My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store (16 page)

Of course, Kay’s not the only one with compulsive tendencies. Where I come from,
not
hurrying is practically an article of religious
faith. America’s grown-ups don’t rush; they throw their arms around the world and try to make it stand still. There’s a stubbornness about it, a refusal to give in to the forward motion of time, as if the future itself is just a fad. Nobody drives where they can walk, nobody vacuums what they can sweep, and nobody microwaves (God forbid) what they can cook on an old-fashioned burner. “Fashion” and “technology” are dirty words. Not surprisingly, when it comes to big projects—fixing up a house, say, or the type of renovations we’re engaged in at the store—nothing but the most exacting, time-consuming process will do.

On the appointed day, undeterred by Kay’s ticking stopwatch, I arrive early with a detailed plan, and things get off to a promising start. Edward, to my surprise, shows up with his occasional partner Ling, a Cantonese electrician, as well as Gab’s uncle Jinsuk, who happens to be a professional carpenter.
Wonder of wonders
, I think,
with all this extra manpower, we might actually accomplish some things!
However, as I soon discover—to my horror—these people, all being small business owners themselves, are just as hardheaded and independent-minded as Kay. There’s no cooperation. There isn’t even a plan. People just start taking things apart and rebuilding them willy-nilly. Soon the store is filled with the racket of a construction zone and a great choking cloud of sawdust. For a while I try to organize things and at least get people to coordinate; but there’s a big difference, I realize, between me and the trio of Edward, Ling and Jinsuk: they have power tools and I don’t.

Meanwhile, as my dreams for the store disintegrate, through the haze I see Kay standing there with her hands on her hips, hounding everyone to go
faster, faster, faster
.

“Can you please get her to lay off a little?” I ask Gab, feeling as if my stomach is writhing with poisonous snakes that want to come out and bite everyone. “It’s stressful enough in here.”

“I’ll try,” she says wearily. Once again Gab is serving as a sort of
human buffer zone between two silently warring parties. Kay and I never argue—not directly, anyway. Oh, we clash over just about everything, from coffee to the renovations, and we criticize each other as brutally as any son-in-law/mother-in-law combo, often while standing in the same room, but because of the language barrier there’s no need for diplomacy. After all, when we need to communicate and be respectful (something that’s especially important for me as the son-in-law), we can rely on Gab to act as a filter.

This puts a terrible burden on Gab, however, and on top of all the other stress she’s dealing with, it’s beginning to take its toll. We’re all strung out, but Gab looks particularly miserable.

As the day goes on and Kay’s deadline nears, paranoia creeps in. Gab and her parents are conferring in Korean, and I’m watching them from a few feet away, hoping to pick up a few words. It’s indicative of how crazed the day is making me that I consider for a second “accidentally” knocking down part of a wall or cutting some wires to make finishing today impossible.
No, of course I won’t do that. That would be sabotage
. But then hadn’t I recently discovered Kay deliberately undermining one of
my
goals? After finding an old box of CaféAmerica under the sink, she’d started secretly offering it to longtime customers, brewing a whole separate pot and selling it at the old price of ten cents less than the new coffee.

I was outraged. “Your mother is impossible. I can’t work with her anymore,” I railed at Gab, who promised to stop Kay from freelancing. But freelancing is exactly what small business tends to bring out.
If I don’t do it, no one will
is what you constantly end up saying to yourself. Sometimes the attitude is helpful. For instance, since we opened the store we’ve been getting extorted by our snack food distributors, Mr. Yummykakes and Mr. Tortilla Chip, who’ve been trying to strong-arm us into buying more merchandise than we need and “forgetting,” if we don’t honor their demands, to make scheduled deliveries, or claiming we haven’t met their quotas
(which are much lower than what they actually want us to purchase). As a result, some of our shelves have gone empty, and customers are asking where their favorite foods are. It’s a game of chicken, and much to the consternation of the snack food thugs, who probably thought they could walk all over this roly-poly Asian grandmother manning the day shift, Kay hasn’t blinked. In fact, she’s banned some of them from the store. My mother-in-law knows all the distributors’ tricks, whether it’s dumping eight dollies of the new and soon-to-be-discontinued no-calorie beer next to the cash register and driving away before we can open the boxes, or sticking us with a freezer full of ice cream that got too warm in the back of the truck. (Refrozen ice cream has the texture of snow dislodged from the underside of a delivery vehicle.) Besides being fierce, she’s paranoid and inexhaustible, a scammer’s worst nemesis.

