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Restaurant life helped clarify our future We opened seven days a week (half-days on Mondays), and 364 days a year, Thanksgiving Day being the exception. Whole fryers that had to be deboned, and separated into white and dark meat piles. Celery, onions, bell peppers, broccoli and other vegetables that needed chopping, dicing or slicing. Twenty-pound boxes of shrimp that needed defrosting, then shelling and deveining.

One of my parents’ close friends who operated a Chinese restaurant two or three miles from ours left town in the middle of the night, leaving, I suspect, a trail of unhappy creditors that included the landlord.īoxes of snow pea pods that required de-stringing. Those of us who toiled in family-run restaurants know hardship is a given and failure is commonplace. We received 30-day warning notices that the water or the electricity would be shut off. When the bad stretches lasted long enough, we’d write checks to utilities, creditors and such, and strategically decide which ones to mail first so they didn't bounce. My first job, at age 9, was helping my older cousin bus tables on the weekends I earned a dollar for the 10-hour shift. My dad started as a prep cook: rolling egg rolls, fashioning egg foo youngs, whipping up egg drop and hot and sour soups. When my family immigrated to Tucson from Hong Kong in the mid-1970s, my parents’ lack of the English language meant they ditched their professions (they had operated a children's nursery he later worked in publishing) for manual-labor jobs at my aunt’s restaurant. If anything, it may be a shared recognition.

No heir - that has meaning to meĪs an immigrant child raised in Chinese restaurants, I had to smile. His two children opted for careers in other fields. There is no heir, he noted, to whom to pass the torch. What caught my eye was a passing remark by third-generation owner Harlan Lee toward the end of a news article announcing the restaurant's shuttering.

Ninety years tends to build up a good deal of loyalty and memories. The closure Sunday of the iconic Sing High Chop Suey House in downtown Phoenix undoubtedly has set off pangs of nostalgia.