Jimmy Yang: How to American

That day, Grandpa took my dad and me to his favorite restaurant in Los Angeles. I was ready for my very first American feast and I was excited to explore Tinsel Town. Three generations of Chinese strolling down the beautiful streets of LA. We walked down La Cienega Boulevard, a main artery of LA. Every building we passed by was wide and short. In Hong Kong, every building was slim and at least twenty stories tall. That’s the only way to cram seven million people on an island the size of San Diego. It was nice to leave the concrete jungle and see the wide-open California sky, but at the same time Los Angeles felt a bit empty and lacking in humanity. There were only a few pedestrians on the streets; it was eerily vacant compared to the human sardine can I was used to in Hong Kong. The streets were massive gray pavements with six lanes of traffic and a narrow sidewalk. This was definitely a town built for cars, not humans. We walked by a few strip malls with dreary dry cleaners and generic burger shops. I’d never seen a strip mall before. Every mall in Hong Kong was a monstrous shopping center that stretched vertically for multiple levels. These monotonous strip malls with flat white paint looked like the lonesome Wild West with the proverbial tumbleweed rolling by.

Finally, we walked by a Pizza Hut, one of my favorite restaurants back in Hong Kong. I asked Grandpa:

“Can we eat here?”

“You can’t eat here, there’s nowhere to sit.”

I didn’t realize this Pizza Hut was just a kitchen for pizza delivery. What a fraud! The Pizza Hut in Hong Kong was a nice sit-down restaurant with a swanky salad bar. You could order pizzas with shrimp, a fancy pie-crust soup and my favorite seafood pasta. This American version of a pizza oven inside of a hole in the wall was quite jarring to me. How is the authentic version so much shittier than the foreign version? I felt betrayed.

Fifteen minutes into our supposedly ten-minute walk, I asked my grandpa in Shanghainese, “Are we there yet?” It’s a universal saying amongst impatient children around the world, in all languages.

“We are very close, just a few more minutes.” We ended up walking for forty-five minutes in the sweltering dry heat of a Los Angeles summer.

We finally arrived at our destination. It was the biggest strip mall yet. On one side, there was a huge two-story building called LA Fitness. I wasn’t quite familiar with the concept of gyms yet. We didn’t have corporate gyms in Hong Kong; everyone was skinny. On the other side of the strip mall, there was a small glass building. Grandpa pointed to it and said, “This is it, my favorite restaurant in LA. It’s authentic Mexican cuisine; they don’t have this in China.” I looked up at the sign:

EL POLLO LOCO

I had never heard of El Pollo Loco. I didn’t even know the name was in Spanish; I thought it was three English words I hadn’t learned yet. I was disappointed that a forty-five-minute hike ultimately ended in a fast food joint. But once we walked in, I realized this place was unlike any fast food restaurant I’d ever been to. I saw the biggest grill I’d ever seen in my life behind the registers, packed with rows of whole chickens with a beautiful brownish yellow tint. It smelled absolutely delicious. I looked through the glass panel and I saw a cornucopia of sides: rice, beans, mac and cheese, corn and an interesting green substance, which I later learned was called guacamole.

My grandpa went up to order in his Shanghai English:“Six pieces, dark meat.”

Then he turned around and explained to us in Shanghainese:

“They let you choose which part of the chicken you want here, dark meat and white meat. Dark meat is the good parts. White meat is the breast. It’s dry and rough for American idiots.”

Grandpa’s words of wisdom. To this day, I still only order dark meat.

Then the cashier asked Grandpa:

“Flour or corn?”

“Flour.”

And once again, he turned around and explained it to us in Shanghainese: “They give you these bread sheets to wrap your chicken in. Flour is good. The corn ones taste funny.” After a college trip to Tijuana, I realized the corn ones didn’t taste funny, they tasted authentic. I now strictly order corn tortillas. Sorry, Grandpa.

Grandpa finished the order with three cups of water. He said to us, “They make their money by overcharging you on soda. You can just get a free water cup and fill it with whatever you want.” My mind was fucking blown. You can pour your own soda here? And it’s free? Wow! Jesus could turn water into wine, but in America you could turn water into Dr Pepper. What a beautiful country.

Then there was the salsa bar. What can I say about the salsa bar that hasn’t been said about Disneyland? It was a magical kingdom of color and flavor. The El Pollo Loco salsa bar exemplified American freedom; land of the free, home of the salsa bar. “Take whatever you want, it’s free,” Grandpa said. I thought he was messing with me. I looked at that salsa bar in front of me like a virgin staring at a naked Gigi Hadid.

This can’t be. This is too good to be true.

Grandpa noticed my hesitation and he nudged me forward. “Go ahead. Take as much as you want. Take some home if you want to.” Why would anyone ever buy onions and cilantro if it’s already finely chopped and free for the taking here in El Pollo Loco?! If I had known what the word loco meant, I would have understood. There is so much freedom in this fast food joint, it’s loco ! El Pollo Loco was the most American place I’d ever been to.

After stuffing ourselves full of dark meat and free salsa, we had to walk the same forty-five minutes back to my grandpa’s apartment. This was way before Uber. I was exhausted that night, but I couldn’t sleep. My first day of American school was tomorrow and the only thing I knew about America was El Pollo Loco.

The first day I walked into John Burroughs Middle School, I felt like Andy Dufresne getting off the bus and walking into Shawshank prison. John Burroughs was a middle school in the LA Unified School District that went from sixth to eighth grade. I was thirteen years old, which placed me in the eighth and last grade of the school. Which meant I started in this school where everyone had already known each other for at least two years. It’s always scary for a new kid to move to a new school; I was a new foreign kid moving to a new school on a new continent. I was scared, confused and anxious. A part of me wanted to keep to myself, but another part of me desperately wanted to make some new friends. I was never shy with strangers, but this was an entirely different world. It was a different culture, a different language and a different educational system. It was like I was transported to an alternate universe.

Before classes started, I walked through the exercise yard where all the kids hung out. This would be what they called gen-pop, or general population in prison. In Hong Kong, we only had Chinese kids in school. In John Burroughs, there were kids of every race, every religion and every size. I had never interacted with white people, black people or Hispanic people before. I didn’t even know where to start. Then, I was relieved to see a group of Asian kids who looked like my friends back home. I walked up to them to introduce myself in my native tongue, but when I got close enough I realized they were speaking Korean. I froze and walked away with my tail between my legs. My hopes were crushed. I soon realized that all the Asian kids in this school were Koreans. I wasn’t racist; I just didn’t know how to speak enough English to have a conversation yet. I had learned English in Hong Kong the way American high school kids learn Spanish. I knew some vocabulary words, but I couldn’t carry on a conversation; it felt like everyone was speaking way too fast. I was desperately hoping for some Chinese kids I could cling on to in this new school. In hindsight, this was a blessing in disguise. If I had gone to an American school with a lot of other Chinese kids, I would not have been forced to assimilate, and I would have probably turned out to be the dude selling dim sum in Chinatown.