I wiped the sweat from my forehead. It was the afternoon lull but my legs were already starting to ache from the hours I’d spent on my feet since the early morning. I poured in some detergent, then turned on only the hot faucet and let it fill the sink. At the beginning, I couldn’t bear to put my hands in the scalding water, even when I’d diluted it with some cold. I’d tried to use gloves until I realized the steaming water poured in over the tops of the gloves anyway when I submerged my arms. But if I was good for nothing but washing dishes, I’d resolved to be the best dishwasher I could. I’d increased the heat day by day until my body adjusted. I didn’t mind the way my hands and arms became reddened and chapped. It was the cost of my labor.
The rising steam combined with the August heat was stifling. I dropped a stack of bowls into the water, then plunged in my hands and forearms to soap them. My skin had become so rough now I barely winced anymore. The hotter the water, the faster I could work. Although the restaurant had a dishwashing machine, it was so ancient I had to make the dishes as clean as possible before loading it anyway, rather than waste time cleaning out the debris from the machine traps. Otherwise, I would have to check the dishes when they came out of the machine to know they were clean. Especially during the mealtime rush, every second was precious or we’d run out of clean dishes and silverware.
I pulled out another stack of dirty bowls from the bus tub and found a large roach hanging from one of them. I froze. I didn’t want to drop everything into the soapy water and have to fish out the now-boiled roach. The bug took advantage of my confusion, racing up my hand and onto my arm.
I screeched. The dishes I’d been holding clattered onto the floor while I batted at the roach, trying to get it off my shirt before it reached my face. Suddenly, a white cooking cloth whipped the roach off of me. It landed upside down on the floor, thick legs waving, and a man’s foot smashed it.
“You are the clumsiest dishwasher we’ve ever had!” said Mr. Hu, the owner of the restaurant. His round cheeks seemed covered with a perpetual layer of grease. “Clean it up right away!”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was—”
“I don’t want to hear it!”
Pa was standing in the doorway. “Mr. Hu, she works very hard.”
Mr. Hu softened when he saw my father. Without Pa, his restaurant would lose most of its business. “I know. And she is strong too. Just get rid of this mess, okay? Dishes are expensive.”
I started sweeping up the broken crockery right away. When Mr. Hu was gone, I said, “Thanks, Pa.” Although I could understand Chinese, I couldn’t speak it very well. Pa and I usually communicated in English. Sometimes he spoke Chinese and I answered him in English.
“Anyone can drop a soapy dish. That man needs a vacation.” He gave me an affectionate pat on the shoulder, then went back to the noodle station.
If it weren’t for Pa, I didn’t know if the restaurant would have kept me on since there was no shortage of cheap labor. However, I did work hard and I knew the restaurant had gone through a number of dishwashers before I was hired. It was dirty work, even for Chinatown.
An hour later, I was sleeping across a row of chairs by the wall at the back of the restaurant. All of the staff took naps there during our breaks because our shifts could extend from early morning until late in the night, depending on business. If more customers showed up, the restaurant stayed open. Everyone ignored us as long as we kept our backs to the other tables, and if we didn’t snore too loudly.
Someone tapped me on the side of my head. I jerked awake and peeled my cheek off the vinyl of the chair, annoyed and disoriented. “What?” I saw the yellowing wallpaper, then turned to focus on my little sister Lisa’s heart-shaped face. “Don’t touch my hair.”
“Sorry,” she said but I could tell she’d done it on purpose. “You wouldn’t wake up otherwise.”
I pushed myself up on one elbow and frowned at her. “Did you try?”
“No. I know from experience.” When I rolled my eyes, she leaned in and whispered, “I found an ad for a new job for you.”
—
I didn’t find out what Lisa’s job possibility was until after my shift. I’d shooed her out of the restaurant after her announcement, before she got me into trouble with Mr. Hu again for dawdling on my break. I knew she’d be waiting for me at home. Even though it was late by the time Pa and I arrived at our apartment, Lisa always tried to stay up. If she fell asleep, she’d wake up again when she heard us come in because she wanted to make sure we got home safely.
“What could happen in Chinatown?” I asked her once.
“Petty theft, knife fights, muggings, gang wars,” she answered.
She had a point. She was only eleven but Lisa had always been precocious. Sometimes I watched her sleeping and wished I could keep her safe from the life I led. At the very least, I would have liked to keep her ignorant of how tired I was much of the time, but it was impossible to fool her. No matter how often I told her I was satisfied being a dishwasher, Lisa kept trying to find new opportunities for me.
To be honest, I didn’t mind. I wished not for a new job or place but for a different life altogether, to change not the where but the how of things. Some people dreamed of going someplace else; I dreamed of being someone else. Someone who hadn’t always been in the bottom half of her class at school. Someone poised, elegant and beautiful—like Ma had been, like Lisa would be when she grew up. It was Lisa who took after Ma, from the slight flush beneath her skin to that gliding grace when she ran. Sometimes I would look at Lisa and Pa and silently ask the gods, “Could I please not be born into such a good-looking family in my next life?” It wasn’t easy being a cow among gazelles.
Every night, after saying good night to Pa as he retired to his tiny closet of a room, Lisa and I folded up the plastic table in the living room and put it in the corner. My mattress, with the sheets hanging off it, always leaned by the wall. We squeezed that in between the sofa and the pile of three little televisions stacked against the other wall. Only the top one worked, but Pa could never bear to throw away any of the others. “They will be maybe handy someday,” he said. Then we pulled off the worn patchwork cloth covering the sofa, exposing the scorch mark I’d made when I left the iron on it once. We covered the sofa with a sheet, then piled on Lisa’s pillow and blanket, which I had painstakingly sewn together from scraps. She was growing almost too tall to fit on the short sofa and I wasn’t sure what we would do then.
Although I nagged Lisa to go to sleep before Pa and I got home, I secretly looked forward to those moments of peace at night: Lisa lying on the sofa and me on my mattress on the floor below her, when we chatted and read before going to sleep.
“How were Uncle Henry and Aunt Monica today?” I asked.
She made a face, then said, “Fine.”
“You shouldn’t be ungrateful,” I said, “we’re—”
She completed my sentence, “—lucky that they use me for free slave labor in Uncle Henry’s office under the guise of taking care of me. I know.” Uncle Henry was a well-known doctor of traditional Chinese medicine in Chinatown. Lisa helped out at his office with tasks like filing and cleaning after school until closing time, then she came home. Now that it was summer vacation, she was there full time.
I grinned before I could stop myself. “How did you become so obnoxious?”
“The same way you got so moralistic.”
We stuck our tongues out at each other, even though I knew I was much too mature for such a thing.
“And I thought you wanted to be a doctor,” I said.
“I know.” She sighed. “It’s good experience for me, even if he’s not a western doctor.”