At the Thai food restaurant - By N.L. Belardes

I sat with chingpea at a favorite Thai food restaurant. I don’t know how the owner survived because for months we seemed like the only two people in the restaurant. Today the seats were packed.



The owner knows chingpea likes the soup. Among the rice noodles, baby corn and cabbage there’s a strong flavor of ginger. Her throat hurt. She sipped the soup, but it wasn’t quite as hot as usual. “I wanted it to burn my sore throat,” she said froggily.

“Let me know if you want more soup,” the owner smiled.



I kept chowing down and she still finished her soup before mine. She didn’t ask for more as her chicken fried rice appeared before she took a final last swallow.

At the table next to us sat two grubby men in their late 50s. They looked like truck drivers: disheveled with greased down hair and bushy grey beards, and torn jeans with hints of oil stains. I can usually spot them in a crowd as my dad was a truck driver. Not to mention, truck drivers often have a certain mentality toward life: that the world revolves around them, that roads and freeways are laid out before their golden rod trucks like big red carpets.

And all the little cars on the road don’t mean a thing.

Is that the cowboy spirit? My dad was a mean little Mexican truck driver who carried a gun. Machismo shot out through his mouth as easy as it would the barrel of his side-shooter. But it wasn’t just a Mexican-American cultural machismo. It was the cowboy mentality, the John Wayne on wheels, the “I got a horse and you don’t” swagger and constant readiness to swing a fist as if the entire world were a saloon brawl waiting to happen.

These cultured cowboys at the next table weren’t Mexican-American. Doesn’t matter what their ethnicity was. Cowboys know no color. It’s the movies that make Americans think 'white'. I suddenly heard one of them speak to the waitress, “This isn’t a spring roll.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I ordered a spring roll. Spring rolls aren’t fried. This is fried.”

I had a spring roll sitting on my plate. It’s fried. So are the spring rolls at half the Asian food restaurants I go to.

The waitress opened the menu and pointed, “Sorry sir. You would have to order a fresh spring roll. I can take your spring roll back.”

“I don’t want fried spring rolls. I just thought you people knew what a spring roll was. If I thought you people didn’t know what a spring roll was, I wouldn’t have ordered it.” And so on went the old cowboy talking about spring rolls needing to be boiled.

He needed his head boiled.

While I fumed, chingpea politely looked over to me, “I just let it go. It just shows the ignorance of some people who lump all Asian foods together, thinking because they had one style of Asian food, that the rest are all the same.”


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This entry was posted by N.L. Belardes, on Thursday, July 20, 2006. You can leave your response.