vats of bean paste. When I first moved into the Paks’ house, I admit, I had a hard time with the food. Korean cuisine, which largely consists of vegetables like cucumbers and seaweed, with large components of fish and rice, is almost ridiculously healthy and flavorful, and Koreans tend to eat every meal as if a fast just ended, piling their plates with a wildly colorful assortment of food and stuffing themselves till no one can
stand up straight. However, one occasionally has the suspicion that in order to protect their cuisine from being overexposed and watered down, Koreans decided to mask it behind some extremely challenging smells, like minced garlic and fermented soybean paste. Now, my enthusiasm for food that is exotic, flavorful and hopefully spicy enough to give you breath that can peel paint runs second to no one, but the tastes and smells of Korean cuisine are so powerful that they seem to permeate everything around them—like milk, if you store it in a refrigerator with Korean food, or me, if you store me in a basement near dried anchovies and pickled cabbage.

Eventually, though, I stopped noticing what Kay’s house or, occasionally, my own hair smelled like. Not only did I get used to it; it seemed as if my tendency to scrutinize and judge had gone on a much-needed hiatus. Korean daytime TV, for instance, looks no less dim-witted than the American version, but for some reason watching
Ten Thousand Wons of Happiness
, a popular game show, doesn’t depress me the way an hour of
Pyramid
does. Korean junk food looks plenty junky, but Choco Pies, one of Gab’s favorite snacks, don’t set off the snob siren the way an equivalent American snack like MoonPies (“Oh my God, you’re really going to eat that?”) would.

Koreans also have a different perspective on what Americans take to be the all-time classic symptom of loserdom: living with one’s parents. In America, what Gab and I are doing is considered unspeakably embarrassing. However, every time I watch Korean TV with Gab and Kay, I seem to see a sitcom or a drama featuring a domestic situation that looks scarily like our own, with a multigenerational household living too close together and tearing one another apart over some drama like a shared business. There’s no stigma. It’s just normal. Kay says that modernization has started to dilute the practice of multigenerational cohabitation somewhat, and of course coming to America introduces all kinds of challenges
to traditional living arrangements. However, even after emigrating, Korean-American families tend to go on living the way we do because of the need to enlist family members in labor-intensive businesses like a deli. It’s not just that relatives make good auxiliary workers / indentured servants / child laborers; they’re also potentially available for household chores, freeing someone like Kay to focus more on business. In Kay’s home we’re constantly exchanging shifts at the last second, asking family members to fill in and trading favors like “You let me sleep an extra hour tomorrow morning, and I’ll do your laundry. Deal?” Living with coworkers provides invaluable flexibility. The house becomes an extension of the store, like a dormitory: you can sense that conveyor belt looping endlessly between the two, shuttling goods and people.

Of course, nothing could be more foreign to my own family, where personal space is guarded as vigilantly as international spheres of influence between rival nation-states. The rule against unannounced arrivals at someone’s house, for example, is enforced as zealously as the Monroe Doctrine. After personal space comes
peace
and
silence:
you can share space with someone, but you have to contain yourself, which means not just keeping your personal noise level under control (no gum cracking or scratching, no breathing like a St. Bernard) but not being a “fidgeter” or a “yapper,” especially when someone else is engaged in the all but holy practice of
reading
. (Some families, when you get them together, play sports, watch TV or eat. When you get a group of Howes together, you get group reading, not unlike the Puritans and their favorite activity: group prayer.) In general, it’s all about control—of your body, your impulses, your emotions, just as Strunk and White advocated.

But perhaps we can change, even after we’ve allegedly grown up and become set in our ways. Before we moved in with the Paks, I was the kind of sleeper who would be kept miserably awake by someone’s whistling nose hair three doors down the hall. Now I
sleep like a baby, whether Kay is vacuuming next to my head in the middle of the night or Edward is in the next room singing karaoke. Maybe it’s because I’m worn out by the store. Or maybe it’s because when lots of people are living together, someone is almost always awake, and it feels like they’re standing watch; at some point the brain can’t help but relax as a sort of pack instinct kicks in. It wouldn’t surprise me: the psychological effect of living with an extended family can be startlingly powerful, especially when the family is struggling together toward a common goal. It can suffocate not just your social life but your whole feeling of autonomy. At some point during the last year I realized that every facet of my life had become intertwined with Gab’s family: I had the same doctor, the same dentist, even the same haircutter, a Korean woman at the Staten Island Mall. Maybe moving out won’t be so easy after all. And now Gab’s got me worried that we can’t afford to anyway.

AS SPRING COMES
on and we prepare for Emo’s arrival, the deli finally gets a taste of stability, one of the most vital conditions for a successful store. Rising temperatures mean more pedestrians, particularly on weekends, which seems to correlate with about a 10 percent increase in revenue. Salim had promised us this would happen, yet for some reason I didn’t quite believe him. Maybe because there’s an air of unreality to publishing—the work is so much about what goes on inside people’s heads; words, sentences, ideas—the idea of being affected by something as elemental as the weather seems almost quaint. In any case, it’s refreshing.

Meanwhile, we’ve also settled into a routine. Now, I am no fan of repetition; I can have an existential crisis if I see the same TV commercial more than once an hour. But routine is essential for a small business—you simply can’t start making those teeny-weeny profits that are the lifeblood of your business until you know more or less exactly how much Diet Mountain Dew to order every week,
where to find a parking space whose meter you won’t have to run outside and feed every hour, and how much change to have ready when Joe Commuter marches into the store for his bagel at 7:06
A.M
. sharp.

