Yen Ching

Just before Thanksgiving, I received a text message. “Chengfeng” asked, “Hello, have you been at home all this time? I’ve sold my restaurant.” It was Guishan Chen who was calling, the now-former owner of Yen Ching restaurant on Milwaukee’s Northwest Side. Putting down the phone, I didn’t reply immediately. The news had caught me off guard, like a stone falling from the sky, making the memories that had settled surge once again. I want to take advantage of this moment, while those memories are still hot, to write about my time at Yen Ching. (You can also read this as a belated director’s statement.)

In 2013, I came to the United States to continue my studies in film at University Wisconsin-Milwaukee. I bought a second-hand stick shift Chevrolet Beretta from a friend for $400. One day there was a job advertisement in a listserv, “Chinese restaurant hies drives, with or without work experience.” After working in this restaurant for a few days, I was fired. Even thought I was in incompetent, the boss had come to like me, so he said to me tactfully, “It’s full here. If you still want to do this kind of job, I can introduce you to my cousin. His restaurant has just opened.”

Even though Yen Ching opens at 4:30 pm, I was so desperate to get the job that I got there shortly after 3 for my first day of work. A waiter in black took me to the kitchen. As soon as he opened the door, the sounds of Spanish and a blaring radio mixed with greasy air and sprayed out from the gap. The waiter in black then introduced me to a woman wearing a green hat who was packing a meal to-go and who was talking in a Chinese dialect that I couldn’t understand. Then the woman put down the lunch box, turned around, and introduced me in the same dialect to a man in white apron who was operating four fry baskets at the same time. “Sit inside, sit inside, we will call you if there is an order.” His loud voice pierced the roar of the range hood and stove, “Are you hungry, do you want to eat something? Pour your own drink. If there is an order, we will call you.”

There was only one order for takeaway on that first day of work, and most of the time I stayed in the party room alone behind the dining area and did my homework. Late that night, the fry cook walked out of the kitchen and then with waiter, went to the cash register where he checked day’s receipts. He rubbed his two greasy hand on his apron, took 35 dollaers from his pocket, and handed them to me while saying, “Go home, go home, business is not good today. It will be fine in a few days.” Only then did I realize that the short fry cook in front of me was Yen Ching’s boos, Chen. The woman who packed the lunch is his wife, Lan. The waiter who brought me in was their eldest son, Rong.

The restaurant’s business had not getting any better in a few days as Chen promised. I constantly made 35 dollars per night for a long while because there was not order to deliver. Being bored, I began to work with Chen to figure out how to increase the number of delivery orders. In the course of doing all this extra work – distributing menus from door to door, taking photos of the dishes, and connecting the restaurant to various online ordering platforms, I became very good friends with Chen’s family and other restaurant employees.

Through my experience at Yen Ching. I began to see that American Chinese restaurants, once the hope of the previous generations of Chinese immigrants, are actually facing a serious and widespread decline. I looked to history for an explanation.

The development of American Chinese food can be summarized in three major changes to the cuisine, each change occurring within a specific period of American and Chinese history. The first era dates back to the gold rush era. The coolies from southern China who came to San Francisco for gold brough Chinese cooking methods to the United States. At first, the Chinese food coolies ate during the gold rush can hardly be called a cuisine. “Chop Suey” was really just a quick stir fry of whatever was at hand: a cheap fast food meant to quickly fill the belly.

The next period occurs in mid-century. With the defeat of the Kuomintang in the Chinese Civil War of the 1950s, large numbers of the Chinese social elite were forced to leave their hometown and flee to America, where they then had to figure out something to do. Many of these people chose the restaurant business, and thereby injected new vitality into American Chinese cuisine. Cecilia Chiang, for example, took advantage of her husband’s position as a diplomat in Japan to successfully open a Chinese restaurant there, and then she reproduced her successful experience in San Francisco. Mandarin was the first Chinese restaurant to serve northern Chinese cuisine in the United States. Likewise, Peng Chang-kuei, a former personal chef of Chiang Kai-shek, immigrated to the United States in the 1970s and invented General Tso’s Chicken. Their arrival broke the dominance of Cantonese cuisine in America, improving the dishes and also changing the image of a Chinese cuisine that has always thought to be cheap. Although my restaurant, Yen Ching, was built in the 1980s, the architectural style and decoration style still resemble those of Chinese restaurants from the previous era. You can see that influence on the menu too, where beef and lamb and a few of spicy dishes reflect the characteristics of northern cuisine and the changes in the immigration structure during this period.

