Kim Fu - For Today I Am a Boy

“Up here, Ling Ling.”

I met his gaze. “My name is Peter,” I said dumbly.

“Peter what?” He had his feet against one leg of the table and pushed against it to make the chair sway back and forth. He made me feel insignificant. An insect he was too lazy to squash. “Can I guess? Wing? Wang? Wong?”

“Huang,” I said, the H nearly silent.

“Wong,” he repeated, satisfied. Around his cigarette, his long fingers called attention to their joints. I thought they were beautiful. He could probably crack an egg, work his fingers inside the shell, and empty it with one hand, one flick of the wrist. “What are you applying for?”

“Line cook?” It came out as a question. I couldn’t place his age. Anywhere between thirty and sixty. He had a streak of gray in his short, square haircut, and the bushy eyebrows I associated with older men. His face was young but hardened.

“Have you worked in restaurants before, Wong?” The pectoral muscles under his tattoo flexed, making the birds twitch. I wanted to touch them, to soothe their tortured faces.

Water beaded on my eyelashes as I blinked away the smoke. “No. But I cook for my family.”

“Then you’re applying to be a dishwasher.” His chair continued to rock. “You look like a delicate sort of kid to me, Wong.”

I was wearing a shirt of my father’s. The sleeves were too long. “I’m not.” I said the boldest thing I could think of: “Give me a chance. I’ll show you.”

He let his chair fall forward so the front legs struck the dirt floor loudly. He stubbed out his cigarette on the table, leaving a mark, and then leaned across the table and grabbed my hands. A jolt flew through me. His hands were large enough to eclipse mine completely. I felt his calluses on my smooth knuckles.

“You’ll work nights,” he said. “You’ll steam your skin off. You’ll smell like shit all the time.”

I nodded as though these were instructions.

He let go of my hands. I left them on the table where he dropped them, feeling suddenly rejected. “I like you, Wong. I don’t know why. I feel like I could whip you into shape. Like you’re not anything yet.” I nodded again, afraid to ruin the moment.

That evening, my father and I washed the car. The light rain had driven mud up onto the sides and into the tire wells. He lathered up the body while I scrubbed inside the tires with a stiff brush, squatting over the gravel. Breaking the silence, I said, “I got a job.”

I listened for pride, suspicion, anything. He threw his rag into the soapy bucket and walked to the side of the house, where I couldn’t see him, and began unraveling the hose. “What kind of job?”

“Dishwasher, at the new restaurant.”

Water coursed over the roof of the car without warning. I jumped out of the way a moment too late. A few minutes passed as he sprayed back and forth, and I thought the conversation was over.

“I did that once,” he said. “When I first came to Canada. It was hard to find work. My English was good enough, but nobody cared.” I stood back, dripping. He glanced at the fresh shine of the hubcaps. “Good job.”

The air hovered around freezing, so we had to dry the car quickly with old towels before the night — and the ice — set in. We worked side by side in short, muscular motions, a little too rough, risking the paint. A physical rhythm. My arms started to ache. Father seemed at peace.

When I first entered the restaurant kitchen, I had to squint away from the light. The dining room had been dim, with inoffensive jazz at low volume, tinted windows, black and red leather. The kitchen was bright as an operating room, and with the same urgent efficiency. Men ran back and forth, shouting. Metal flashed. The air went wavy for an instant when someone opened an oven. The cook at the broiler casually doused a fire with a bottle of water. I stood in the archway. No one paid me any attention, and I couldn’t bring myself to interrupt them.

Hands clamped down on my shoulders so suddenly that I jumped. “Why are you just standing around, Wong?” It was the chef who’d interviewed me. His thumbs touched the back of my bare neck. Like everyone else, he was wearing his jacket buttoned with an apron on top, checked pants, and a black cap. Mine was the smallest size jacket they had. It hung flat off my bones the same way it had hung on the coat hanger. I cinched the pants tightly, and the legs ballooned around me like I was a wasting old man.

“I’m… new.”

“We’re all new, but you’re the only one doing nothing. Let’s go.” He led me through the kitchen. “You have three basic tasks: dishes, cleaning, and fetching stuff for the cooks. Voilà, the walk-in cooler.” He grunted as he pulled the heavy metal latch to release the door. The freezer was inside, past another door; a room within a room, about the size of a closet. “There’s no light in the freezer part, so you have to hold the door open as you root around,” he explained. I stuck my head in. Some faint alarm rang at how close together the walls were, at the rush of cold, the dark, the stout icicles lining the walls.

We walked back to the dish pit and he pointed out its parts. The high-pressure hot-water hose hanging over the double sink. The industrial dishwasher with its vertical steel doors that came down sharp as a guillotine. “All the dishes go through twice. First you wash ’em, then you bleach the fuck outta them. Any questions?” he asked.

I pictured his tattoo underneath the apron, underneath the jacket. The birds moving with each breath. “What’s your name?”

“You call me Chef.” He tilted his head. “Your jacket is buttoned wrong.” His fingers settled on my chest. He undid the buttons, pulled the jacket straight, and rebuttoned it on the other side. It took a long time. I could smell his hair, a sharp, cold scent, like the air before it snows. Like the walk-in freezer. He ended by patting the jacket smooth. “Men button it on the left. Women on the right.”

“Oh. Thank you.”

A voice called down the line, “A waitress wants you, Chef.”

I started an hour later than the rest of the night shift, at six. Dishes were already stacked high enough to form precarious towers. I put on the rubber gloves that floated with the detritus and patches of grease in the sink. The gloves were filled with hot water, which ran into my sleeves.

Chef talked to the waitress through the pass window. She was large and curvy, crushed into the uniform white button-up shirt and black pants, her coppery hair pulled into a high ponytail that exposed her forehead.

“Birthday at table twenty-three,” she said. “The birthday girl doesn’t like any of the desserts on the menu, and she wants to know if you can make her a fruit plate.”

“Tell the bitch to go fuck her grandmother,” Chef said.

She waited.

“I’m on it. Tell her it’ll be a few minutes.”

The waitress nodded and disappeared back into the din and artful leather of the dining room. I blasted food off the plates with the hose and loaded them into the dishwasher. The skin on my forearms was already breaking out in a rash. Chef went into the walk-in cooler and came out with an apron full of fruit.

Watching him work, I found it hard to reconcile his hands with the way he talked. He cut segments from a grapefruit, raw and pink as a baby’s flesh, so that the membranes hung off the discarded peel like pages off a book’s spine. He fanned out paper-thin slices of apple and peach, made spirals from out-of-season strawberries, cut the kiwis into stars, everything stacked toward a single citadel carved from a pineapple and drizzled with honey.

He placed his sculpture on a square, white plate and flung it through the pass window. As the waitress moved it to her tray, he said, “Stick a candle in it and charge the bitch fifteen dollars.”