My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store (25 page)

Managing a bakery meant waking up at three in the morning every day, not the sort of work that fits well with raising young children. Fortunately, Kay had help—Edward’s stepfather had recently passed away, and Edward’s mother had moved into their apartment. With her babysitting, Kay was able to turn the bakery into one of the more popular eateries in Seoul.

The bustling bakery was in a trendy part of the city favored by South Korean celebrities. It had small coffee-shop tables and a large young staff, some of whom lived in what was becoming a sort of dormitory in Kay’s apartment. Within a few years it had become so successful that Kay decided to expand, so she bought a restaurant that specialized in tripe soup, which Koreans typically eat for lunch. And she bought a bigger apartment to accommodate all the workers she was taking care of, and a Hyundai Pony, which, according to Gab, made her very proud.

“She used to get in the Pony and open the window so people could see her at the wheel, then drive it one block to change parking spaces,” Gab once told me. At night she went out with friends wearing flashy jewelry and European shoes. Korea as a country was now fully immersed in hyperchange, the negative effects of which included abominable pollution and great political instability (coups, strikes, assassinations), but so far Kay was enjoying it all just fine, thank you very much. Twenty years earlier, she and Edward might have gone back to Dogae and settled into a thatch-roofed farmhouse, and Kay might have spent the rest of her life washing clothes in the river and growing her own food. Instead, she had a career
and
security for her family that she herself provided, plus the resources to indulge herself. What’s more, she had the satisfaction
of making it up as she went along, of standing out. Her own mother had been a strong woman and a partner to her father’s businesses, but she was nothing like Kay. For what Kay was doing, there were no role models.

But then Edward had enough of shipping and came home, and everything changed. He would never have insisted on Kay staying in the kitchen—he was both worldlier and not nearly cruel enough. The question was more, How would
he
fit in? Where was
his
place now? What would
he
do? You have to feel for Edward—he’d spent the better part of a decade toiling in one of the world’s most dangerous professions, and upon his return he found his home filled with strangers, his country in the midst of an industrial revolution (not to mention a brief but severe recession at the end of the 1970s), and his own children barely able to recognize him. As he looked for ways to establish himself, his marriage with Kay began to fray.

For all the confidence Kay had earned as a single parent, this struck surprising terror into her. As a woman in a male-dominated society, Kay could never shake the feeling that by stepping into a “man’s role” she was violating some natural law of the universe. “My mother is a very complicated person,” Gab says. “On one hand she’s a sort of feminist, believing women ought to be assertive and independent. For instance, when I was growing up she used to tell me that the sort of woman she admired was an ‘inteli,’ which comes from the English word ‘intellectual’ but in Korea means an educated, independent, career person. However, she also believes that women should cook, clean and raise kids, and anything different from that freaks her out. In her mind a woman should stay at home, because anything else will eventually break up the family. It’s unnatural, she thinks. And since she’s also very superstitious, these things really bother her.”

So when Edward came home and found himself uncharacteristically
idle, Kay decided she would give up her own independence in order to restore the “proper” marital balance. She came up with a plan. “My mother knew my dad would never be happy in Korea,” Gab explained, “so she offered to move to the U.S., because that was a country he knew.” (During his time in the U.S.-sponsored engineering program, Edward had been stationed for a few months on the West Coast.) Of course, the fact that Korea as a whole was experiencing a fit of
migukpyong
—America fever—nudged her along as well. Twenty years earlier, there had been almost no Korean immigration to the States, but since the Hart-Celler Act of 1965, which ended the de facto policy of accepting only white immigrants, Korea had sent more émigrés here than any country except Mexico or the Philippines. Kay, who had never been outside Korea, had zero interest in America. She disliked the food, didn’t particularly care for the culture and had heard too many stories of Koreans in the United States who ended up working twice as hard for less money. (They used to say that at Kimpo Airport you could spot the immigrants coming home from America because they all looked like guh-ji—bums. Kay was also disturbed by the ubiquitous stories of immigrant parents being abandoned by their Americanized children.)

