The LemonSqueeze

A mile east of where the 5 merges with the San Bernardino freeway is Duke’s Sportsman Liquor store. Duke and Sunny, my middle aged parents from South Korea, owned the small liquor store in the city of Terrace for nearly a decade. Sitting on a stool behind the hanging rolls of scratchers, I watched my parents work. My dad, with his toes exposed in his velcro sandals, greeted customers while talking with the Budweiser courier about the day’s shipment. My mother stood at the counter behind the bullet proof glass for hours on end, shifting her weight from one leg to the other to spare her aching muscles. Occasionally, a regular customer walked in and greeted me. “Duke Junior” is the title I was given as I had some of my father’s strong Korean features: monolids and pronounced cheekbones. Around sunset, my mother and I left the store. As we reversed out of the parking lot, my father stood and waved goodbye. On the radio was 50 cent’s “In da Club” and my mother left the windows of the Chevy wide open almost as if she was letting the wind evaporate the day’s sweat.

My parents eventually sold Duke’s Sportsman Liquor Store and moved onto a larger business in 2005. Royalty Market, located in the heart of South Central LA on 62nd and San Pedro, was much different than Duke’s liquor. The glass got thicker, the ailes grew larger, and the weekends were no longer spent as a spectator as I frequented Ace wholesale with my mother to pick up a variety of vegetables, sodas, dairy, and cigarettes. We were regulars at the wholesale. The workers gave my mother a suitable nickname: “Royalty!”, but I retained my title as Duke Junior. With an increased workload, my parents placed a queen size bed in the storage attic to sleep overnight, while leaving my sister and me with my grandma back at home in the San Fernando Valley. This was the busiest and most dangerous period in my parents’ lives. An altercation with a customer led to a black eye and missing front teeth for my father. It was a common sight to see red salonpas along the back of my father’s neck or around my mother’s forearms.

Jug Jug Sports Bar and Restaurant in the San Fernando Valley was my parents’ last business venture together. After three years of opening the restaurant, my parents divorced, and I lived with my mother and sister. As a middle schooler too consumed in my own dramatic friend groups, I spent time neither with my mother who worked full time as a social worker at a nursing home nor with my father who worked tirelessly at the Korean-American fusion bar. Senior year in highschool/freshman year in college was an essential period for both my father’s restaurant and me. The restaurant, after serving customers for nearly 5 years, required a new food safety certificate, supplemented with a strict health inspection. Greasy fingers and sore wrists from scraping under the fryer or the stinging sensation in my nostrils from bleach was a common side effect of working full time at the restaurant. My father repeated himself quite often about how “there’s nothing to be embarrassed about working in a kitchen and washing dishes”. I responded with silence. Placing my phone on the dish rack and playing 2000s rap was my attempt at channeling the memory of my mother’s hair sticking to her damp forehead, or the bulletproof glass from a decade prior. I was working in a much safer area in addition to making a decent wage of 3 cents per plate washed. Windows down and on the way to deposit my day’s salary at 2AM, was a moment when I came closer to understanding my parents’ sacrifice and devotion for the family.

While my parents may both be apologetic for not being consistently present for much of my siblings and my childhood, their example enabled me to acknowledge the power of grit and persistence. It is a privilege to understand the value of hard work and recognize the struggle of my parents as many other Korean-American valley kids were never exposed to the idea of hardship. I made simple mistakes such as buying expensive shoes or following the latest fashion trends throughout college in attempt to hide my less privileged background. Little did I know that my parents’ efforts would have been in vain if I were to fail to recognize the loss of authenticity when burying the origins of my identity.

I am proud of achieving a closer resemblance to my parents.