MEI TING
On special occasions, like my birthday, we had Chinese food. That was pretty exotic for Long Island in the 1960s. My favorite Chinese food was Moo Goo Gai Pan, because that is what my father always ordered. My mother liked chop suey.
Chinese food meant take out and a trip to Mei Ting on Jericho Turnpike. We never ate in the restaurant, which was very red inside with ornate dragon moldings and a fat smiling golden Buddha with upstretched arms in the vestibule, which was a fancy term for inside of an entrance. My father would place the order over the phone and the person taking the order would tell my father it would be ready in fifteen minutes. Even though it was a half hour drive to Mei Ting we would always have to wait. My father never minded though. He would elect to wait for the order at the bar, where he would order a Mai Tai. I never saw him drink a Mai Tai outside of Mei Ting. I’d clamber up on the bar stool next to him and I would get a Shirley Temple, which I would sip slowly, saving the maraschino cherry for last.
I liked to look at the posters of Hong Kong on the walls and ask questions. My father told me that Hong Kong was British, even though everyone was Chinese, and that the people there were free because Hong Kong was not part of Communist China. He said we were very lucky to be living in the United States of America. I remember being very grateful to live in a country where they had maraschino cherries.
When the order was ready my father would check inside the bag to make sure the order was complete and ask for extra packets of mustard and soy sauce, which would be stockpiled in the refrigerator after we didn’t use them. My father called soy sauce pigeon blood, although never inside the restaurant. The only explanation he ever gave was that soy sauce looked like pigeon blood. I had never seen a pigeon bleed but I assumed my father had because he had been in the war and never talked about what he had seen or done except for the three day pass in Paris. Still, the thought of eating pigeon blood excited me somehow, like when the priest placed the consecrated Host in my mouth on Sunday and pronounced it the body and blood of Christ.
After my father was satisfied the order was correct, he paid in cash and we would drive home, the aroma of Chinese food filling the car and making me hungry. When we got home, my mother had already set out the paper plates on the kitchen table. My father took the white cartons from the brown bag and we each got an eggroll and some rice and my father would spoon the Moo Goo Gai Pan over his rice and mine and we would eat with forks because no one knew how to eat with chopsticks.
After we finished, we would have dessert. We would each get a fortune cookie that we would crack open one at a time and slowly extract the scroll inside. We would then each read our prophecy in turn, very solemnly.
My fortune was always the same: “YOU WILL LIVE A HAPPY LIFE.”
And I would always wonder when this would happen. When would my happy life begin?
“I am an attorney practicing in Manhattan, but not for too much longer. I have been accepted into the Sarah Lawrence MFA in Creative Writing Program (Poetry) and will be starting in the Fall.
My work has been published in Gargoyle #73, The Tishman Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, Blue Unicorn, Third Wednesday, The Cape Rock, The Driftwood Press, The Worcester Review, The Ocean State Review, Cagibi, and TRINACRIA, among others. I have been a finalist in the William Wisdom-William Faulkner Writing Competition and for the Edna St. Vincent Millay Poetry Prize.”