My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store (24 page)

This sort of scene gets repeated any number of times each day. Rather than wait even thirty seconds for help, Kay will invariably move the oppressively unwieldy racks of produce and soft drinks inside the deli herself. She’s as much the compulsive nonprocrastinator as ever. The family has tried to restrain her, but without physically stopping her it’s simply impossible.

“What if we make the store so successful that your mother doesn’t have to work there anymore?” I asked Gab the other day. She shook her head. “She’d still come in and kill herself. When it comes to work, she doesn’t trust anyone else, not even me or Emo. She wants to do everything herself.”

I think about that remark a lot, because it suggests that self-reliance is a compulsion, not a skill you acquire because you or
your parents thought it would be good for character development. You acquire it by being scarred, and becoming incurably suspicious that if you don’t take care of a job yourself, no one will. Which is a harsh statement, if true, because how many of us are lucky enough to be immigrants, war refugees or single parents? (Maybe being a shopkeeper comes close?)

In order to convince Kay to slow down, I need to know what makes her tick
. But how do you even begin to understand someone whose origins are so distant? Sometimes I look at her the way I look at a musician or an athlete and think I could never do what they do.

Don’t get me wrong—I’m not suggesting that Kay’s an automaton. In Korea, her generation experienced some awful things during the Korean War—massacres, aerial bombardment, forced relocations—which she doesn’t talk about. And as immigrants the Paks went through plenty of other dramas, which similarly aren’t discussed. The sum of those experiences, I’m certain, tended to numb as well as focus the mind.

After the paper towels and the pet food, she and I move on to the personal hygiene section, above which Jetro’s corrugated steel roof, now popping in the late morning heat, has sprung a leak, resulting in a flood that even a lifetime supply of Bounty can’t soak up. Naturally, Jetro’s management acts as if the thigh-deep puddle isn’t there. Kay and I look at each other. Should we have brought our own inflatable canoe? The Black Pond of Aisle Seven is filled with pigeon feathers, floating Optimo cigars and other crud, and as I wade in I worry about it carrying some electric current too. But since the warehouse is now roasting like an oven, it actually feels refreshing, and with the cases of tampons and Huggies perched on my shoulders as I make one sortie after another into the muck, I can easily imagine the studio audience for
Shop to Death!
cheering in appreciation—not to mention the denizens of Boerum Hill. Of
course, wet pants become something of a liability in Jetro’s frozen section (“Gotcha!” the producers scream), and as I run around frantically fetching frozen logs of baloney while icicles of sweat form on my eyebrows and pneumonia develops in my lungs, the studio audience breaks into nervous laughter. I would laugh too, if only these sorts of tasks weren’t the ones gradually killing Kay.

AFTER JETRO ONE
task remains, a brief stop at Jetro’s little cousin, a Yemeni-owned place called Screaming Eagle.

Unlike Jetro, I look forward to going to Screaming Eagle. It’s smaller and even grubbier, but its young owner, Walid, is right down there in the squalor with you, and it’s one of those obscure but integral parts of the city whose existence I would never even have known about had we not gone into the deli business. Nevertheless, as soon as we get there, I always have to fight the urge to run. The place is forbidding. You park on this lifeless industrial block of truck bays and warehouses without a pedestrian in sight—just different shades and textures of concrete covered with broken glass. One of the truck bays belongs to Walid, though I can never figure out how Kay knows which one, since there’s no sign. After parking next to a car with no wheels, we approach and, finding a half-open side door, enter without knocking.

“Yoo-hoo!” says Kay, stomping out a Parliament before waltzing blithely into the darkness of a crumbling stairway. “It’s me, old Korean lady. Anybody home?”

There’s no buzzer or waiting room. You just feel your way along (unless you’re Kay, in which case you barely slow down, despite the gimpy leg) to the next door, which feels as if it could open to a dungeon, an arsenal or an opium den. Suddenly you find yourself inside a dim, low space full of men wearing ankle-length tunics, with devout-looking beards and faces that always convey surprise and displeasure no matter how many times we come. Middle Eastern
music plays in the background, but shuts off as soon as we walk in. Seeing Kay, some of the men walk out. Then Walid comes out and greets us, and while still stealing nervous glances at us, the remaining men go back to their work, which involves slicing open an endless heap of cardboard boxes containing all manner of small electronics and personal hygiene products, plus tobacco and baby formula, then setting out the boxes on shelves for clients like us to rummage through.

