Peter Cheung's China
Peter runs a small Chinese restaurant on a side street near busy Keystone Avenue. I stopped having lunch there ten or more years ago when I became embarrassed by his mother’s attention. Walking by the restaurant yesterday afternoon, I decided to check it out again. I had fully expected the restaurant to be gone by now. The larger, more successful Chinese Ruby closed this spring, before the economic downturn began to affect other businesses.
Peter is ebulliently friendly as always. He treats me like a long-lost brother without mentioning that I have patronized his restaurant in years. No recriminations, everything as though I had been going there all these years. I am older and Peter, too, is older. He has gray in his sideburns. His father who used to be the main cook passed away a year or so before I stopped going. His mother now stays at home.
“She walks slowly, moves slowly, but still talks fast,” he says. He spends as much time at the restaurant to get away. She is 81 years old.
Peter talked about the new China. There are 300 cities with over a million people. The people have idolized American capitalism but since the recession their adulation turned them from being disciples to leaders in their own right.
“They come to Chicago,” Peter says, “and are disappointed.” The buildings are old. In China, because they “started from scratch,” the buildings are spanking new and glitter in the newfound prosperity of abundant, cheap labor.
They have evolved a kind of communism different from that of Soviet Russia. The politburo collects information then makes decisions that affect the whole country. One size fits all. It works for the country if its economic triumph is any indication. Peter admits there is no room for protest. There is no room for the individual.
Peter himself is a product of the old China. He has been running his restaurant for decades through sheer perseverance and hard work. He told me he planned to keep working for another ten years then will retire to Hongkong. “There,” he told me, “he could hire a Filipino to do his household work at $500 a month. Your money there goes a long way.”
Unlike the new Chinese immigrant businessmen, Peter is not looking to rapidly expand his business or build a franchise. He does most of the cooking himself. He greets each customer personally, chats with each one before he seats them, and takes their payment after they finish. As I was leaving today, I told him his food is as good as it was when last I ate there. He told me he cooked Cantonese and now Sichuan. A young woman helps with cooking in the kitchen.
When I think of business, my model is similar to Peter’s. Personal touch is high on my values. Customers are treated like old friends. Like Peter I would like to be generous with freebies. Lagniappes is how I think of the most successful small-time business owners in the Philippines. After you conclude your business, they add a few more prawns to your heap while making small talk, never making a big deal of the tiny addition. Those little gifts are what the customers remember, what keep them coming back again and again. They become suki, regular patrons.
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