My parents came to Canada and worked hard to start a restaurant. My need for attention was an order that often had to wait
"When my parents fight, nothing is off-limits. During their frequent kitchen blow-ups, Mum and Dad throw chicken balls hot out of the deep fryer at each other while cursing in Cantonese," recalls Rachel Phan in her new book.
Building a family business is dream for many people. In reality it can bring rewards but put family relations under strain. In this excerpt from “Restaurant Kid: A Memoir of Family and Belonging,” Ontario’s Rachel Phan describes a period in her girlhood when she — a self-described former “sickly child, with severe asthma and seizures” — struggled, in the many hours spent at the family’s eatery, to get the attention she craved from her immigrant parents.
After seven years of working in the Happy In kitchen, Dad meets a man named Frank, who owns multiple buildings across Essex County. One of the businesses, a coffee shop in the nearby town of Kingsville, Ontario, has failed and is closing, he tells Dad. Would my dad — who has since taken on his own Anglo name of George — be interested in renting the building and turning it into a Chinese Canadian restaurant? Frank tells him it is an opportunity to get out of someone else’s kitchen and own his own business. This is his chance to be a better man, a better provider, for his wife and kids. “Do you want to try it out?” Frank asks.
“Yes,” Dad immediately responds, thinking he can try it out for a couple of months. If it doesn’t work, there’s always the Happy In to fall back on.
On the day of the restaurant’s grand opening in 1992, the people of Kingsville flock to the new exotic restaurant on Main Street, with its fiery red sign — very auspicious — and bold white letters in the classic wonton font — very “Chinese” — urging them to try the Cantonese and Szechuan food advertised underneath the name May May Inn. (For years, we’ll get calls from confused tourists asking, “Does the May May Inn have any rooms available?”)
As soon as my parents turn the “Closed” sign to “Open,” it is mayhem. A family friend’s daughter is scheduled to help out as a waitress but ends up sleeping in — and my poor mother, who spent 10 years working at the mushroom farm, has no idea how to take orders or be a waitress. To make matters worse, neither of my parents has a strong grasp of the English language yet.
The responsibility falls on Dad to make it work. It was, after all, his decision that led our family down this path. That day, he is the cook, the server, and the person fumbling through English and math to settle bills. He is a man possessed, driven by an impossible dream.
“May May was packed that afternoon,” he says. “It was hard, but after that day, we knew we were going to make it. Even though we f—ked up, we saw the people and the customers, and that gave us hope.”
While my parents scramble to learn the ins and outs of running a restaurant, I’m learning lessons, too.
I learn fairly quickly that when you’re a restaurant kid, you’re never really alone even though you always feel a little lonely. You’re constantly trying to get out of the way of your family members who are busy working or you’re being doted on by a waitress when she has a moment to spare or you’re making polite chit-chat with the regulars who help keep your family’s business afloat. Your entire life is marked by the constant thrum of the restaurant’s hubbub. The restaurant is always the centre of attention, never you. The restaurant quickly becomes your entire world. It’s never just a restaurant — it’s evidence your parents, who gave up everything for a chance at a new, safer life, have succeeded. They’ve made it. The restaurant was, and is, everything.
It is our family room, with the TV blaring in the kitchen during slow hours. We play music videos of Dad’s favourite songs — he sings along to “Eternal Flame” by the Bangles on repeat — or make our way through piles of Chinese dramas on VHS tapes. “What’s he saying?” I ask, and Dad translates from Cantonese to English while he puffs on a cigarette in between the rushes of lunch and dinner. I love these quiet moments best because it almost feels like I have my parents to myself. I don’t have to compete with the customers at table five who are waiting for their dinner for three.
Once, when it is dead inside, Dad takes me outside and asks if I want to sit on his shoulders. I quickly say, “Yes,” pleased by the novelty of his attention. But the moment my stumpy little legs bracket his neck, I want off. I am not a child who takes to playing naturally, my earliest years punctuated by so many hospital stays. I never learned how to play freely with a careless, reckless abandon, because I always had to be so careful. Rather than seeking thrills, I learned to prize stability and security.
I am so frightened by my feet parting ways with the ground that I grab fistfuls of my dad’s hair and shout, “Down! Down! Down!” The nervous flipping in my stomach prevents me from enjoying even 10 seconds atop my dad’s shoulders. My dad, laughing, listens to my desperate pleas to be put down before rushing back into the kitchen.
Later, when I’d feel like a ghost in my busy parents’ lives, I’d wonder why I didn’t relish that moment with my dad more. It wasn’t often that he gave me the full weight of his attention, not when there were so many chicken balls to make and the wok to attend to at all hours of the day. In those moments when I’d feel the ache of my parents’ absence, I would wish for retroactive bravery and the ability to hold firm to my dad’s head and shoulders, trusting that he would never let me fall, willing him to never leave me, believing he would always keep me elevated on a pedestal.
To my horror, the restaurant is also my parents’ battleground. When restaurants are busy, the people being run ragged in the kitchen are never at their best. Tensions are high, curse words fly off the tip of your tongue without a thought, and no one’s personality is sparkling. That all becomes ten times worse when your spouse is constantly in your space. You never get a break.
