edison, circa 1983

Edison hadn’t considered himself many things, but he had always considered himself, above all else, funny. In his school days, while he may not have excelled at math or science, he always loved language and its ability to shape the world around him. He loved reading and turns of phrases and double entendres and pretty much anything else that gave language its nuance. He was adept at lightening a room, making an unexpected observation, or finding a joke in a phrase others might have taken with only total sincerity. He was sometimes a clown or a goof, but he was never dull. Not for a second. If nothing else, he was endlessly amusing. And though his friends had expected him to be the one to find the humor in any mundane or miserable situation, lately in the face of everything, Edison hadn’t felt very funny.

Since moving from Kaohsiung, he’d had trouble adjusting to life in a new city – a city where he knew no one, lived in a cramped studio apartment, and could hardly say more than five words to another person without taking a break to conjure a phrase he had forgotten. His English wasn’t very good, even though he had studied it in secondary school and taken night classes leading up to his departure. He knew all the words and could string together a sentence if he had enough time, but when it came to listening to others and responding, he would often concentrate on the words themselves so much, completely missing any subtlety to their performance or underlying meaning they had intended.

He was no longer a master of language, not like before, when for a short while, he worked as a sales representative for an insurance company and had one of the highest commissions ‒ not because he knew the products better or because he could decipher what a customer really needed, but because they liked talking to him. He knew how to set people at ease. He knew how to make their day better. He knew how to make them laugh.

But now he fumbled through language, each step along the way slow and sputtering. His movements were cumbersome, his feet heavy, and he had lost the bounce he once had in his step. He lived on the outskirts of Chinatown, where he worked first as a dishwasher and later as a cook at a Chinese restaurant, in addition to working weekends as a loading boy at the seafood market. But even in the back kitchen, he found no solace from the rest of New York City. The owner was from Hong Kong and so nearly all of the staff spoke Cantonese. The jump from Mandarin was too far for it to translate into any kind of comic timing, and even worse from Taiwanese, his actual native tongue.

Strangely, he found he had the best rapport with the busboy Hector, who spoke Spanish and only bits of English, because both of them spoke in broken, simplified phrases they each could understand. They had learned to compensate with overacted hand gestures and by leaving enough space between words and even more space at the end of sentences to give the other a chance to catch up. 

So Edison went through most days not speaking much out of fear of giving the wrong impression. And while at one point in his early life, all his friends and family would’ve effortlessly described him as the life of the party, he now worried he resembled more of a wallflower, or worse, someone with a low intellect.

Sometimes, he would peruse the few Chinese bookstores that carried imported novels from the mainland or Hong Kong and even sometimes Taiwan. The written language of Cantonese and Mandarin were identical, and if the world had allowed him to communicate entirely through writing, he might have thrived. But spoken language and the mastery of it greased the wheels of every social interaction. Not having it made one realize how absolutely essential it was to social life.

Edison had been in the States for over a year now and had yet to make a single friend. Soon enough, his wife Jiayang would fly to live with him, but the paperwork to get her into the country had stalled, over and over again, so much so that he wondered whether the talk of customs fees and governmental signatures had really just been an excuse to call off the marriage entirely. Still, he waited patiently for their life to begin in a new country where they were no longer bound by expectation or tradition, but only by their own will to work hard and build themselves up from nothing.

He had already saved a small fortune. It was small by most people’s standards, but a fortune compared to any amount he had ever accumulated in his life. He made sure to eat cheaply, to find ways to pass the time for free, and never ever to waste anything. He almost never threw anything in the trash, always finding ways to recycle the spare bits of every purchase he made. He could return plastic bottles for coins and reuse paper bags for insulation. Once even, he had found a way to engineer the packaging from a space heater and some plaster of Paris into a sturdy container for his spare tools.