Another development in our favor is that Gab, after tracking down Salim in Nevada, has negotiated a compromise with him and the government whereby our remaining debts on the purchase will be forgiven in exchange for paying off the tax penalty, which the state reduces by half. Also, her bluff to Bienstock seems to have worked, as for now the threatening phone calls have stopped.

However, new threats have begun to appear around us, including the arrival of two new convenience stores in the neighborhood and a sudden barrage of ambush-style government inspections. This spring we’ve been visited by undercover NYPD officers trying to catch us selling liquor on Sundays before noon (11:57
A.M.
, to be precise); Consumer Affairs personnel trying to catch us selling cigarettes and lottery tickets to minors; Consumer Affairs, again, seeing if we pad our scales or use a cat to catch mice; even the Drug Enforcement Agency, looking for contraband sales of cold medicine. No one has caught us yet, in part because Dwayne has an uncanny feel for when an inspection is under way. (It’s a sixth sense, and goes with his ability to look at someone and tell if they’ve been to prison. I have a sixth sense too, but it isn’t much use at the deli: I can look at someone and tell if they’ve been to boarding school.) However, it’s only a matter of time before they do. And when it happens, it has the potential to be devastating, because like everything in New York, the city’s fines are murderously expensive.

Kay is particularly worried, since a few months ago an old friend of hers from Seoul who owns a deli in the Village called and asked if she wanted to buy his business. No thanks, she said, my
hands are already full, but why are you selling? After all, the man owned a successful store, and to show off how proud of it he was, he had given it the kind of name it deserved, like the Garden of V.I.P.’s Diamond Deli, or something along those lines.

As it turned out, the deli’s awning, with its boisterous name followed by a long list of products the store sold, caused it to violate Paragraph A of Section 52-542 of the New York City Zoning Resolution, which forbids business from creating “visual clutter.” The fine was twenty-five hundred dollars. The cost of replacing the flashy old awning with a more demure one amounted to five thousand more. This, coming on top of endless violations that no one could remember anyone ever being cited for, like having spoons positioned incorrectly in the potato salad (for some reason they’re supposed to face down), and others that he couldn’t control, like litter outside his door, had convinced the man that it was time to get out of the deli business.

He isn’t alone. All spring we’ve been hearing about store owners hit by obscure and unreasonable fines. New York always increases its collection of things like parking tickets when the economy slows, and with the city now in its second year of recession following September 11, there are fewer tourists and less in the way of Wall Street profits to pump up revenue. Ninety percent of the city’s businesses—about 220,000, all told—employ fewer than thirty people, and the government is saying to them, We need you to contribute a greater share.

Puritans and their descendants tend to be pro-authority by nature. They’re into structure and consensus; they like doing things as a collective, like group prayer and public stoning. Even when they were taking the radical, ultimately suicidal (for many in the group) step of abandoning Mother England to follow their religious convictions, the Pilgrims did so as a nice, orderly club, spending years meticulously planning their escape. Once they got to
Plymouth, they set up a government that was no champion of individual liberty, either. They liked to intrude on one another’s affairs, sending tax collectors and the equivalent of child welfare inspectors into their own homes with onerous frequency. Unlike Thomas Jefferson’s belief that a government’s job is to do as little as possible, the Puritans were the sort of people who believed that society was at its best when smothered within a government bear hug.

Growing up, I had a vague appreciation for government, because unlike most of the big, abstract forces in America that people talked about—religion, capitalism, mass culture—it didn’t seem like much of a threat. But then again, how would I know? It’s not like I had any personal experience dealing with the state, other than the six early years I spent in public school. Like most products of the Boston suburbs, I had managed to avoid incarceration in a U.S. prison, was not pressured by my parents’ social circle of 1960s-era college professors and hippie musicians to join the military, and had never been in a jobs center, a veterans’ hospital or a staterun foster home. The one continuous up-close contact I had with the government was garbagemen, who deliberately spilled trash all over our sidewalk every Tuesday morning. There were also occasional encounters with the toll collectors on the Mass Turnpike, whose dead-eyed expressions made me want to drive away from them as fast as I could. (And for only fifty cents, they let me.) Add it all up and you’ve got about eighteen seconds of face time with the government a week.

Of course, for a small business owner, it’s your duty to hate the government with an all-consuming passion, no matter how big a fan you are of, say, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. You’re supposed to become a rabid, red-faced Contract with America–spewing zealot with a violent hatred of trial lawyers and, above all, tax collectors who think “government” is a synonym for a Mephistophelian leech sucking the hard-earned dollars out of
America’s last honest citizens. New York doesn’t help matters by never apologizing for taking your money. It’s an adversarial city. “Everyone wants a piece of us,” says Gab. There’s no union or lobbyist to stick up for you. The city itself doesn’t care. And with all the adversaries besides the government lined up against you—competition, the economy as a whole, the weather and even something as random and frequent as street repairs—the last thing you have patience for is some multichinned bureaucrat waving a clipboard. And sometimes you just want to know, as Gab said to me recently, “Who’s watching
them
to make sure it’s fair?”