When my parents fight, nothing is off-limits. During their frequent kitchen blow-ups, Mum and Dad throw chicken balls hot out of the deep fryer at each other while cursing in Cantonese. A veritable smorgasbord of items are sent flying, from the expected — dishes, cutting boards, mushrooms — to the surprising and downright dangerous — knives of various lengths and sharpness, whole plates of cooked food.
They yell at one another, faces red and forehead veins near to bursting. F—k you. F—k your mother.
My mother calls Dad an a—hole and they curse each other’s families as if our family unit isn’t impacted by such curses thrown out so casually.
My siblings and I cower in the dining room, my sister paralyzed by anxiety and willing herself to disappear while my brother rocks back and forth, his left leg bouncing with nerves. As the baby of the family, I am given the unenviable task of defusing the situation with my charm and elevated status. As the youngest and smallest, I need to be protected and cared for the most. That is the expectation, at least.
“Go in there, May May!” my brother and sister say. “Tell them to stop!”
Pushed into the kitchen, into the eye of the storm, I yell with the full force of my little lungs. “Stop fighting! They can hear you all the way in China!” That is always my go-to line. It usually works and leads to tenuous peace between the two warring factions until the next time a grenade is thrown.
Sadly, we aren’t always just collateral damage. Sometimes, the belligerents fix their destructive gaze on us.
There are three early memories I can barely conjure now, partly because of how young I was and partly because of the pain:
I am three or four and my parents are new restaurant owners. There’s something I want my mother to see — maybe a drawing or a cut finger — and I pull at the black apron tied around her waist.
“Mama, Mama,” I plead for her attention. “Look!” My tiny fingers clutch at and grasp for her waist. Each tug is met with an exhausted sigh, but I am undeterred. Persistent. “Look, Mama!”
Suddenly, my mother rips her apron from my desperate hands and grabs my delicate wrists.
“Aiyah, May May, move!” she snaps. Her tone is harsh, final. She is done with me. I can see it, the way her back is already turned, her attention cast down to the giant colander of rice she is washing free of starch in the sink.
Her dismissal stings, but I take to heart the lesson it brings. I must never get in my parents’ way when they are working. Their attention during those many long hours is not mine to take.
Another memory: it’s slow in the restaurant and my dad — I still called him Baba then — spots me picking at my nails.
“May May, not in the kitchen!” he yells. “Do you need to clip your nails?” I shake my head, feeling obstinate the way children sometimes do. He sighs. “I can see you picking at your nails. Come on, let’s go outside and I’ll cut your nails for you — they’re so long!”
For some reason, the thought of having my nails trimmed fills me with dread and terror. “No!” I cry. “I don’t need to, Baba!” He ignores my cries and grabs me gently by the hand to lead me outside. “Give me your fingers,” he says expectantly. My face twists and contorts in distress, and I shake my head.
“No?” His face, usually a cool river, is also twisting into something new. Dangerous. My mother often talks about how the Phan family is mercurial by nature. She says there is a blackness inherent in our blood that makes us prone to sudden changes in mood. I see that shift in my dad’s face too late.
“No?” he repeats. I shake my head and hide my hands behind my back.
My nails are mine! Why do I need to cut them?
When Baba slaps me across the bottom, swiftly and hard, I have no choice but to unclench my resisting fists. When another slap follows, just as hard, I offer him my hands freely without a fight. The pain and shock spreads, and I soon forget why I resisted in the first place. Resistance, I learn, comes with dire consequences.
One final formative memory: Baba is at the sink, rinsing a pot. I’m peering up at him, but he doesn’t notice I’m there. I am suddenly filled with a reckless desire to do or say something that will get him to divert his gaze from the hot running water to me. Get his attention, no matter what it takes. “I love Mama more than I love you, Baba,” I say. Kids can be unexpectedly cruel and cutting, and I am no exception.
My hurtful words are swallowed by the sound of the water pouring out of the faucet. At least, I assume they are because my dad doesn’t bat an eyelash in response. He doesn’t look at me at all.
That’s how it is for me, living life on the periphery. Since my siblings are old enough to help Mum and Dad in the restaurant, I while away the hours by myself in our apartment. My 12-year-old sister, Linh, handles the front of the house, from cash to phones to bartending, while 10-year-old John oversees the deep fryer and cuts chicken.
To get to our three-bedroom, one-bath apartment from the restaurant, one has to go outside and walk up a long flight of stairs. Our apartment is technically not above our restaurant, but above the store next to it — a jewelry store called the Jewellery Box. It’s where I spend hours marvelling at shining, gem-encrusted trinkets and delicate porcelain figurines, while Mary, the woman who owns the store, patiently tolerates the smudged fingerprints I leave on the glass display cases. I always have too much time on my hands and no one to notice when I’m gone too long.
One day, I am talking to Mary about birthstones and whether Mum would like a necklace proclaiming her to be the “No. 1 Mom,” with all five of our family members’ stones casting a sparkling line around a solid gold heart.
“Yes, absolutely,” she says. “Your mom is so lucky to have a daughter who loves her so much.”
I don’t tell her how I feel like I miss my mother all the time even though she is never far from me, frantically scribbling down table number six’s order and rushing back to the wok to make their fried rice.
Excerpt from “Restaurant Kid: A Memoir of Family and Belonging” by Rachel Phan, © 2025. Published by Douglas & McIntyre (2013) Ltd. Reprinted with permission from the publisher.
