Chapter 2
MAY
The current quest progress: fourteen woks since shift start and the fourteenth was kicking his ass.
May hit it with the steel wool again, elbow deep in water that had been scalding an hour ago and was now the gross yet reasonable temperature of a customer’s abandoned soup.
Behind him on the wok station, Ah-Keung was attempting to drown out Hacken Lee ming wan jau syun’ing from the radio with the hissing roar of high flame. And clanging. There was no escape from either “Red Sun” or the clanging.
May had been here since—actually when did he get here. The clock above the fire exit said 5:40. He was fairly sure it had said 5:40 before, or something close, or possibly it had said 4:15 and then bzzt and then 5:40, which meant either time had skipped or it was his brain again.
“You eaten?” Auntie Tsang materialized at his shoulder the way she always did, a five-foot-two woman who could just sort of insinuate herself into the corner of your vision without you noticing until she was in your face.
He’d eaten. Probably. There was evidence—a bowl by the prep station with chopsticks sitting across it. Someone had set them down mid-bite and wandered off, and that someone was likely May. So sure, he’d eaten.
“Yes, Auntie,” he said. This was one of their cute little conversations. She talked at him in Cantonese, which he understood through context and vibes, and he replied in English, which she understood perfectly and had no interest in speaking.
In the universal language of aunties, she pushed a plate of cut-up siu yuk toward his counter. Pork belly, skin still crackling, sliced thin, the fat layer catching light in a way that was beautiful if you were the sort of guy who found beauty in rendered pork fat, which May was, actually.
“Thanks, Auntie.”
He grabbed his bowl and chopsticks from the station, plucked an acceptable amount of pork into the bowl, then placed one piece into his mouth and chewed until the lady was satisfied.
The pork was outstanding. The pork was always outstanding. He and Uncle Lau, who co-owned the place, disagreed about basically everything—the correct height at which to mount a TV being the most recent one—but they were united on the siu yuk.
May ran the sink. His hands moved through the water, finding the next thing by shape, and for a second his wrist pressed against the steel edge of the basin.
The pressure stopped him for no reason he could name.
Something weird about hands and greasy water and solidity and pressure. Contact. He imagined being a submarine.
Then someone dropped a pan behind him and the crash brought the room back in full and Ah-Keung swore just as “Red Sun” started playing again. Sam the prep cook laughed, and May laughed too.
“Ah-Keung,” May called, holding up a stock pot with a dent in it the size of a fist. “Were you cooking with your hands or your ass?”
“Let’s not talk about my hands and your ass,” Ah-Keung fired back, and the kitchen erupted. May grinned. He liked this part; the play, being part of the back and forth. Remembering he could turn a room into one that wanted him inside it.
May used to be the guy out front. He was good at it, chatting up the regulars, and he liked the rhythm of the floor. Then there had been the car crash where he’d taken a knock to the head and some internal bleeding and after that, things had gotten shittier.
He’d lost a whole table once—four fully formed human beings he’d served twenty minutes earlier, gone from his head like he’d never seen them. The same thing happened two, three more times.
Auntie Tsang and Uncle Lau had talked about it and moved him to the back, where the only thing he had to count were hours. And woks. May liked to count in fives. It had been his number since birth. Wuyue, May, fifth month—lucky number five, never let him down, except when it did.
After the endless procession of woks and pans and dishes, there was less to do.
And that was nice too. May helped with wontons because they were easy the way Auntie liked them done.
Spoon the filling, scrunch and pinch, finito.
He’d recently graduated to also being allowed to make jiaozi, which was another kindness, or maybe a test of some kind that he hadn’t yet passed or failed.
His phone buzzed from the shelf above the sink.
He quickly dried his hands on his apron and checked it between loads.
He checked it every half hour or so, because the gig economy ran on notifications and sweaty twenty-somethings.
STDY’s home screen was already open. One active booking for Saturday, a birthday party in Daly City, confirmed.
One completed, paid, cleared. And now, at the top, a new request.
May thumbed the notification and the preview flew away.
* * *
The back door opened to the alley between Lau Kee and the building next door that had been a bookshop and now sold crystals and salt lamps.
Steam followed May out, clinging to his arms, his neck, the parts of his shirt the apron hadn’t covered.
The air hit and the temperature difference was immediate.
May leaned against the wall, ankles crossed, phone cradled in both hands. The request screen had the guy’s photo at the top—good-looking, perfect nose, serious face staring straight to camera. It looked like he’d taken it at the DMV.
Hello. I need a companion for a family dinner.
Korean holiday, extended family, probably 4-5 hours.
I’m not easy company in group settings. I’ll need someone patient and comfortable not being spoken to.
Ideally you will be able to improvise without being offensive.
Knowledge of the culture would be helpful.
I’d like to meet beforehand to see if this works.
I’ll be direct about what I need. Thank you.
May read it again.
Then he read it a third time because his brain had been actively rotting from chronic low activity, to use his little brother’s phrasing, and parsing a single paragraph was hard now.
It just went through him. The words were there on the screen and he was on Mars and then he was…
back in the alley, next to the dumpster, phone warm in his hand, with the fog still crawling up from Broadway.
May stopped on the part about ‘improvising without being offensive’ and smiled.
Someone out there in the city had typed those words.
Genuinely believed that if you put a stranger in a room and said “go crazy,” the stranger’s first instinct would be to cause offense, but this instinct could be tempered by the words “oh, but not too crazy.” May was attracted to optimism and thus respected this.
