The Cooked Seed (15 page)

There were four waitresses working in the restaurant at the same time. Although we worked the same hours, the tips we earned were drastically different. While I made $25 in tips per night, Sing-Sing, a waitress from Taiwan, could earn $150; the big-breasted American girl, JoAnn, earned about $100; and Wen Li between $50 and $75. JoAnn believed the problem was my bra. “You need a super-padded bra to show off your assets! Customers like that.” JoAnn flaunted her cleavage. “That’s how you get return customers.”

I discovered that my low earnings had nothing to do with my “assets.” Mrs. Soong was pulling the strings. She brought high-tipping costumers to Sing-Sing and JoAnn’s tables, while low-tipping folks went to Wen Li and me. One group of regular Filipino costumers never tipped more than two dollars, even for a fifteen-person table. Mrs. Soong always led the same Filipino costumers to my table.

Mrs. Soong was straightforward about what she was doing. “You folks were ill educated by the Communists!” she said to Wen Li and me. “You need to be taught how to properly treat a customer. The American
way. You poor things, capitalism is such a new concept to you, isn’t it? Communism has turned you into wooden hens who don’t know how to behave in front of Western customers!”

Mrs. Soong explained that the reason she let Sing-Sing earn more was that Sing-Sing had come from her hometown. Mrs. Soong praised the way Sing-Sing charmed her customers. “She speaks fluent English, and she cracks jokes!” Wen Li and I tried our best to impress Mrs. Soong, but she was unmoved. While Sing-Sing took her breaks, we were ordered to clean soy sauce bottles, peel pea pods, and help the busboy clean the floor and set up tables and chairs.

I didn’t think Mrs. Soong was being unfair. I believed that I should earn her respect through my performance. The trouble was that earning such low pay was not worth my time and energy. By the time I subtracted the ten-dollar round-trip train fare from the twenty-five dollars of tips, I made only fifteen dollars per night.

I hung on. I learned to smile to customers and became expert at wrapping the stuffed mu-shu pancakes. I began to earn better tips with new customers whom Mrs. Soong hadn’t yet sorted as high- or low-tipping people. When I worked the lunch shift during the summer, Mrs. Soong observed me. She would call me a wooden hen if she thought that I talked “too little” to customers. But when I started to chat with customers, she accused me of being a chatterbox. If I walked fast, Mrs. Soong would “whisper” loudly behind me, “Is my house on fire?” When I slowed down, she would hiss, “I didn’t hire you to be lazy!”

I didn’t mind Mrs. Soong’s attitude and bluntness. I never knew exactly the reason why my bosses back in China punished me. With Mrs. Soong, it was up to me to adjust myself and improve. I was happy with my relationship with Mrs. Soong, although I knew that I was being exploited. By American standards, Mrs. Soong owed me minimum wage. Yet who was I to demand such rights? Mrs. Soong was the hand that fed me.

One day a couple of customers left without paying the bill. By the time I ran to the parking lot, they were gone. As a punishment, Mrs. Soong made me pay. It took every penny I earned that day. A week later, while I was busy wrapping pancakes, Wen Li told me that the customer I had just served had left without tipping. It was a nice elderly couple. I
didn’t know what to do. I only knew that I was not supposed to chase after customers for a tip.

To my surprise, Mrs. Soong decided to intervene. In her high-collared burgundy-and-pink Chinese dress, she went after the customers. Smiling like a blossoming flower, she asked the elderly couple, “Did you have a good time dining at my restaurant?”

“Absolutely,” the couple responded. “The best meal we ever had, as a matter of fact!”

“Then would you please kindly let me know the reason you left no tip so that I can tell my waitress to improve her service?”

“Oh, no, we are terribly sorry!” The couple had forgotten the tip. They apologized and offered it.

One lunchtime, Mrs. Soong took care of a credit card bill. When she noticed that a customer left me a five-dollar tip over a six-dollar dish, she was upset. “The customer could have ordered another dish!” she said. “I hope you didn’t try to hit on him, or did you?”