But these aren’t qualities that can easily be switched off, and as Kay herself will eventually admit, the stress of the last few weeks has brought out a kind of demonic single-mindedness in her. She’s gone into crisis mode, which means that come hell or high water, she’s going to get us through this turmoil. As a result, there’ve been times when she’s been almost as fierce with us as she has been with Mr. Yummykakes and Mr. Tortilla Chip. Using all the weapons in her arsenal (the guilt trip, the nag, the tantrum), she’s been pressing us to stay focused on survival—making it to the next day, then the next pay cycle—without committing unforced errors like getting fancy with the renovations. No one else in the family has this kind of strength or takes on the same amount of responsibility. Other than Edward, who’s not involved in the store every day, Kay’s the only one who knows what it takes to get through a crisis. But as I keep telling myself, bullying is bullying, whether it’s for a good cause or not.

So after watching Kay browbeat everyone some more, I order
the whole family, plus Ling and Dwayne, out of the store.
Since no one else will stand up to tyranny, I will
is something like the thought going through my head.

“Can you stay here for a second?” I say to Kay, putting my hand on her arm as she’s about to leave the store too.

“Me? Why?” She looks surprised.

Instead of answering I close the front door, which, like the rest of us this morning, has come slightly unhinged and immediately wedges tight against the frame.

Now’s my chance. I have prepared a speech, something direct but not disrespectful, firm but not inappropriate.
If only the sawdust wasn’t so thick and my eyes weren’t watery and bulging, and my face wasn’t red with exertion and I didn’t look like a man who just lost his wits!

“We need to talk—” I start to say, but before I can finish the sentence Kay screams as if she’s in a horror movie and runs for the bathroom. Now, my mother-in-law has the loudest voice I’ve ever heard. She used to be a wedding singer, and in Korea they train singers to project their voices by making them practice next to waterfalls. Kay’s shriek isn’t a whole lot less piercing than Uncle Jinsuk’s table saw, but luckily her voice is set to stun, not kill, and I may only be temporarily deafened.

The people outside start pounding on the door, though.

“Hey, what’s going on in there? Is everyone okay? Open up!” Their alarm is magnified by finding that the door won’t budge.

Oh, great. This looks wonderful
. I knock on the door of the bathroom, but Kay won’t come out. She’s locked herself in and is still screaming for help.

“I just want to talk!” I shout at her in a voice that sounds remarkably like Quasimodo’s.
What happened to my mother-in-law the bully?
Now she’s acting all ladylike and scared, leaving
me
to look
like the bad guy.
What kind of person
, I can hear any sensible observer of the situation saying,
terrorizes a defenseless grandmother?
I almost believe she’s faking it, playing victim, except she really does seem terribly frightened, and after pleading with her unsuccessfully to come out of the bathroom so I can explain (“Please! I wasn’t going to hurt you!”), I give up and do what I can to help the rest of the family open the front door instead.

It takes a while, but eventually we pry it out of the frame, and a few minutes later Gab (after shouting at me, “What’s wrong with you?!” on her way in) coaxes her mother out of the bathroom. Shortly afterward, without talking to me, Kay goes home, along with Edward, Ling, Uncle Jinsuk and Gab, leaving me alone to work on the store with Dwayne, who goes home too after a while.
Mission accomplished
. The renovations will not be finished today. The store is a bloody mess, covered with debris, half-finished projects and a thick layer of sawdust. It looks like a bomb blew up inside it, which I suppose in a way one did. So much for family.

