Growing up, my parents never had a “place.”
Meaning they did not have a restaurant to which they could escape, just the two of them.
Meaning that using “place” like that was not in their language.
As a family, we rarely ate out at all. Both my parents worked, and the nights we did spend eating dinner together was mostly a grilling of how my brother and I were doing in school, or who we were hanging out with. Rituals or holidays— like staying for Oneg Shabbat at the synagogue or breaking the fast with extended family after Yom Kippur ended— were an exception, but there was always a reason for lingering over a meal. For every yearly Pesach Seder in which we plunked down red wine on our plates, my brother and I giddy that our teenage selves were allowed— no, required, in our eyes— to drink wine when our non-Jewish friends were not, there was no eating of pizza or Chinese food on Christmas once we reached a certain age; my brother and I both worked on most non-Jewish holidays, at a small dollar movie theater called Nakoma 8 (a lot of people go to the movies on Christmas, at least in my experience), my mother assuring us that extra money was always worth it. In our family, there were all things to be done, work to be caught be up on, studies to be completed, as we attended both secular school and Hebrew school in the after-hours.
Part of the reason was largely economic too: we just couldn’t afford it. My mother disdained fast food, not trusting what was being put into our young bodies, and considered it a waste of money.
It wasn’t until I was older— and my mother and I both experienced significant life changes, her losing two of her siblings and me falling into chronic illness— that my parents, whom are both still working, have slowed down a bit. Nowadays, they will take a bottle of wine and sit outside in the evening, swatting at mosquitoes, swapping stories, as they relax near her small garden. My mother’s garden in which she resuscitates nearly dead tomato plants bought for less than a dollar at a certain large multinational chain superstore where my father once worked for years, a place that treated him very badly, a place where they still buy groceries because it is, of all things, a way to save money, a way to have a little extra so that they might, in their golden years, linger with a bottle of wine and— even have “a place.”
And they do, they have a little, family-run Greek restaurant in a nondescript strip mall to go to, and of this I can say no more, as my mother has asked me not to give away the name, to keep her secret safe, to keep the place “their place,” and after so many years, I intend to keep that promise.
And in any case, this essay is a tribute to “our place,” to Tim Chen’s restaurant Quaint— the place that was one of the reasons in how I convinced my then-boyfriend Brian to move to my neighborhood and not me to his, forsaking his beloved corner of Bushwick, Brooklyn, for my beloved stretch of Queens, an area where Sunnyside runs into Woodside. Quaint has that kind of rare kind of magic that “a place” has, one in which is a true neighborhood spot, filled with quiet even when it was packed, the lighting gentle, the walls mahogany, the wooden booths pew-like and spacious.
I write “has” and “was,” mixing up verb tenses, present and past, because Tim Chen’s Quaint remains “our place,” and will always be “our place,” and my language is not quite ready to accept that on June 23rd of this year, it will close its doors.
*
In 2012, it was here that my husband and I came on our third date, the previous night being only our second date at another neighborhood place nearby— an Irish pub called Copper Kettle or just, as we call it, The Kettle— in which I tried to end things because we had only just met and I didn’t want to burden him with my overwhelmed feelings. I was dealing with sudden, very sudden, neurological problems that affected my balance, vision and overall health, and was bewildered and frightened, and couldn’t imagine continuing to date anyone. But after our second date at The Kettle, Brian not only did not leave, but also stayed over at my apartment and the next morning, carried a gallon of my urine on 2 different trains to a 7:30 am doctor’s appointment so I could complete the next series of medical tests. He waited until I was done, and I was even more bewildered that he’d stayed in the waiting room for me. We said our goodbyes, and he went to work and I went to teach and busied myself with work, because this is what kept me grounded and going, work. I ignored his texts until he called to say he’d (conveniently) left his portable phone charger at my place.
That night, I decided that I didn’t want him to visit much less stay at my apartment again, so I told him I’d meet him somewhere, and he said he was hungry, so we had dinner at Quaint for the first time, which I had been to before a couple of times with friends, a place that I was fond of its genuine warmth. I thought going to such a place, with its subdued shades and calming atmosphere would be the perfect place to try to convince Brian, yet again, to move on.
My greatest fear in life has always been becoming a burden on someone— a fear deeply entrenched in a family dynamic of work, work, work— and I liked him too much. Or rather, I’d already fallen in love with him, with his candor and humor, his beautiful face, his strong embrace, and the fact that he’d carried a gallon of my urine on two trains at some ungodly hour.
I remember our drinks came— we both ordered Fallen Leaves, one of the many specialty cocktails that remained on the menu— as I was explaining myself, explaining myself away really, as if I were an investment that would never mature, my language cold and clinical and so unlike myself, a language that my mother would have been proud of, though a language that she did not use herself, though I would never tell her that, that she too was as an emotional person as her daughter whom she was forever trying to make “stronger” by study and work and achievement.
For I’d been raised to learn any other language except that of direct achievement had to be earned.
Meaning that these “other kinds” of languages could be used as an escape from the reality in which they were created, these languages of creation and purely of the creative mind, these languages of pain and joy itself, but only if the majority of time was spent wisely, pragmatically, and invested in language that served purpose. (For instance, nothing makes my mother angrier that people who use “summer” as a verb, but I digress.)
My mother, though she’d never admit it, is often a deeply emotional person, someone who is often filled with disapproval and suspicion of others, which I’d only understand later is a product of the tough circumstances in which she was raised. My mother’s happiness was seeing her children do well, present-tense. Promises meant little to her; she wanted to see results. It was seeing working and using time wisely. So I already harbored deep regrets for pursuing a career as a poet and professor rather than becoming a doctor, her dream for me, which meant having a more clear purpose in life. If I’d only chosen a field more entrenched in her idea of cold and clinical language, the language of success, then I might be free from ever needing to explain myself again, having earned the socio-economic strata that deserved having “a place” in which to escape, or choosing to use other kinds of language in my spare time.