Given the way you enter, Screaming Eagle doesn’t feel like a legitimate business, but instead like part of an underground economy where much goes on that is sketchy. Essentially, Walid is a middleman who dips his hand in the torrents of consumer goods flowing about the globe. Things like razor blades, teeth whitener, iPod headphones and batteries moving around peripatetically between the factories where they are made and the shelves where they are finally sold, and sometimes getting hijacked. Take baby formula, one of the most expensive items in a grocery store. The underground retail market loves almost nothing more than a twenty-five-dollar can of Enfamil because it has a constant worldwide demand and the price is consistently high. In fact, illicit sales of Similac and Enfamil are thought to reach hundreds of millions of dollars globally, and attract the likes of—yes—Al Qaeda and Hezbollah. It’s laughable but true, and though Screaming Eagle isn’t an outlet of the terrorist baby-formula-and-teeth-whitening market (every time government inspectors have raided our store, their stuff has checked out), lots of places just like it in Brooklyn are.

This is one reason I have the urge to leave—the feeling of being an intruder. Walid’s employees, who have the jumpy air of newly arrived immigrants, stop working so they can stare at us. Maybe they’re offended; after all, most of Screaming Eagle’s clients are Middle Eastern shopkeepers like old Salim, who got us into this place. There aren’t many mismatched couples like the clean-cut
white guy and the Asian grandma wearing a skin-tight T-shirt and red lipstick, trailing cigarette smoke.

It testifies to Kay’s character, courage or whatever you want to call it that she appears to be the only woman to set foot into Jetro or Screaming Eagle. At first that struck me as odd, since you always see women at Korean delis. You see men too, but less frequently, and often just in their golf clothes at the beginning or the end of the day. At many Korean-owned businesses, a husband’s job is to bring money to and from the store and open the heavy steel shades (leading to the moniker “shutterman”) before heading off to the driving range. Many also pick out the store’s inventory at a place like Jetro or the Hunts Point produce market in the Bronx. However, with Edward running his own business, Kay does this part, too.

At Screaming Eagle she avidly sifts through the cardboard boxes. She’s in her element; this is her kind of shopping. It takes brass to come in here and a merchant’s steely eye to find the good stuff, and at the end Kay gets to jujitsu with Walid over prices. The discounts end up being worth it, but even if they weren’t I think Kay would come in here anyway. Afterward she always wants me to tell her what I know about Yemen and the Middle East, which isn’t much. It may look like Kay’s all business, but she’s curious, just like anyone else.
Who are these people? What are they doing here?
and
What do they think of us?
Which are, of course, the same questions I have about Kay.

GAB’S COUSIN JUNG
comes over that Sunday for a barbecue, and while chatting with him in the backyard I confide my struggle to understand Kay. “Good luck,” he chuckles. “It’s a generational thing. Her generation is special. They don’t even understand themselves.”

“What do you mean?”

“Okay, I’ll give you an example.” Jung says he was watching Korean TV recently and saw a show about Korean housewives of approximately the same age as Kay undergoing therapy for what you might translate as “hyperadvancement syndrome.”

“These were women who grew up when Korea was barely even the Third World—it was almost the Fourth World,” he says. “I mean, we’re talking outhouses, drinking out of streams, livestock in the yard.” Since the 1960s, however, South Korea had developed from one of the poorest countries in the world into what many call the most technologically advanced nation in history, with its futuristic communications infrastructure and world-dominating tech firms like Samsung. Jung, who has just come back from visiting Seoul, says the country makes the United States look old and backward (“We’re ten years behind”), and those women experiencing “hyper-advancement syndrome” had, like all Koreans, seen their world change about as much as humanly possible in one lifetime. They were suffering from future shock.