AS A RESULT
of the fight you’d think I’d be chastened enough to avoid conflict for a little while—and I would, under any other circumstances. Unfortunately, it’s just too important to stick to the plan—my plan, that is, for turning the store into a gourmet market. Thus while Kay and I make up the next day (or, rather, I humbly beg her forgiveness, and to my surprise she mumbles something about being sorry too), the whole cycle of recrimination, mistrust and behind-the-back criticism starts again almost immediately. Kay sees me doing something she doesn’t like and says so to Gab; I see her doing something I don’t like and do the same; and Gab, after hearing from both of us, runs out to the street and screams at the sky, “Jesus Lord in heaven, what did I do to deserve this? I’ll do anything if you let me escape.” (That’s the thing about family business, though—there is no escape. You live with the people you
work with, and after putting up with them at work all day, you get to come home and listen to them clip their toenails as they hog the television.)

To make matters worse, one morning the mail delivers a sleek, expensively produced catalog from a distributor specializing in gourmet and imported foods. At first I hide it from Gab, who would surely throw it in the recycling bin if she saw it. Then I consider burning it in the backyard, or at least blacking out the company’s telephone number, lest I act on some unfortunate impulse. (Remember, Gab just told me no more expensive, nonessential purchases.) But I can’t do any of these things. The spreads pictured in the catalog are too sumptuous, the pictures too beautiful. It’s like walking past a bakery with the smell of hot, crusty, freshly baked bread wafting out.

“Good afternoon, this is Steinway Gourmet Foods. May I help you?”

Now, let’s be clear: this
really
is not your usual brochure. It’s more like an art book, something you could leave on a coffee table. The products it offers—a cornucopia of international delicacies, the kind to be found in epicurean gift baskets and crowded window displays at specialty stores in the West Village—have been assembled into still lifes so mouthwatering you can practically taste them. The variety is astounding—who knew there were that many different kinds of balsamic vinegar? And so many delicious little mysteries—for instance, what does hempseed oil taste like? So much wholesome goodness and so little to feel guilty about; this is, after all, the good side of globalization, the flowering of world culture in all its myriad expressions.

Yet as I hold the phone to my ear I feel like I have no soul. The back of my neck is damp and my stomach is knotted.

“Yes,” I say, trying not to sound as sinister as I feel. “I’d like to make an order.”

“Splendid!” says the female operator in a cool Southeast Asian accent. “However, before we start, I must confirm that you are aware of our thousand-dollar minimum.”

A thousand?
I had assumed that it was only around one hundred, as it is with most vendors.

“Yes, I’m aware of that.”

“Very well, then. What is the first item on your list?”

The first item on my list …
what list? I haven’t made a list. All I’ve done is go through the catatog trying not to drool on the pictures. My first item? Well, what does our store need (besides everything)? Which products does it
lack
more than any other?
Flip, flip, flip …
I should have made a list. But then I would have thought about it and lost my nerve. And what the store needs is for people to stop thinking. It needs inspiration.
Flip, flip, flip … Presto!

“I’ll have some Chessmen,” I pronounce decisively.

“Chessmen?” says the operator.

“You know, those little butter cookies shaped like rooks and queens?” Doesn’t everybody’s grandmother keep a package of stale Chessmen in her pantry for visits by the grandkids?
Here, some cookies … from the year before you were born
.

“What’s the SKU?”

“The what?”

“Product code.”

“Oh.”
Flip, flip, flip …
Now I’m starting to feel it creep up on me: hesitation. Second thoughts. Am I really going to defy my long-suffering wife so I can order some butter cookies?

“And give me some of those chocolate-covered Chessmen, too.”

“Next item?”

Now, having successfully fought off self-doubt, I begin to sense a growing freedom. The shackles are falling off. At first I select a few more bland, conservative, New Englandy cookies, but then I move on to the stuff Steinway Gourmet Foods specializes in: world
cuisine. Culinary exotica. Gastronomic nirvana. The word “flavor” pops into my head as I peruse the offerings of Indian, Latin American and East Asian cuisine. How did we ever live without it?

Picking up speed and confidence, I order and order and order.
Give me four cases of … And yes, a whole box of … Okay, multigrain too … Sure, throw in the fat-free as well
.

This feels good
, I think. I may be useless when it comes to a lot of things at the store, but I know my way around a Whole Foods. And this isn’t just regular grocery shopping—it’s shopping for the whole neighborhood. What could be more fun?