“Seung, I need you to work harder,” his manager told him. It wasn’t the first time he’d been reprimanded and wouldn’t be the last. On more than one occasion, crabby customers would hand back their fancy Italian coffees insisting any barista other than him give it another go.
At 23, Seung had seen a decent amount of the world. The summer after his senior year in high school his mother shipped him off to Yonsei University to brush up on his less than stellar Korean.
He ended up drinking himself silly for 5 weeks with cousins who introduced him to a Korean vodka called lemon soju. The drink went down so smooth Seung was half convinced it didn’t have any alcohol at all.
In any event, he never looked back.
By the time he returned he had nothing to show for the 5 years he spent in college. The already fragile patience of his parents was waning with each half-assed Americano he slid across the counter.
His father had come from Seoul a decade after the Korean War and gradually turned a not so brief stint as a busboy into an empire of high end grocery stores in and around Minneapolis.
So when his oldest son still couldn’t stick to anything he started, beginning with a plea to learn the alto sax in the 7th grade, it finally dawned on him he’d been coddling the boy for too long.
Those days were now over.
Now, here he was wiping down dirty table tops in a popular cafe off Hennepin Avenue. To make matters worse, Seung was broke. Any money he did have went straight to his liver, which explained why he’d stumble into work each morning with his world still very much spinning at 5:30 am.
It was the only time he could think of when a hangover might have been a sign of progress.
He worked double shifts whenever he could, and not because he wanted the money or needed the distraction. Another hour at the cafe meant another away from his folks; though his parents rarely left the store before 11:00 pm.
Living at home proved to be an inescapable purgatory; not good or quite bad enough to do anything about. Another month of practically free rent and reliable WiFi was enough to endure the barrage of lectures, which invariably grew into screaming matches between Seung and his father.
One night, Seung’s mother had to separate the two before they came to blows.
The next morning before heading off to work, Seung could hear his mother sobbing at the kitchen table.
He was breaking her heart and he knew it.
In the alleyway where Seung took his smoke breaks, he’d often see a woman about his age taking out the trash. The restaurant next door was a popular hangout among local politicians and businessmen. After a home game, one also had a half decent chance of spotting a Minnesota Twin or two. The place was rumored to have the best burger in town and arguably the biggest Oreo milkshake in the Midwest.
She smiled at him every time she tossed the bulky bag into a giant green dumpster. How she could make something so uninspired look so graceful only made him fall harder.
Seung began daydreaming about the two ambling down the Stone Arch Bridge before his fantasy was interrupted by the disapproval his parents wouldn’t bother to hide for bringing home a girl who wasn’t Korean, let alone Somali.
That would put them over the edge, he thought.
Still, he spent the next few weeks trying to time his breaks to catch glimpses of the girl and eventually muster up the courage to say something — anything. But trying to time how often the trash needed to be taken out was like picking which stock to ride.
It was anybody’s guess.
One evening he strolled into the restaurant after a double-shift and ordered aMaker’s Mark on the rocks. He feigned interest in a game playing behind the bar, while scanning the place in search of the girl.
After a few minutes he downed the drink and asked for the bill before seeing her tall frame in a corridor by the kitchen. She was carrying a pair of bus pans filled with thick water glasses and heavy dinner plates full of half eaten steaks and vegetables that’d been pushed aside.
It looked as though it weighed a ton.
He watched as the girl skillfully maneuvered in the tight space, taking on one task after another with no sign of fatigue or indifference. She did the work in a way that indicated she had no choice; a realization completely foreign to him.
When she ducked back into the kitchen, Seung took a long look at his empty glass before deciding to make his way home.
As the weeks went by, something strange started to happen. Seung felt compelled to keep his head down at both work and home. He now looked customers in the eye, showed up sober, and even learned how to make that damn Americano.
At home, life gradually got better as well. He and his father still argued from time to time but it now seemed less a matter of Seung’s future prospects than a sort of cultural temperament. Seung even asked to help out at the store; a place he’d once swore he’d never set foot in, let alone work.
In some perverse way, learning the nuances of what made a store run helped him understand the complexities of his own father; a man he later discovered survived by eating bark during the Korean War.
The irony of course was, it took a minute of watching the work ethic of another immigrant to appreciate the one of the man and woman who’d raised him.
Once he connected the dots he never talked back to his father again.
A few years later Seung walked into his parents’ store sporting a tie and a weathered, but stylish book bag he’d picked up while traveling through Italy. He’d stopped by to drop off a few books and pick his folks up for dinner. Seung had promised to take them both out with the first check he’d earned as a professor.
He’d been out of state the three years it took to get his masters and admittedly felt a little out of place each time he returned. Now, he was teaching at a community college in St. Paul and gradually getting his footing again in the place he’d know his whole life.
So when it came to choosing a place to eat he went with what he remembered foregoing the new trendy restaurants that lined the streets downtown.
He was going to get his parents a burger and a giant milkshake.
The three made their way into the busy restaurant. They took a corner booth as Seung could see the cafe he once worked at through the window. He’d left on good terms before heading off to grad school but wasn’t even remotely nostalgic about his time there.
His parents sat together as Seung’s mother read the entrees to his father. His eyes had gotten even worse over the years, but Seung got the sense his dad enjoyed being doted on.
The two scanned the restaurant as if they’d landed on the moon. Seung’s parents went out to eat so rarely, the act of being served might as well have been something from another planet.
The three ordered a few appetizers before the main course when Seung spotted a familiar silhouette near the kitchen.
It was the same girl.
Only now she wasn’t sporting an apron or carrying a bus pan. Her hair was pulled back as she wore a sharp blue business suit with a binder in her hand. She looked to be explaining something to a waiter before making her way towards the bar.
Seung tried to piece together her new role and knew whatever it was, she wasn’t taking orders anymore, she was giving them.
He smiled as his mother caught his gaze.
“Friend of yours?” she asked in Korean.
“No,” he said. “Just someone I used to know.”
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