Gab’s father is a good example. The rural village he comes from, called Dogae, was home to his ancestors for sixty generations, according to family lore. When Mongol hordes invaded Korea in the thirteenth century, Edward’s relatives were there. And when the Japanese first started marauding Korea three hundred years later, they were still there. And when the Russians and the Americans divvied up Korea after World War II, things were still more or less the same. But this last generation had been different. It had cut the cord. And when Edward left, he didn’t just wind up in a neighboring village or Seoul—he went to the other side of the world.

In Kay’s case, her background was more cosmopolitan; her parents were successful merchants from North Korea who imported goods from Manchuria. Their estate was supposedly so big that it had eight gates leading up the driveway. Even as Korea endured famine and foreign occupation (Japan annexed Korea in 1910 and
held on to to it until the end of World War II), Kay’s siblings went to school in a chauffeured car, had a radio in their house and enjoyed other luxuries. However, when North Korea turned Communist in 1948, the family lost everything. Kay’s father, targeted for his fortune and his anti-Communist political activity, was arrested and sentenced to the gulag. His family won his freedom only by ransoming their estate and cashing in on a personal connection to the uncle of the future North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung, then fled to South Korea, where Kay was born.

Kay’s parents were educated; her siblings attended high school (a privilege reserved for the elite) and even college, but the family’s reduced circumstances in the south forced her to earn money instead. Blessed with that powerful voice, she joined a singing troupe that performed at weddings and baptisms, and while still a teenager she met Edward, who was serving in the South Korean navy.

Edward had also been affected by Korea’s tumult, but if dramatic ups and downs shaped Kay’s childhood, displacement shaped his. During World War II Edward’s parents went to Japan, where his father became a laborer in a tin mine and eventually died of lung poisoning. An only child, Edward was dealt another blow when, upon returning to Korea, his mother married a petty tyrant who made home life unbearable. As soon as he was eligible, Edward joined the navy and headed abroad. When he met Kay (she was working as a receptionist at a YMCA in Seoul) he was on shore leave, and immediately after their wedding he went back to sea, setting a pattern for the rest of their marriage.

Kay was left to live in the household of the tyrannical stepfather Edward couldn’t stand, serving her in-laws (as per Korean tradition) as a virtual slave. Their house, a former Japanese hospital that had been converted into a general store, was haunted by the stepfather, a cripple who began drinking every morning at ten, when the
day’s shipment of
makkali
(unrefined rice wine, also known as “farmer liquor”) arrived. By lunchtime the tiled walls would ricochet with his hateful haranguing. Whenever Kay’s mother-in-law left on an errand, her father-in-law jotted down the time, and if she returned a minute later than promised, he would haul himself over to the doorway and sit there with his stunted legs folded beneath him muttering, “I’ll kill that woman someday” while beating his palm with a ball-peen hammer. Kay’s job was to cook, clean and mind the store. She cried herself to sleep each night, accompanied by the sound of hissing, the old man’s favorite meal being snake soup, which he forced Kay to prepare using live snakes caged outside her room.

“You think you have it bad living with my parents and working at a deli?” Gab says to me one windy afternoon during a rare walk we’re taking, alone, along Staten Island’s industrial shoreline. “At least no one makes you cook snake soup.”

Eventually Kay managed to get herself kicked out of her father-in-law’s house for disobedience. On the street, she was aided by customers from the store, who took up a collection, enabling her to move into a flat. Soon afterward Edward quit the military, having recently completed an elite training program for engineers sponsored by the U.S. Navy, and from maintaining engines aboard destroyers he now attempted to shift to factory work. Kay went back to singing at weddings and baptisms, then got pregnant, and the two of them tried domestic life. However, within a year Edward went right back to sea, this time circling the planet for various commercial shipping companies. For the next decade he would be essentially absent, usually as far from South Korea as physically possible.

Kay decided she needed a more lucrative career than wedding singer. Although Edward sent home checks from Gdansk, Valparaiso and Seattle, she had little idea when they would come or
how much they would be for. Luckily, her older sister Sook Ja had just opened a bakery in downtown Seoul and was finding herself unable to handle the job alone. Kay volunteered to help and soon was running the place.