The next part that interested him was ‘not easy company in group settings’ and he recognized something there—the desire to play the role better next time.
May had met this person before, a hundred times in a hundred rooms in a hundred mirrors. Someone trying so hard to ask for something they’d already decided wasn’t theirs to want.
His thumb traced the air above the words ‘Thank you.’ He stared at the screen for a moment, picturing himself sitting beside the man.
Then he echoed, “Thank you,” beneath his breath, accepted the request, and went back inside.
* * *
The 38 at this hour was mostly empty. May’s eyes passed over his fellow passengers: a woman with grocery bags that took up two seats, a guy in headphones whose head lolled with every turn, two possibly-teenagers huddled up toward the back, cackling at something on their phones, heads pressed together.
Outside, downtown gave way to the avenues, lit signs thinning out block by block until the city was mostly dark houses and fog.
His apartment door stuck twice and then gave in, because the door to doorframe relationship dynamic was entering the ‘will’ era of their will-they-won’t-they. May took that as a good sign.
Inside, the kitchen counter was a magnificent diorama.
Notebooks in a stack, a phone charger cord tangled with his neon green earbuds, plus an unopened bill he’d put there with the intention of opening it in a theoretical future that kept not arriving.
The stovetop had a pan on it containing oil from a previous cooking attempt whose details were now unclear to May and therefore lost to history.
The living room consisted of a couch, a low table, and a TV.
Nothing on the walls except the obligatory red calendar with 福 on it that they gave out every year at Lau Kee.
His last visitor, his sister Anna, had come inside and let out an ohhh that lasted for an unreal amount of time while she tried to find something nice to say.
Shoes off in the shoe corner, backpack dumped by the door.
He took his meds at the counter. Two pills from the organizer with days labeled in Sharpie because the pre-printed letters were too small, and if he couldn’t read them it was all for naught.
The pills went down with water from a mug he’d accidentally stolen from a break room somewhere years ago, the faded print advertising a towing company that no longer existed.
His phone lit up with a message from his brother. A photo of a steak dinner, no caption; how Louis often deigned to communicate with him. To go back through their chat would reveal many such check-ins and a concerning amount of potatoes.
May typed nice and then deleted it and flipped open his green notebook and wrote: say something nice to your brother NOT LITERALLY NICE. Then he drew an empty checkbox next to it. Actionable. He’d do it tomorrow.
Next he checked his bank balance, because he needed to keep his mood consistent somehow. It was a number that kept him where he was. STDY wasn’t fun money.
The TV was already on. It was always already on or he turned it on without remembering the turning.
He’d left some show streaming, a C-drama with fifty-thousand episodes.
Costumes, hairpieces, people in courtyards staring severely at each other as one of three approved songs played over the intensity of their stares. The woman on screen opened her mouth.
“How could His Majesty leave me so destitute—”
May mouthed the words. He’d watched this episode or an episode from this drama, or an episode from a different drama with the same actress.
She’d been in everything for a decade and May had absorbed it all.
His Chinese came from her and from women like her, so often when he spoke he sounded less like a Chinese-American guy from the Bay and more like a scorned concubine.
His father was a man of few words in all his languages.
His mother spoke Mandarin when she wanted everyone in the house to understand something and Hokkien when she did not want the children to know anything.
May knew exactly enough to know when she was talking about him on the phone, but not enough to know what he’d done wrong.
The drama carried on with the lady in the courtyard and as she wept, May began to see the actress who’d been directed to weep, who had found the tears from somewhere else and poured them out so the lady in the courtyard could have her sadness. And May watched her, and May watched himself watch her.
One moment he was on the couch and the couch was his couch and the room was his room and the next moment all of those things were still true but he was seeing them from slightly behind his own eyeballs. A show about watching a guy sitting on a couch watching a show.
His hand moved. Thumb on cheekbone, fingers on temple. Tap tap. The pressure of his own fingers against his own face, checking that the submarine wasn’t leaking.
The drama’s soundtrack swelled as the woman’s monologue reached its climax, which meant the dramatic ending theme would be kicking in soon.
He didn’t remember starting the episode, and that made sense, because the TV had already been on when he’d entered the room.
His thumb pressed harder against his cheekbone and the room came back for real this time.
* * *
A foghorn honked from somewhere out west. Either the sound or the rattle had woken him.
He didn’t know when he’d fallen asleep, but he always slept like shit, so whatever impact his impromptu unconsciousness had wouldn’t matter.
The lady on TV, now in a pavilion, was crying about some other injustice, not a hair out of place.
May sat on the couch with his phone on his lap.
His lock screen told him it was one in the morning.
He rubbed his eyes with one hand and swiped to STDY.
The booking he’d accepted hours ago in the alley, partly on impulse, before he’d written a word back.
The accepted request sat there with an empty reply field beneath it that May should have filled, could easily have filled, on the ride home from work.
Was it weird to reply this late? Probably. But this was San Francisco and the request had been weird, and the app was weird. He tapped the field and started typing.
Hey!!! This is definitely my kind of thing. I’m good at dinners and parents. I once took an improv class and I’m extremely patient. Meeting beforehand is a good call. When works for you? I’m free Tue, Wed, Thurs before noon. May (That is my name, not just saying a month!!!)
May read it back. He added one exclamation mark and then deleted it again, trying to settle on whether three was too many. It was too many. Did he sound too eager?
He glanced back up at the end of the original message, at ‘Thank you,’ and decided eager was appropriate, with three exclamation marks.
He sent it, and then made a mental reminder to write down that he’d sent it.