Chapter 1 Part 1/4: From Fryers to Functional Fluency

My first encounter with the study of Japanese was during my sophomore year of college, around the time I was 18 or 19. I say encounter because at the time I was more actively involved in fraternity life than the actual act of studying anything, and wound up dropping Japanese 105 along with all of my other courses and pretty much the proverbial ball on my entire sophomore year.

I took nearly a year off school, during which time I cut grass, cared for plants and acted as basically a lackey on the estate of certain members of the DuPont family in northern Delaware. The work was neither fun nor rewarding and had no promise of anything better, but I was happy to be doing something substantive for which I got paid and to have a regular schedule. It also gave me the chance to consider what to do with my life with my head removed from the haze of sleeping half the day and spending the nights making blender drinks and jungle juice for "pimps n hoes" themed greek mixers.

After about six months at this job, I decided to apply for a job as a line cook at a Ruby Tuesday in The Concord Mall in Wilmington. Cooking was something I had always had an interest in and wanted to pursue. This job, although not any better paying and with not much more upward potential than the assistant groundskeeper job, turned out to be more interesting for two reasons. The first was that I was good at it – I had a natural ability for cooking and became quite competent at the job very quickly. The second reason was that two thirds of the kitchen staff, like the kitchen staff of all ten-dollar-a-plate, all-you-can-eat-salad-bar joints in the United States, was Mexican, and I could speak Spanish with them.

I had an excellent high school Spanish teacher, Mr. Cornish, and an ability with languages. I could speak mostly fluent Spanish, including plenty of expletives, from the time I was around sixteen, and so the Mexicans took to me quickly.

Almost all the Mexicans spoke very little or no English; almost all the managers all spoke very little or no Spanish, and the handful of second-generation Hispanic immigrants on the staff seemed to think that speaking Spanish would somehow compromise their hard-earned American identity and as such did so only when absolutely necessary.

So I became friends with Oscar, Jorge, Lucio, and Fermin, with whom I worked the fryer, made salads, ran the dishwasher and drank beers on the weekend. In the meantime I picked up Mexican Spanish and a deep respect for the Mexican people and their work ethic.

I continued to work the grounds keeping job during the day, coming into the restaurant every weekday night and all day on Saturdays and some Sundays. Experiencing working two jobs for dog-crap pay began to make me better appreciate the value of higher learning, and I made the decision to quit the grounds keeping job, keep the restaurant job, and begin to take classes again for elective credits.

The experience of speaking Spanish with my Mexican friends and co-workers at Ruby Tuesday made me realize that I should probably major at what I was good at, which was foreign languages, and so I decided to pursue the Three Foreign Language major offered by the University of Delaware.

The major was structured with a primary, secondary, and tertiary language with a descending amount of credit hours required for each. Spanish, which I already spoke and in which I already had a few credits from my freshman year study abroad program to Spain, was naturally my first choice. Since I figured studying three languages while working pretty much full-time would be somewhat of a challenge, I thought a language similar to Spanish would make a good secondary language, and so French was the natural choice.

But because the tertiary language didn't require too many credits, and I still had an interest in the novelty of learning to speak a language very unlike Spanish and French which not many Westerners spoke, I decided to give Japanese another go.

At around the exact same time, a restaurant offering “Pacific Rim-inspired cuisine and sushi bar,” Mikimoto’s, named after the Japanese cultured pearl merchant, Mikimoto, opened fortuitously a few blocks from my home in Wilmington. Mikimoto’s was hiring kitchen staff, and I walked down to put in an application.

When I arrived the chef was nowhere to be found, but there were a number of Asian kids in cook pants and aprons milling around the back entrance to the restaurant and construction workers finishing work on the dining room. I was told by one of the kitchen staff that the chef was not available but that the owner might be around in his office in the other restaurant he owned next door.

I was guided up the stairs to the owner’s top-floor office where he greeted me and offered me a seat. The owner was a somewhat overweight yet not bad looking and friendly Greek guy probably in his late 30’s who was polite yet clearly had more important things go do than interview a line cook.

There really wasn’t that much to the interview. Cooking jobs in general are poorly paying and the hiring standards correspondingly low, and so the fact that I had some amount of experience, had combed my hair, could speak coherently and was sober at the time of the interview was enough for the owner to guarantee me a spot on the line. I was given a date and time to come in and called Ruby Tuesday to let them know that I was moving on to bigger and better things.

On the day of the orientation all of the hires gathered in the main dining room and were separated into cooks and wait staff. There were about 15 cooks altogether including the sushi bar staff, three or four Vietnamese and Chinese guys around my age, several Mexicans, and a few American guys.

The chef that the owner had hired to run the sushi bar and kitchen was named Shigeki, who was the first Japanese person I knew.