Growing up in a chinese restaurant, you get to know everyone you work with very well. We all work the whole 12 hour day together, we arrive together and leave together.
The kitchen crew comes and goes....some stay for many many years, some only lasted a few months, some last only a few days....Most of the guys are all the same: Gambling addiction, smoking addiction, alcohol addiction...bad teeth and they smell like grease....wait..thats just people in general...nevermind....
Something that you must understand about a chinese restaurant...the whole kitchen crew live together in a small apartment that the owner provides. The owner deducts rent from their pay check. Working and living together take a toll on these guys. The kitchen crew and sometimes a waiter or two would walk together to and from work like a family. But my restaurant..I am their ride. I pick them up and drop them off everyday. The kitchen crew would call me "Princess" or "Little sister", now they call me "Little boss". (of course in mandarin)
Sometimes there was fights, and sometimes there were alliances. Sometimes the crew would be super tight and when one guy quits, all of them quit.
In the 23 years of being in this business, I have seen numerous fights between the cooks. I remember one time at Peking Palace there was a fight between two cooks and one of the cooks took a bite out of the other cooks ear! Of course they both got fired.
The one employee that I miss the most is a Vietnamese man who worked with my family my whole life. His name was "A". He was a Vietnam war veteran and was super religious. He obviously became really old over the years and my parents had to let him go because he was too old to be working, and he was really upset, so was I.
I grew pretty close with some of the employees over the years and I felt hurt when they would leave because they became family members to me. So as I got older and when cooks and deep fryers and dish washers would come, I started to not be nice and never called them by their real names. I would refer to them as "Deep fryer", "skinny guy", "fat guy", "old man"...If they don't have a name then you won't mind if they left.
In this photo from Left to right: Deep fryer, Mr. Tall, My Father, Fat guy, and Old man.
(Mr. Tall and the fat guy are no longer with Golden Harvest because they liked to fight each other)
I had to stop Mr. Tall from chopping the fat guy with a butcher knife.
:::sigh::drama drama drama....
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