There is a new Korean restaurant in town called Yummy Yummy. It's located at the corner of Oak Street and Washington Ave (next to Oak St Cinema) on the East Bank of the UMN campus. Don't confuse it with Yummy which is located on Nicollet Ave South (Eat Street). That restaurant is Chinese and also good, but go eat at Yummy Yummy!
Yummy Yummy is pretty yummy. I've only been once for lunch but it was a good meal and definitely plan to revisit soon. They have a limited menu (about 6 main dishes of beef, pork, chicken, dumplings) but the quality and quantity is good. What's more, the owners are super friendly and sweet. They are earnest folk who are really invested in making this venture a success.
Although I've only been there once (ok, twice if you count the first time walking by the restaurant with friends and stopping to talk briefly to the owners), I feel a kinship with the owners. It dawned on me pretty quickly that they remind me of my own family who used to own a Chinese/Korean restaurant.
My parents immigrated to the US in the 1960s and by the mid-1970s opened up a Chinese fast food takeout restaurant/diner called Chung and Young's (after my aunt and mom's first names). It was located in East Hartford, CT on a busy street full of small businesses and shops and close to the highway leading into Hartford (capital and insurance company mecca). It was a working class town. Only a couple of years after opening the shop, they lost their lease when the owner realized how successful such a business could be. He booted them and opened up his own Chinese restaurant (even tho' he was White) which eventually failed. Looking back, I am sure my parents could have sued his ass but they had no resources (limited English skills, no savings, etc.).
Resilient and undaunted, my family opened up a bigger, nicer restaurant with the same name (Chung and Young's) down two blocks and across the street. This restaurant was open for lunch and dinner. Unlike the first location, it had a small parking lot in the back where I could ride my bicycle in circles and circles for hours and hours. The inside was decorated sparsely but it had these great orange bar stools attached to a counter bar at the back of the restaurant where I could spin around in circles and circles for hours and hours. You get the picture of how much time I spent there as a little kid.
As far as I know, the restaurant business was successful in part because my mom was a great cook. My aunt and she later went on to sell the business and open a Korean grocery store (Arirang House) down a few more blocks and across the street. This grocery store is still around, I think. Eventually, my mom started to teach Korean cooking classes in the evening adult education program and was even featured on the front page of the Food section of the Hartford Courant newspaper. I joked in my eulogy at my mom's funeral that she remains the most famous Korean American to be featured in the largest state newspaper!
Well, Yummy Yummy (hereafter referred to as Y2) reminds me a lot about family's early years and it brings back many memories. It's interesting how something so tangential can open the flood gates of childhood yearnings and adventures, snapshots of happiness and nightmares of sadness. Why Y2 and not my many visits to Dong Yang (another good Korean joint in Columbia Heights). It's hard to say, but I think it's the owners at Y2. The husband and wife duo strike me as so much like my own dad and mom. My dad was the guy who seemed to always be busy but we were never quite sure doing what. In truth, he handled the finances and ran all the errands. My mom was the super energizer bunny who was super friendly to customers and cook extraordinaire.
It was a crazy time in our lives. We were sort of living the American dream in terms of our rise to working middle class in just a short 10 years in the country. Yet it was hard, hard work. My dad and mom both had full time jobs working for an ad agency and an insurance company, respectively, and then they worked at the store in the late afternoon and evenings. In other words, they were working by 7 AM and returning home around 11 PM, day in and day out. After school or on the weekends, my brothers and I spent many hours hanging out in the restaurant kitchen, chasing each other around, wiping down tables, stealing fortune cookies, scrounging up change to get ice cream at Friendly's. Otherwise, we were at home with our grandmother watching a lot of television, playing sports in the backyard, and exploring the creeks and tobacco fields that surrounded our house.
I think back fondly at those times, but if I really examine those memories, I also can recall the frustration, the boredom, the loneliness, the heartache, the worries, the exhaustion that are buried deep down. I try to gloss over these memories with the idealism of youth (and the fiction of adulthood), but I know they are there...wanting to be heard, seen, felt. Oh, I know they are there and I occasionally allow them to surface spontaneously or through provocation. It's always good to feel the full spectrum of memories to give life the right perspective...but truthfully, it's much easier day to day to just focus on the hedonistic and eudomonic memories of the past and present.
Nonetheless, it's really quite amazing to think of the resilience of immigrants like my parents. How did they do it? What helped them to succeed while others in our family and community failed? What costs were incurred emotionally and socially to assure other benefits financially and educationally? Whose lives were bettered and whose lives suffered?
What I do (or try to do) in my work as a psychology professor is to start to answer these questions through my observations, methodological and quantitative skills, and writings. Although I focus on the cultural experiences of immigrants, adoptees, US-born, and refugees, I recognize the genetic, environmental, personality factors that interact with each other to influence our development and adaptation. Yet it's so easy to get lost in the details of these specifics and to lose sight of the big picture. What does all this mean to the everyday person? Am I really understanding and reflecting those experiences in their lives that need to be heard by scholars, politicians, community leaders, neighbors, and strangers? Whom am I serving and in what capacity? These are important but hard questions to use as a reality check.
I'm so thankful to have memories evoked by such simple everyday encounters like stepping through the front door of Y2 and seeing this owner-couple waiting to greet me. I'm reminded of why I am here, doing what I doing.
Posted by richlee at September 8, 2005 11:50 AMRich, that is so beautiful. Thanks for sharing.
Posted by: SY at September 9, 2005 08:28 PMrich, thanks for sharing this window into your childhood and upbringing which really helps to tell the story of so many immigrant families struggling to get by, succeed, and perhaps help their children have a better life. i too am constantly in awe when i think about my parents' own immigration and tremendous hard work and sacrifices for their children (there are four of us). i actually don't think i really even began to apprecaite it until i became an adult and can see glimpses of my parents in the families i research (that is a bit of an overstatement since they had graduate degrees and their struggles with more with racism, long work hours, linguistic barriers, etc--but i do recognize now how much i took for granted in them). thanks.
Hi Rich, it's me again--a first time visitor to your Blog site. After reading this entry about the impact of being part of an immigrant family and growing up in the family business, I had to respond again. The universality of these combined experiences is really weird...I wrote about pretty much the same things you did in my Personal History Statement for grad school. Maybe we should start an online club for people who grew up in their immigrant family's small business and go into researching social issues...
Posted by: Mary at December 30, 2005 07:25 PM