Thanksgiving day, we had almost no costumers. At the end of the day, I had earned negative-ten dollars due to the train fare. I felt sorrier for Mrs. Soong. She stood in front of her restaurant window and stared into the snow. All day long she was silent. Her lips pursed tightly. She must have been thinking of the money she would lose on preparing the meat, vegetables, rice, and soup on top of her rent and the salaries to the chef and his assistants.

My head nodded during art history class in the auditorium. I was so tired that when the slides came on and the professor began his monologue, I began to doze off. I put Chinese Tiger Balm on my eyelids, hoping that the discomfort would help me stay awake. The lecture was on the Mesopotamian region three thousand years ago. My English could barely grasp the basics of what was being said.

I failed the midterm in art history. I went to the teacher’s assistant and asked for help. We negotiated a deal. As long as I could spell the name of the artist and remember the date the piece was created and its title, he would give me a passing score. And if I wrote a paragraph on the significance of the piece, I would earn an even higher grade. To
make it easier for me, the assistant exempted the first name of the artist. He would let me pass with “Picasso” instead of “Pablo Picasso.”

On the train to Libertyville, I recited each slide’s name, date, title, and significance. I wasn’t aware that I was becoming sick. I had been ignoring my exhaustion. I told myself that I didn’t have time to be sick. Yet my body revolted. I felt weak and was short of breath. A few times I passed out in elevators and once almost threw up in class. “Are you pregnant?” the professor asked.

I tried to keep up with my schoolwork and my various jobs. When I felt truly awful, I rested my head on my arms.
No quitting
, I kept telling myself.

One day I coughed blood. My immediate thought was,
I could harm the customers if I have tuberculosis!
I phoned Mrs. Soong to explain why I had to quit.

I made a doctor’s appointment at a family health center in Chicago. Although I had student health insurance, my copay was 20 percent, which was still a huge amount to me.

Dr. Dutch was the one who received me. He was a gentle-looking white man. He told me that my condition was so grave that I needed to be hospitalized immediately. He told me that he had already contacted Saint Joseph Hospital, and that they were expecting me. He asked if I was with someone who could drive me to the hospital. I told him that I had nobody. “I’ll take the subway.”

“No,” Dr. Dutch insisted. “You could collapse.” He glanced at his watch and then asked me to wait. It was five P.M. He said that he would be off work in half an hour and would give me a ride to the hospital.

Two strong male nurses showed up the moment Dr. Dutch dropped me off at the hospital entrance. I was led to an isolation room where a heavyset black lady stood guard at the door. As far as I understood, I was to be tested for possible viruses.

The night in the hospital was long. I learned that it would cost me thirty-three dollars a day to watch TV in the room. I couldn’t help but think that I earned only twenty-five dollars a day. The next morning I was put through a white tube. It made me feel like I was living in a science fiction movie.

I was given an IV needle. After a few hours, I felt nauseated. Fearing
medical expenses, I endured the discomfort. I wished that someone would explain to me what was going on.

My nausea worsened the next morning. I could barely think, but I tried my best not to bother the doctors. I began to hallucinate. I heard the phone ring and my aunt on the other end. I knew it was impossible, but I could hear her voice: “Do you know the cost of medical expenses in America?”

I struggled to overcome the nausea, but I felt sicker as the hours went by. I had no memory of passing out, but when I opened my eyes, a group of doctors stood around me. They talked among themselves. I couldn’t understand anything. In fact I could barely hear them. They sounded like faraway mosquitoes. When one of them spoke to me, I responded, “I can’t hear you.”

It didn’t occur to me that it might have been the drugs that were knocking the senses out of me.

I was determined not to cause any trouble. In China I was taught to endure pain. The next morning I woke up to face a different group of doctors. I realized that I couldn’t hear their voices at all—not even the mosquito sound.

I endured as much as I could and didn’t report how I really felt. I passed out in the end. When I woke, I was lying on the floor between the bed and the bathroom. I was no longer connected to the IV needle, as it had snapped out of my vein in my fall. I felt much better. I now knew for sure that it was the drug. I got myself up and moved toward the door. The black lady outside said to me, “Please get back into your room, now!”

