‘You’re too soft,’ said my parents. ‘You need to build character.’ So I spent an exhausting, demoralising summer waiting tables
Since I can remember, my parents have wanted me to work in a restaurant. “You need to build character,” they would tell me, usually when we were eating out, and always unprompted. “We raised you too soft.”
My mother had worked in a Chinese restaurant when she first moved to the US and felt that her experience had toughened her up. When she remembered how wimpy she used to be, her blood pressure would rise. “I made your dad fly from Colorado to Los Angeles to pick me up from the airport. We were dead broke for months, because I couldn’t handle a simple connecting flight.” This was, by the way, not only the flight that had delivered her from Beijing to the US, but also the first flight she’d been on.
I often burned my fingers on hot plates and hot-and-sour soup, and dropped boxes on myself in the walk-in fridge
I realised that nothing was stopping me from quitting. But what I would tell my mother?
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