Approximately a million people of Korean ancestry now live in America, and the sheer size of the group is a factor contributing to its success. There are Korean radio stations, Korean newspapers and Korean business associations with considerable lobbying power in cities like New York and Los Angeles. Korean businesses tend to work with other Korean businesses and depend heavily on networks built around social organizations such as churches. However, Gab’s family always seemed to unconsciously avoid places with large Korean populations, starting out in Houston for a couple of years, then moving to rural Ohio, and finally in Staten Island (which at the time had fewer Korean residents than any
other borough). This made the struggle of adapting to a new country even harder than it could have been. As Kay had feared, the family suffered a steep drop in its standard of living—everything they’d brought with them from Korea, all the proceeds from selling Kay’s businesses, went into founding a family-owned air-conditioning company, which, like all start-ups (particularly those in a country that the owner has just moved to), struggled at first and went through years of ups and downs. Until Edward became established, the Paks were forced to live in trailer parks and a brutal succession of blighted condominiums overlooking highways and cemeteries. Kay had no choice but to work in sweatshops and as a night cashier at stores, and meanwhile she still had to raise three kids and open her doors to an endless stream of visitors, including me and Gab. Despite her attempt to restore the “traditional” balance between a husband and wife, there was no switch from breadwinner to full-time housewife.

But of course there was a happy ending: the family stayed together. In that sense, things have worked out. And now, with the store getting on its feet, there is finally the potential to restore what had been lost.

On that day when I stand at the window watching Kay smoke in her tank top (never has the name for that particular shirt style suited its wearer more appropriately, by the way), it feels as if we are in some kind of golden moment, and it almost looks that way, too. For one thing, the sun is setting, and at six o’clock on a July day the light filtering through the industrial haze of New Jersey is nothing if not peachlike. (To my mind Brooklyn is always at its best during a long summer sunset, when it is still a city and still dense with neighborly interaction, but when the volume and pace are at a humane level and you don’t feel literally overshadowed by the sheer bulk of New York’s money and ambition.) For another, inside the store a few feet away from me, one of our new workers, an eagle-eyed
college kid named Kevin, is meticulously unpacking a shipment of inventory in front of a startled frozen food deliveryman. After failing in our initial attempts to hire people other than Dwayne who don’t share TV time with us every night, in Kevin we’ve developed a competent, able-bodied employee who craves as many shifts as we can give him. Kevin has an especially useful talent: he makes a sport of sniffing out the deliverymen’s tricks and is essentially a one-man stop-loss squad, probably saving us hundreds of dollars a week. And with Emo making the morning shift into smooth sailing and Dwayne thwarting the narcs, it feels like we’re actually covering our bases for once, instead of constantly being caught out of position.

Meanwhile, a group of Mexican busboys stand in back, boisterously but not offensively getting smashed on cases of Corona Light sold to them at a special regulars’ discount. Residents of one of Chucho’s overcrowded rooming house–style apartments upstairs, they’ve been doing this now every Wednesday since the start of the summer. Other regulars—I’d say we currently know about a third of all people who come into the store by name—keep coming in and lingering by the checkout counter, some for a few hours. They bring their lizards and their dogs, their mothers in Nebraska (via cell phone, of course) and all their annoying habits, like the Russian limo driver who always starts shouting lottery numbers at me when I’m in the middle of talking or counting someone else’s change, or the woman in neon pink spandex who can never decide what sandwich to order and stands there at the counter slowing down the line. Some of the regulars have come back—Super Mario, Barry the half-blind cab driver, a soft-spoken Haitian waiter known as “the General” who stands in the snack section every night for two hours and doesn’t speak. I’m not sure why they’ve returned. At one point back in the spring I think we all realized how miserable we’d become, and it could be that since then we’ve
made an effort to be friendlier. Surely success brightens one’s attitude.

