The Tang and Yee family business plays a starring role in the hit time-traveling comedy Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Almost. If you pause at exactly the right moment, as Socrates and Genghis Khan run amok in the San Dimas, California mall, you can see it: a restaurant in the mall food court with a green countertop. The red neon sign at the front reads “New Jade: Chinese Food.” I’ve never actually seen the full movie, but my dad proudly showed that blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment to me as a clip on YouTube when I was a kid. It’s not every day that your family business gets 15 milliseconds of fame.
In reality, our restaurant existed in Metrocenter, a mall on the Phoenix side of the Phoenix-Glendale border. The only photo I have of it on my phone is from seven years ago—the last time I visited my ama’s house, a little under three years after my ye ye died of colon cancer, around half a year before the mall closed for good during lockdown. In that photo, the counter had been renovated and the name of the restaurant was “Jade: The Taste of China”—the “Jade” part in big green font, next to a red, fan-like logo. The photo is absurdly grainy. It’s as if my phone camera knew that the experience of visiting my dad’s family in Arizona would always be a hazy one, never totally denoised.
Most of the memories I have of Metrocenter and “the Jade,” as my dad calls it, are second-hand ones. I was born and raised in Massachusetts, closer to my mom’s side of the family. The way my dad tells it, for him and his brothers, Roger and Justin, that air-conditioned wonderland-turned-ghost-town was their whole world growing up. The Jade was co-owned by my ye ye and my dad’s cousin, Ron Yee. My dad worked at the Jade after school, probably in violation of child labor laws. It was where he learned how the little chicken drumsticks are actually the upper part of the wing, as well as the ultimate business strategy of asking, “Would you like a drink with that?” My dad and his brothers usually worked at the counter, filling said drinks at the soda fountain and ringing up people’s orders. To my ama’s horror, Justin once ripped up a $2 bill in the register because he thought that there was no way it wasn’t counterfeit. Another time, Roger greeted a customer with an exasperated “merry fucking Christmas.” The customer, a regular, asked my ama if her eldest son was doing okay every subsequent time he visited.
Of my dad and his two brothers, only Justin ended up learning Cantonese—he was the baby of the family, while Roger and my dad had been born almost exactly one year apart. When Roger and my dad were little, my ama and ye ye, young and bright-eyed, were just getting used to married life in the States and extremely busy working at the restaurant. The two boys were babysat by my ye ye’s adoptive mom, Ron’s grandmother, but she apparently “didn’t talk much.” Instead, their main sources of Chinese cultural immersion were Bruce Lee, a very bad English dub of The Five Masters of Death, and, of course, food. At home, they ate jellyfish salad and watercress soup, but when my grandparents brought leftovers back from work, there would be crispy egg rolls (made in-house, as my dad would proudly specify) and saucy-sweet orange chicken, alongside pizza from one of the Italian stalls.
Outside of these vignettes, I don’t know very much about my dad’s childhood. The less pleasant parts usually come up in random bits and pieces. My dad hates getting Rickrolled—high school in Tempe in the late 80s was not good to him, and my dad got shoved in lockers for being Asian and overweight as Astley serenaded his lover on the radio. I’ve always known my dad to be a fitness nut, and when I was a kid, my dad bought 2% milk for me to drink and skim milk for his cereal, and he never let me drink soda or fruit punch, even at birthday parties. My mom says my horrible sense of humor, puns and all, is copy-paste from my dad’s. As I grew older, I started to have a sneaking suspicion that his groan-inducing jokes came from an attempt to become not the fat Chinese guy, but the funny guy.
While in college at the University of Arizona, my dad continued working at the restaurant over the summer, but everything changed when he happened upon a flyer for a history summer program info session while checking his mailbox. He stopped by on a whim, but ended up applying and getting in, a sequence of events that ultimately resulted in his admission to UC Berkeley for grad school, where he met my mom.
When I was little, we barely visited my grandparents in Tempe. Our visits only picked up—Thanksgivings, Christmases, even random blocks of spring break here and there—after my ye ye’s terminal diagnosis. When we visited the restaurant, I repeated a familiar routine every time:
- Say hi to extended family at the counter, wondering if they remember you.
- Realize they do remember you because your dad sends photos, and feel guilty about not keeping in touch yourself.
- Remember that you never learned Cantonese, which might be making things more awkward.
- Hear your ama yell, “Egg foo young!” above the noise of the kitchen.
- Ask for orange chicken (“orange” you glad for that classic?), lo mein, and an egg roll. And teriyaki chicken, which isn’t Chinese but has always been inexplicably there, very salty, and very, very good.
Now that I think about it, I don’t remember my dad ever saying much during our visits to the Metrocenter. Once, when my ye ye was still well, my dad took me to the back of the restaurant, where my ye ye looked up from the chicken he was chopping, waving a gloved hand and grinning toothily. Other than that, my dad would simply say an enthusiastic but quick hello to whoever was at the counter or near the front of the kitchen, then ask me what I’d like to order.
The only time I’ve seen my dad cry was at my ye ye’s funeral. Wiping his tears gently, he addressed my ye ye’s family and family friends, half of whom I barely recognized.
“I guess I’m lucky,” he began, choking a little on his words. “Out of me, Roger, and Justin, everyone always said that I looked the most like my dad.”
On our mantlepiece at home, there’s an old, faded photo of my dad when he was six, the same age I was in my first memories of Arizona. He’s standing in the desert, a blurry saguaro in the distance, smiling so wide that his eyes are almost closed. I sometimes imagine that boy in kindergarten, among a sea of faces unlike his and placed in ESL despite English being his only language. Or I imagine him at the Jade stacking red and white soda cups, still barely tall enough to see over the counter.
“Look at that big smile,” my mom would sometimes say to me, usually while sipping her coffee in the morning. “Just like yours.”
