Rollicking, risky business
By Corby Kummer |
March 27, 2011, Sunday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
IT'S hard not to fall in love with "My Korean Deli." First, it's the very rare memoir that places careful, loving attention squarely on other people rather than the author. Second, it tells a rollicking, made-for-the-movies story in a wonderfully funny deadpan style.
By the end, you'll feel that you know the author and his family quite well - even though you may not be eager to move in with them.
The book opens in the autumn of 2002 with Ben Ryder Howe, then an editor at The Paris Review, riding around New York with his mother-in-law, Kay, "the Mike Tyson of Korean grandmothers," looking at locations for the delicatessen his family has decided to buy - or, more accurately, his wife, Gab, has decided to buy, in order to occupy her mother and repay her for the heroic self-sacrifice of moving her family from Korea and slaving to send her daughter to the University of Chicago, where she and Howe met as 20-year-olds. Gab, who is turning 30, feels she has accomplished nothing in life, despite earning two graduate degrees and working as a corporate lawyer. So she tells her husband she's quitting her job. Instead of using the US$30,000 they have saved to liberate themselves from their apartment in her parents' Staten Island basement, they'll put it into a deli. The quick profits, she assures him, will soon pay for a house of their own.
It's immediately clear that no one except Kay, who for 20 years has been a clerk at various 7-Elevens and Stop-N-Gos, is the least bit suited to working at a convenience store, let alone running one. Aside from a summer job pumping gas, Howe has never done manual work. Unlike Dwayne, the longtime employee of the store in Brooklyn, that the family eventually buys, who has a gift for knowing when city inspectors are descending for a sting, Howe has a sixth sense that isn't much use: "I can look at someone and tell if they've been to boarding school."
Howe's working life has been spent in another basement, George Plimpton's, toiling in a world where family connections and schools matter as much, and maybe more, than actual ability. The idea of risk - real risk, of the kind his in-laws faced every day in their new country, in which actual survival depends on getting and holding a job - strikes him as "an antidote" to The Paris Review's "make-believe world (poems! stories!) inside a bubble of privilege." Running a convenience store will be Howe's version of climbing the Himalayas or, though he never makes the comparison, of his boss's attempt to play professional football. (When Plimpton hears about Howe's plan, he insists that he be allowed to work as a stock boy for a day.)
As much as "My Korean Deli" is an introduction to the constant obstacle course that is the life of a small-business operator, it's finally a portrait of two people Howe comes to understand much better through his own travails. His mother-in-law, who won't and can't stop working, is humorless and unembarrassable (holding up condoms at a wholesaler's and loudly demanding to know which customers will like better, ribbed or studded), but she's also unhesitatingly generous. Howe's other employer, George Plimpton, may seem like an aged frat boy who has lost his way, both as the leader of a defiantly unprofessional magazine and as a writer who can't make progress on his own memoir, but he's also a brilliant editor who doesn't stop caring, who's always eager to be surprised. Howe comes to see the joyous amateurism he had soured on as both an inspiration and a daily effort that, like Kay's, always needs to be in productive motion.
That fresh embrace of discovery keeps "My Korean Deli" moving as fast as it does. And although Howe would never say so himself, his new life fully achieves the sort of risky adventure Plimpton only dabbled at.
By the end, you'll feel that you know the author and his family quite well - even though you may not be eager to move in with them.
The book opens in the autumn of 2002 with Ben Ryder Howe, then an editor at The Paris Review, riding around New York with his mother-in-law, Kay, "the Mike Tyson of Korean grandmothers," looking at locations for the delicatessen his family has decided to buy - or, more accurately, his wife, Gab, has decided to buy, in order to occupy her mother and repay her for the heroic self-sacrifice of moving her family from Korea and slaving to send her daughter to the University of Chicago, where she and Howe met as 20-year-olds. Gab, who is turning 30, feels she has accomplished nothing in life, despite earning two graduate degrees and working as a corporate lawyer. So she tells her husband she's quitting her job. Instead of using the US$30,000 they have saved to liberate themselves from their apartment in her parents' Staten Island basement, they'll put it into a deli. The quick profits, she assures him, will soon pay for a house of their own.
It's immediately clear that no one except Kay, who for 20 years has been a clerk at various 7-Elevens and Stop-N-Gos, is the least bit suited to working at a convenience store, let alone running one. Aside from a summer job pumping gas, Howe has never done manual work. Unlike Dwayne, the longtime employee of the store in Brooklyn, that the family eventually buys, who has a gift for knowing when city inspectors are descending for a sting, Howe has a sixth sense that isn't much use: "I can look at someone and tell if they've been to boarding school."
Howe's working life has been spent in another basement, George Plimpton's, toiling in a world where family connections and schools matter as much, and maybe more, than actual ability. The idea of risk - real risk, of the kind his in-laws faced every day in their new country, in which actual survival depends on getting and holding a job - strikes him as "an antidote" to The Paris Review's "make-believe world (poems! stories!) inside a bubble of privilege." Running a convenience store will be Howe's version of climbing the Himalayas or, though he never makes the comparison, of his boss's attempt to play professional football. (When Plimpton hears about Howe's plan, he insists that he be allowed to work as a stock boy for a day.)
As much as "My Korean Deli" is an introduction to the constant obstacle course that is the life of a small-business operator, it's finally a portrait of two people Howe comes to understand much better through his own travails. His mother-in-law, who won't and can't stop working, is humorless and unembarrassable (holding up condoms at a wholesaler's and loudly demanding to know which customers will like better, ribbed or studded), but she's also unhesitatingly generous. Howe's other employer, George Plimpton, may seem like an aged frat boy who has lost his way, both as the leader of a defiantly unprofessional magazine and as a writer who can't make progress on his own memoir, but he's also a brilliant editor who doesn't stop caring, who's always eager to be surprised. Howe comes to see the joyous amateurism he had soured on as both an inspiration and a daily effort that, like Kay's, always needs to be in productive motion.
That fresh embrace of discovery keeps "My Korean Deli" moving as fast as it does. And although Howe would never say so himself, his new life fully achieves the sort of risky adventure Plimpton only dabbled at.
- About Us
- |
- Terms of Use
- |
-
RSS - |
- Privacy Policy
- |
- Contact Us
- |
- Shanghai Call Center: 962288
- |
- Tip-off hotline: 52920043
- 沪ICP证：沪ICP备05050403号-1
- |
- 互联网新闻信息服务许可证：31120180004
- |
- 网络视听许可证：0909346
- |
- 广播电视节目制作许可证：沪字第354号
- |
- 增值电信业务经营许可证：沪B2-20120012
Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.