Speaking for myself, the biggest change has been a kind of loosening of that legendary clenched-sphincter Puritan uptightness. Even with a store as small as ours you can control almost nothing—except maybe the environment. And I had tried. Imposing my will on the music or the coffee was a way of making me feel like we were also capable of influencing bigger things, like our fate as a family or my marriage. However, it was even worse than I feared—in addition to all the things about a streetside business that are fundamentally chaotic, there was Dwayne, and there was the built-in instability of our neighborhood, and there was all the arguing at home, which made decision making of any kind all but impossible. Gradually, I began to surrender some of my own ability to control—a decision here and a decision there. Nothing since then has happened that I can directly attribute to my new, Zen frame of mind, and yet I’m almost sure that it has helped. For one thing, the inventory (which is essentially the store itself) has attained a kind of equilibrium: we’re no longer the junk food bazaar we were when we took over, but we never got more than halfway to being the gourmet market I wanted to be, either. The store is a mutant, a hybrid. It isn’t coherent in the slightest—the first time people come in, they often get that “Huh?” look on their faces as they struggle to process the mixed signals sent by a lottery machine and tofu jerky, or by Olde English malt liquor and Belgian Trappist beer. But I learned to accept this and so did most of the customers, maybe because our lives weren’t coherent. New York wasn’t coherent. Why force it to be?

The reward has been that after being a spaz my whole life—I’m a socially nervous person and always will be—I have an almost greater comfort with strangers than I do with people I know well.
Standing there all day not knowing who’s going to come in next or what they’re going to say, you have almost no choice except to become a bit more easygoing, and to trust more. It’s a good thing. Everyone should work at a checkout counter for some part of their lives.

AFTER SIX MONTHS OF WORKING WITH DWAYNE, I STILL CAN’T
decide if he’s the store’s biggest asset or worst liability. On the positive side, you have an employee who shows up for work on time six days a week and frequently comes in on his off day as well. You have an employee who when he’s at work rarely stops working, whether he’s washing refrigerator doors or assembling Sunday newspapers. You have an employee who’s essentially a foolproof government sting detector, a discouragement to would-be troublemakers and the convenience store equivalent of Daniel Boulud or some celebrity chef, all rolled up into one.

On the other hand, you have an employee who is a constant
headache, whether he’s openly disobeying instructions, second-guessing his bosses in front of customers, barking at the customers themselves or merely dropping jaws with outrageous behavior and lewd commentary. You have an employee whose friends and family come into the store and do everything possible to distract him. You have an employee who’s almost as much of a magnet for trouble as he is a deterrent.

And you have the gun.

I have long worried, without telling anyone, that Dwayne brings a gun to work. One day, early on, Dwayne was carrying on with his usual stories of wildings and carjackings (he had just finished telling me about the time he stabbed a man in the cheek with a fork) when he asked me:

“So what do you carry?”

“Carry?”

“To protect yourself.”

I was taken off guard (not to mention still getting over that image of the fork in the face). We had been in the store only a week or so, and self-protection was—somewhat bizarrely, in retrospect—way down my list of priorities. I had bigger things to worry about at the time, like remembering the price of Coors Light tallboys and finding the stamina to stay awake. But I didn’t want Dwayne to think that I was so naïve as to have not given the issue thought. So I muttered something I hoped would be indecipherable, somewhere between “I forget” and “a salad fork,” which Dwayne rightly interpreted as “nothing.”

He was apoplectic, of course. The way he made it sound, brownstone Brooklyn was still an urban combat zone, despite the peaceful changes gentrification had wrought. The store would be robbed sooner or later—it wasn’t a question of
if
but of
how many times
. And it was a question of how you responded: submissively or Dwayne-style, which would send a message to the United Convenience Store
Stickup Men’s Association, or some similar organization, and determine whether you became a frequent or merely an occasional target. Not preparing yourself wasn’t an option.

“Well, what do
you
carry?” I asked.