So when I was speaking that night to Brian, I also was preparing myself for how I’d explain my illness to my mother who’d survived uterine cancer, skin cancer and multiple surgeries to rebuild her jaw that’s forever crumbling, a woman who goes back to work after biopsies and radiation treatments.
I remember worrying I would become a burden.
I remember worrying that she’d love me a little less.
I remember how Brian swirled his drink and then mine. I remember he was smiling as he clinked our glasses and took a sip.
I remember feeling like he was not listening to me, making light of a serious situation. I reached across the table to put his glass down and said in the coldest voice I could muster, “I’m sick. You don’t need this. You should leave.”
I remember the way he caught my hand in his, gently pressing it against the glass, condescension wetting our fingers gently. I remember he reached across the table with his other hand and feeling it pass through my hair before holding my wet cheek as frustration ran down my face. My vision was blurry, but not from the tears.
I remember hearing Brian saying, in the warm light of that restaurant, “I’m going to marry you.”
I remember having two clear thoughts: what happens now? Should I just get up and leave?
But I didn’t. I stayed, seemingly rooted to that table. Not out of fear, but feeling something that was completely new to me.
Less than a year later, my mother cried in my arms and told me that she only wanted me to get well.
Less than a year later, Brian proposed, his vision clear even when mine wasn’t.
*
In all its 13 years, the menu at Quaint rarely changed— although there were daily specials like braised lamb shank with horseradish, fried artichoke hearts, rainbow trout stuffed with crab meat— and this was one thing I loved about the restaurant, which had won numerous Michelin “Bib Gourmand,” but had none of the airs or arrogance attached to what such recognition could bring. Quaint never had any silly pretentiousness about it, much like Tim himself and the line cook Juan themselves. The food was simply delicious, the atmosphere cozy, and the sincerity of Tim and Juan was in the food. That never changed.
While my health was swept up in a torrent of changes as I adjusted to a new sense of body and movement and song and senses, I was often frustrated as I watched my breezy, fly-by-the-night, devil-may-care former self fade, translating to what I only recently appreciate as a sort of “transformation via disappearance.” This was strangely and perhaps unfairly balanced by a series of familial loss, my mother letting me her hear her cry for one of the first times in her life, as her eldest brother was simultaneously dying slowly as he was rebelliously staying alive, and her sister, the victim of vicious brain tumors, befalling the same fate. These changes brought us closer together, and they changed the way we both lived our lives. I began writing like I’d never written before. Something had opened up in me, and in my mother as well, changing the very way we’d lived, and what we called living; my mother began accepting me, that I was a poet, someone invested in language as a purpose for living itself.
While I’m still teaching and writing full time, and still prone to the mantra of work, work will make things clearer and easier, my husband would text me and ask if I wanted to go to Quaint, to clear our heads and regroup, to the same place in what would become “our place.” Amid all the upheaval in our life together, the small menu has remained the same, everything always cooked exceptionally in the open kitchen where Tim and his team wave at us, our faces now familiar.
Over the last seven years together, we often celebrated our birthdays there, as much as we were regulars there. When I got the news I won the Alice James award this year on a cold late January morning, my husband and I headed straight to Quaint in which I shared the news with Tim, swearing him to secrecy as I couldn’t announce it for months yet. And though I brought friends to dine with us, Quaint was really was “our” place. After participating in a poetry reading or sitting in on a panel, which I honestly love doing, it was always nice to have a place that Brian and I could escape to after each event, to return to our beloved stretch of Sunnyside-Woodside, the only place where, in all my years of moving around the world for school and work, I’ve ever felt at home.
While I never said much to Tim of the more painful parts of myself, I later learned that he known I’d been ill. There were many times that Brian and I sat in the second booth just beside the kitchen, my husband clutching my hand, telling me that we were going to grow old together, and live a long and happy life. My husband smiling, always telling me that his language was always so “predictable” and “plain” compared to my own, and yet it was this very language that I found refuge in, for it was anything but predictable and plain, because it revealed that a person, like a place, can come to mean so much to you, and that you should savor these lights in your life for as long as you can.
*
One of my greatest regrets is never bringing my parents to Quaint. They haven’t visited New York in years, mostly due to pressing circumstances, my family needing me to come to them instead. I know my father would have ordered the steak, my mother the cod, and a bottle of wine for all of us, my father asking the waiter Darron, who is one of the funniest people I’ve ever met and a writer you should read (here’s his farewell to Quaint), about the changes he’s seen in the neighborhood. We would’ve drank too much, my mother probably letting go a bit more, reminding me that she’s proud of her poet daughter— who still, if she wanted, could go to medical school.
For some things never change, even when a beloved one decides to share your language, your “place.”
Tonight was the last night of our place. It was Quaint’s last night, and one of my best friends Robin, who also lives in Queens, joined Brian and me. We had the specials— mahi mahi— and Robin had the salmon. I asked Tim if he wouldn’t mind taking a photo and then gave him a card that didn’t say how that I will miss him and Quaint, or that Quaint will always be in our hearts.
I didn’t say that it was our place, as it must be for many people, judging by the turnout over the past few weeks ever since Tim announced its closing.
I didn’t get to say that wherever Tim and Juan and everyone else might be headed to next, we wish you well and thank you for making Queens feel like home to this formerly wandering poet and her (formerly-Brooklyn-centric) husband.
So I’m saying it here.
I’m saying it in the hope that writing these memories can make a place last just a little big longer, and that you know you won’t be forgotten, at least, in my language.