My Life As A Restaurant Kid

One day, when my second-grade teacher asks me for my parents’ signature, I bring the document home hoping I might catch my parents during a slow moment. I feel a push-pull: I don't want to bother my parents while they’re working at our family restaurant. I also want to do what my teacher asked. 

“Just forge it,” my brother tells me while I patiently wait for Mum to finish her kitchen prep and clean-up. He takes a scrap piece of paper and scrawls a replication of my mother’s signature. “See? Now you don’t have to wait for Mum to sign it. She’s too busy.” I internalize my brother’s lesson. It makes me feel free. Now, I don’t have to bother my parents with something as inane as a permission slip or homework.

They already know I am a good girl from the way I nod, say yes to their demands and respectfully blend in with the walls. They don’t need to see my straight As on report cards to know that to be true. 

Most of the time, I understand that my parents need me to be good. To never ask for more than what they could give. But sometimes, I rage against the expectation. Once, with my stomach growling with hunger, I call down to the restaurant from our apartment upstairs, lamenting that I have to starve because my parents are too busy feeding other people and their kids. “I’m so hungry, too hungry!” I cry into the phone. My mother’s impatient sigh tells me she has no time for my childish games. She has pork fried rice to make.

“Just wait. We’re too busy right now,” she says, her voice clipped and tired. “How can you do this to me? I could call the police! You’re starving me,” I whine. “All I have to eat is ketchup!” Without missing a beat, my mother says, “Eat ketchup then,” and hangs up. Stunned, I call back and tell them I’m running away. She hangs up on me again. I tearfully grab a few of my necessities—my favourite 101 Dalmatians sweater, a Baby-Sitters Club book, my Polly Pockets—and make a break for it. When I take my dramatic first steps outside, I am full of bravado and conviction. But it is winter, and it only takes two seconds for the cold, biting wind to humble me.

Of course, I wasn’t starved. My entire life has been a feast of abundance and complex flavours. Food is the centre of our lives. It has always brought us together. No matter how busy the restaurant was or how much cleaning up and food prep my parents needed to do, we always built time into the day for the five of us to spend together. I waited—sometimes impatiently—each day for 10 p.m. to roll around because that was when the restaurant shifted from being everyone’s main focus to the backdrop of our family dinners. Someone would say “Dai gah sik fan”—which translates roughly to “everyone eat rice together”—and for a too-brief moment in time, we’d focus on each other.

With the soo guy and Westernized fare packed away and refrigerated, we’d sit down to savour the food of our people: Mum’s braised pork belly with preserved vegetables in an unctuous sauce I wanted to drink by the salty spoonful; verdant green choy sum or gai lan stir-fried with garlic; and Dad’s lobster prepared traditionally with scallions and ginger or, my favourite, with evaporated milk, butter and onions. In none of my memories do I remember what we actually talked about. All I remember is how lit up it made me feel on the inside to be with my family. 

Even when the memories are bad—like when I was tasked with carrying out a plate of jiu yim pork chops for dinner and dropped the whole thing, to my immense guilt and shame—I still remember this dedicated block of family time fondly. No one was sweating over a wok or working the deep-fryer or placating a customer. In those moments, I felt like I belonged to a real family, not just a team of employees. I was truly, fully theirs and they were mine. 

The nights I loved best were the ones when we’d have my dad’s family over—some from exotic, far-flung places like England or Toronto—and my parents would go into full show-off mode. Look how we made it! Dad would proudly boast about his beloved LaserDisc player that was almost always playing Top Gun. Then, once the adults started feeling loose because of the Tsingtao beer or Vietnamese snake wine, Dad would fire up the karaoke machine. My parents, aunts and uncles would give rousing renditions of the beloved Vietnamese ballads and iconic Chinese songs that floated on the winds of Haiphong when they were children. 

While the adults were transported to the sticky hot nights in Vietnam of their childhood, their own children were in hell. We’d roll our eyes at their music—“Why does Vietnamese sound like that?”—and wish we were listening to cool music by bands like Bush and Silverchair. Our giant kitchen table would be laden with an assortment of dishes—stir-fried morning glory, the most tender suckling pig, Dad’s signature lobster, steamed whole fish with ginger and scallion, and if it was a celebration, a fruit sponge cake from a Chinese bakery in Toronto.

While we ate, my mother would separate the fish from the bones and drop the chunks of white meat on each of our plates. “I’m full, Mama!” I’d say after a while. But she’d keep piling meat and vegetables on my plate, her love for me evident all over her oily fingers. After we finished with the savoury food, Mum would peel us fruit after fruit, dazzling us with how quickly she could strip the fruit of its peel in one perfect, long strip. Her love was never more obvious than when she peeled grapes—a tedious chore that she did just for me.

Full of food and unable to keep my eyes open, I’d go to bed to the sound of the adults cracking jokes and swearing in Cantonese while they played mahjong well into the early hours. The clacking tiles lulled me to sleep better than any soothing lullaby ever could. The comfort of a full house, with everyone present, holding me close and keeping me safe.

From Restaurant Kid: A Memoir of Family and Belonging, by Rachel Phan ©2025. Published by Douglas & McIntyre. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.