After ten days of hospitalization, I was told that the doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with me. The blood I had coughed up was not from my lungs. It was from a vessel between my neck and right shoulder. I asked the doctor to write down my trouble, but my Chinese-English dictionary didn’t have any translations for medical terms. I asked the doctor to give me a general idea of what was wrong with me. The doctor said that it might be genetic, and that it could happen again when my immune system was down.

The doctors concluded that “depression” was part of my illness. I
looked up the word
depression
in my dictionary, but it didn’t make sense. How could I suffer a depression when I didn’t feel depressed?

I was instructed to see Dr. Kelly, a psychiatrist who ran an office in the basement of the school. I had neither the desire nor the time to visit her. I had enough trouble on my hands. My roommates suspected that I carried a contagious disease and were kicking me out. I was looking for a new place to live.

After more thought, I decided to see Dr. Kelly. At least I could use her to practice my English. If my English had been good enough to tell the doctors about my reaction to the drugs, I wouldn’t have suffered as long or as badly while in the hospital.

Dr. Kelly turned out not to be what I had expected. She was a white woman who spoke in a soft and concerned voice. My problem with her was that she wanted me to do the talking. She gave the shortest answers when I asked her questions about herself.

Why would I want to waste time listening to my own poor English? I tried to steer the conversation back to her. But Dr. Kelly refused to talk. She asked questions and expected me to give her lengthy answers. I became unhappy. It was a waste of time for both of us. Dr. Kelly kept telling me that I ought to “let go” by speaking. She believed that I’d get rid of my depression if I could just “release” my trouble.

“I don’t see how this is working,” I said.

She insisted that I needed to talk.

“What do I talk about?”

“Anything,” she said. “It’s my job to listen. You can discuss anything with me, for example, your deepest fear. It would be confidential.”

“What does
confidential
mean?”

“It means that your secret will rest safe with me.”

Why would she want to know my fears and secrets? She couldn’t and wouldn’t be able to help me even if she wanted to. She said it was her job. Did she mean that her service was part of my tuition?

I told Dr. Kelly that I didn’t feel like troubling her with my fears and secrets. She said, “That’s what I am here for.”

“You mean it?”

“Of course.”

“Okay, here it is: I fear the coming of my visa expiration date, and I fear not being able to pay off my debt.”

She listened, took notes, and looked at me intently.

I waited for her response, but she remained quiet.

Disappointed, I shut up.

She suggested that I keep talking.

“I have let myself go,” I said. “I have done the ‘releasing.’ I don’t feel any less troubled. Talking doesn’t help me.”

Dr. Kelly insisted that we continue. We made another appointment. We met every Tuesday from noon to 12:45 P.M. It was economical to use my lunch break. Since Dr. Kelly would charge as a doctor, I imagined the bill would be high. And this bothered me a great deal.

Dr. Kelly phoned me. She said that it was rude to stop showing up without calling to cancel first. I just wanted to avoid her. Would I like to see her again? Of course not. Why? Because I hated the sound of my own voice in her little office. I could have painted a dozen roses on ladies’ underwear and made three dollars.

Dr. Kelly reminded me that it was part of my medical treatment. “Your health is my priority,” she insisted. I promised that I’d go and see her again. She wanted to focus on the root of my depression. She wanted to discuss my loneliness. Should I tell her that I had been using my
Sex Education
videotape? That I dreamed of making love with a real man? That I wept when I was pleasing myself? Should I let her know that the
Sex Education
videotape was a better psychiatrist?

I came up with a one-stone, two-bird plan. I told Dr. Kelly that if I continued to see her, she had to promise to correct my English. I’d get treated while improving my English. Dr. Kelly smiled, and I took it as a promise. When I showed up, I answered all her questions. But she didn’t correct my English. She didn’t fix even one English grammar error. Through the entire session I had to listen to my own voice until I caught a mistake on my own.

“You didn’t fix me,” I complained. “So I can’t come again.”

I kept dreaming of my mother dressed in black clothes. It had been three years since I had left China. My homesickness chewed at my
heart. I had saved enough money for airfare, but the fear of applying for a new visa stopped me. I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to reenter America.

Through letters I learned that my mother had survived a stroke. My father was still recovering from his stomach cancer. So many times I thought of taking the chance to return home. I had heard stories of students who took that risk and were never granted a visa back to America.