Atticus Lish - Preparation for the Next Life

What is your surname?

Zou.

Given name?

Lei.

She watched him write it on a piece of paper that already had handwriting and phone numbers all over it, underlined, circled, and crossed-out.

Not that Lei.

Not flower-bud Lei?

No. No grass top.

This — lightning-thunder Lei? He wrote well.

Yes.

That’s not right for a girl. Are you a boy?

That’s the way they named me.

They want the son, I think. Or they do not recognize literacy. Many Chinese don’t recognize literacy. Right?

She didn’t say anything.

The Chinese people want a son. In America, girl power, right? You hear about it?

Man-woman equality.

You believe the girl power?

Yes, she said.

I think so, he smiled. The business expanding. This area getting bigger. A lot of money comes in. This just the beginning, so we try to change, capture the new wave. We import the ocean flavors, beef, eel, everything sa-cha. We want the team, like the army. He made a claw to show what he meant. Take over the market, make the market share bigger, bigger, bigger—

spreading his fingers wider each time. He seemed to be conducting music. This is the time opportunity, real opportunity. You look: the Olympics will be to China. How great!

What is the pay like?

It is rational, he said.

Minimum wage?

Of course. That’s the law. I have to obey the law. You have to obey the law. Everyone has to obey the law in society.

He asked for her working papers, knowing all along, she thought, that she didn’t have them.

This is a very severe problem, he said. If I hire you, I have risk.

Right? he insisted, when she remained blank.

I have risk. Very serious. If I have risk, who is responsible? You have to be responsible. If I give you the break, you give me the break. Only fair. So the salary will be adjusted. He wrote it on the paper, circled it. This salary.

She did the math in her head.

One more dollar, she said.

He smiled, no.

I give you break, he said.

Really. Do not be disappointed. I tell you something, the truth. This a lot of money.

HER FIRST DAY, ZOU Lei arrived in the food court early and had been waiting for half an hour before she heard the exhaust fans come on in the kitchens in the back. Then, with a snap, the lights came on. She heard a rustling plastic bag and someone banging things around and then saw a woman with a mask-like face moving around under the lights.

Good morning, Zou Lei said. I’m here to work.

The woman snorted and took a drink from a plastic tub of yellow liquid. Zou Lei looked around. She waited. She couldn’t see the man who had hired her. She ducked in under the counter.

Nobody invite you, the woman said, a wonton hanging from her lip.

I’m here to work.

You just remember that.

They made her wait. The register girl came in and said, Could you move? Flung her purse on a shelf under the counter. In the back, a wok was getting beaten with a shovel. They brought the fish-tofu out. Stinky tofu is mad good, the register girl said, glitter in her wolf hair. She held the skewer between her acrylic tips. They talked in slang she couldn’t follow. Everything was number nine. She would learn it meant cock or dick. You can’t stand there. Zou Lei moved again. The cook came out and slammed another tub into the steam table, purple burn marks on his arms.

Go hang that up. You can’t work like that. They meant her jacket. The peg was under the security camera. The woman threw away her soup. I the supervisor. She had a glazed white face, slanted eyebrows painted on her forehead — a Cantonese. Where your apron at? Come on. She showed Zou Lei the fryers, the salad dressing, the congee, meat paste — she flipped the metal lids and pointed, whacked it with a ladle — custard! Don’t forget it! Yanked a crate from underneath a rack. You need a garbage bag, you get it here. Kicked it back. Fried leg, she pointed. There was meat bobbing in water. Fishball. They stepped around a bucket. The exhaust was going. The cook banged a wok over the gas fire. Sink, wok, knife, scrubber. You chop at this table, not over there.

Come on! she said. She took Zou Lei to the storeroom with the hanging rags, the gallon cans of starch.

Time schedule, she pointed. A clipboard with a ballpoint taped to a string. You check it every day before you go.

What did you say?

What?

I don’t understand so well, Zou Lei said.

I say already.

Say what?

Ask somebody else if you don’t get it.

She was given a uniform shirt, a visor, and an orange apron. You have to pay for that.

When she asked what? they thought she was putting up an argument.

Because we all did. Nothing free in this life.

They sent her with a cart to go and get the trays. The basement was roaring. She collected everybody’s trays in the food court. No, only ours! they said when she returned. Basic common sense. No one had told her. She was sweating. There was other people’s food all over her hands. It’s okay, the little one said, the one called Sunnie. Just separate them and put the other ones back.

She made up for it — she tried. She hauled the dishware off in tubs. There was Chinese techno playing overhead. Watch out! the register girl snapped at her. Okay. She stepped around the bucket. The tub weighed almost more than she could take. Her fingers slipped — she caught it with her knee — and swung it down into the sink. They were yelling orders from the front. Sa-cha. The cook repeated sa-cha.

You know how to wash? She nodded. She stuffed the chopsticks in a vented can. Some stuck through the vents. She shook them and rapped them in place and blasted them with the sprayer. It threw water on her orange apron. Steam came up. The cook snatched the sprayer from her and blasted the dishes. Water thudding off the metal sink. He squeezed the soap, and bubbles came out floating sideways, quivering, heavy, rainbows on them. He wheeled away. She took on the dishes with a scrubber. Fast, fast, fast! he shouted. He was slamming pots around, wiping down the stainless table, whipping back and forth with his rag. She was pulling out the plates, one, two, three, water raining off. Her arms were wet. The blast of the water thrummed on the steel sink. Everything was wet, the rubber treads on the floor were wet. She could smell the black muck being worked out of the fissures and moldings, silted in the drain trap.

The rush was over. In front, they were standing around drinking cups of soda.

No one said anything to her. She poured a full-sized Coca-Cola, no ice, and drank it straight down, gasping. Now that was good. The sugar flashed inside her like sunshine in the desert.

She took meat from the steam table and made him a care package. She filled a Styrofoam shell with rice, beef, dumplings, and put it in a plastic bag and hid it on the shelf by the cornstarch and took it to him after work. She had only one plastic fork and he said, no, you keep that, and he ate it cold with his fingers, having done this all the time in the infantry. When it was her turn, she leaned down and ate in her own way like any Asian working person using the fork as a shovel. The two of them had to take turns at the trough or their heads would bump. She prodded him with an elbow and he looked at her.

Tongkuai.

Is that good?

Yes. Tongkuai is warm. We are very warm here. She gestured at the purple-walled basement surrounded by the cold black night outside the window.

The insignia on their uniforms said Ah Genuine and there were two kinds of people working there. There were the twin register girls, Angela and Kay, who had been to high school in New York and who spoke a hybrid slang, in which DG meant to masturbate. Immigrants were called fleas or fence jumpers, boat people, or saiwooks — cargo — a reference to how many of them died in trucks crossing the border. The register girls’ parents had come here legally. They would defiantly admit they couldn’t read Chinese for real. When they texted, they used a mix of Cantonese ideograms and English acronyms. They wore fishnet tights and bras to emphasize their chests.