When China rejoined the world in the 1980s, a large number of non-professional “chefs” flocked to the United States and Chinese restaurants responded by establishing a complete hierarchical system to integrate them into the industry. Newcomers who enter the industry must start from the Dishwasher, and if they do well, they will be promoted to Miscellaneous, and then to Chopper, Fryer, Cook’s Aid, and finally to Cook. When these newcomers have accumulated enough necessary skills and won their immigration cases, most of them will go on to open their own restaurants. Chen is one of these people. With this business model, Chinese restaurants have quickly occupied all parts of the United States. Their combined total far surpasses that of McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, and KFC. This training system produces a high degree of uniformity in the dishes and flavors, but it also contains a fatal flaw. When opening a restaurant is simply a means of earning a living, food innovations are lackluster, business concepts don’t keep pace with the times, and a large number of customers start to lose interest. This has caused Chinese food to return to the old path of small profits but quick turnover.

Chen and his family have followed this course. Before taking over Yen Ching, they ran a Chinese buffet, so now they still use the buffet business philosophy to run Yen Ching. They will do extra work themselves if they cannot afford to hire. They will go home later if there are more dishes needed to be washed. They will increase food portions if the customers start not coming back. Most Chinese restaurant owners of Chen’s generation are struggling to realize their American Dream in this most simple way.

From the chop suey shops opened for the miners in San Francisco, to the improvement of Chinese food by Cecilia Chiang in the 1960s, to the fast-foodization Chinese food today, Chinese restaurant business in America seems going to where it started during the last 100 years.

In the 1980s, China’s reform and opening up triggered a massive wave of immigration to the United States, followed by a boom in new Chinese restaurant and a rising middle class. Getting up early and going to bed late, these people did their best to send their children to the best universities so they could move up in society – and, hopefully never set foot in a Chinese restaurant again! The older generation of restaurant operators are caught in a dilemma. On the one hand, they cannot bear to let the children come back and follow their old paths, but at the same time they are reluctant to sell their life’s hard work to others.

For the younger generation, the old American Dream of owning your own restaurant may become a lifelong nightmare. In most of the Chinese restaurants you have been to, there is an open schoolbag on the chair and a spread textbook on the table. When the phone rings, you can hear a kid who speaks perfect American English repeating the dishes the customer had just ordered: General Tso’s Chicken, Mongolian Beef… “I feel sick as soon as I smell the greasy air from the kitchen.” Jim Wang, the younger son of Yen Ching’s previous owner, who sold the restaurant to Chen’s family told me. Both of him and his older brother had “worked” at Yen Ching for more than ten years. Neither of them wants to keep the business.
When I worked at Yen Ching, I watched Chen struggle with this dilemma. Chen has two sons, Rong and Xin. They are only one year apart but they are very different people. Rong has been helping at the restaurant full-time since he graduated from high school. Xin, on the other hand, went to a college on a scholarship. Chen had hoped that Xin, would return to the restaurant after graduating from college, but he was afraid that Xin’s future might be jeopardized if he did so. “I hope he has a great future,” Chen says of Xin. After a moment of silence, Chen adds, “My best hope is that Xin will not find a job after graduation, so that he can just go home and help.”
When I went to work at Yen Ching in 2017, Chen had owned the restaurant for two years but had made very little progress building up the business.

When I went to work at Yen Ching in 2017, Chen had owned the restaurant for two years but had made very little progress building up the business. In order to save money, Chen resorted to firing the busboy, dishwasher, and waiters one after another. All the extra work is shared by Chen, Rong, and Chen’s wife, Dan. Chen is the boss, the fry cook, and the dishwasher. Rong is the waiter and receptionist. Lan…As the filming draws to a close, more and more employees in restaurants have been laid off, and Chen's has been wasting away.

But what is worthy of "gratefulness" is that Xin, as Chen wished, did not find an ideal job and returned to Yen Ching. Although the business is still the same, the days of the family together make Chen full of hope. Around this time, I also started postproduction. During the editing process, I tried many possibilities, and finally cut out a 20-minute and a 60-minute version. Both versions have their own strengths, but it is difficult to balance the compact plot and detailed characterization. But whether it is long or short, I have the opportunity to sit down and re-examine the ups and downs of Chen's family from a third person perspective. After watching the footage for a while, I found myself in their lives. For instant, the mood of restraint of the family after a long-lost reunion, the pride in the eyes of the Lan when she talked about her younger son, and the hesitation that Chen showed between his wishes and his son’s future. Especially when Rong was picking up the phone, it made me feel that every call when I first came to the United States was like a terrible nightmare. Everyone is a mirror. If you want to understand yourself, you must first understand others. Through the shooting, the friendship between me and the old Chen family has been deepened, and at the same time, I am more and more reflecting on my life.

As an employee of Yen Ching and the maker of the film, I would like to thank Chen's family for their care and support for me. In addition, I also want to thank my teacher Dick Blau for continuing to help this film after graduation. This film cannot be made without his help. I would also like to thank Cecelia Condit for helping me complete the 20-minute version. Finally, I would like to thank my wife Wang Yujing for her irreplaceable help for this film.

Written in January 2021, the third month after Yen Ching sold.