He had become more industrious living in a foreign country. He had never thought twice about it before. He wondered what other new things he might learn about himself in this new place, whether these traits may have lain dormant forever had he never emigrated from his home country or whether they would have naturally arisen in other circumstances. So much of who he was lay so far from where he was now. He could feel a strong pull back there, a yearning of sorts, though it lessened each day he was away and with each new stake he placed in the soil here. But still, while he had begun to discover small ways to find his bearing in America, he felt a bit like he was holding onto the railing of a boat in unsteady waters. He had wanted to root himself in the earth here, to adopt the culture of the city that seemed at all hours on fire, and to become, if not outwardly, at least in spirit, American.

After a few months of washing dishes at the restaurant, he had begun working as a line chef, cooking various new age Chinese dishes that satisfied the American clientele’s sensitive palate. They mostly catered toward tourists, some of whom had to rush out to see a Broadway musical by seven or take the ferry to Liberty Island by one. He even began experimenting with some of the dishes, in small ways, to infuse them with a bit of spice where there was usually sweetness or to crack pepper where there had once only been fish sauce. He did it at first in nearly unnoticeable ways, only apparent when a regular might say, “This tastes especially good today.” And the owner would beam and pat the customer on the back, then nod appreciatively to Edison.

The owner of the restaurant, Mr. Chang, was actually a very nice man by all accounts. He wasn’t like a lot of hardened stereotypes of Chinese business owners, ruthless in their business practices and coldhearted to their employees. He appreciated new ideas so long as they were backed by a sufficiently well thought out plan. For months Edison toiled diligently in the back kitchen, working up enough courage to ask Mr. Chang if one day he might be able to move to the front of the house.

He had been working on his English every day, watching the nightly news where the newly elected president from California, Ronald Reagan, had begun a campaign to end government handouts and where his wife Nancy had sought to end the rampant drug use Edison often saw on the streets of New York. The rhetoric had at times scared Edison. There was so much resentment of the newly accelerating economies of Japan and Germany. Japan especially had become a point of criticism, how the productivity of Japanese auto workers outpaced that of American auto workers by nearly five-fold. How could it be that Americans were falling behind? How could the greatest country in the world find itself defeated by an island nation that they had laid in near nuclear destruction just a few decades earlier?

In reality Americans didn’t mind immigrants so long as they relegated themselves to the back of house. They didn’t want to see them, unless it was to provide them with an authentic culinary experience, where a white waiter would’ve taken them out of the illusion, made them feel less cultured, less adventurous, themselves less authentic for it. And they liked feeling superior to others. Even if their bosses gave them menial tasks at work or their wives berated them at home, they somehow felt assured in the fact that this was their country and that they had graciously extended a hand to others, allowing them to wash their floors for them and deliver them their groceries.

But Mr. Chang had been a shining example of immigrant grit. He had worked his way up from dishwasher to chef to waiter to manager to owner of three locations in Chinatown. He was now a capitalist, an owner of collateral, and an employer of a staff of thirty. Edison felt pride in the little piece of America that Mr. Chang had carved out, so much so that he found himself emulating his mannerisms, as if it might lead him down the same path.

Eventually, Edison worked up the courage to ask Mr. Chang to begin waiting on customers, and to Edison’s surprise, he gave him the opportunity. He first started him on the takeout orders, which would truly test his ability to communicate with customers who were often more terse on the phone and who were harder to read without any physical gestures. In the months that he handled the phone, Edison rediscovered a small piece of himself that he thought he might’ve lost forever. He found he could, even if only in small ways, be funny again.

And within a few weeks his confidence had returned and his English improved. He was now taking orders with regular patrons, engaging in banter, sending smiles and chuckles their way, always in a deferential way that made them feel that the restaurant was an extension of their own dining rooms, a safe space to be as much themselves as they were at home. He had begun to find his footing, not only inside the restaurant, but in his life elsewhere.

He began buying more than the essentials, making his still tiny studio more livable and even going as far to carve out a small space for Jiayang whenever she managed to make the trip over. When he had first arrived with little money and no prospects, it had been a rocky start to his new life. He had almost considered saving up enough just for a one-way plane ticket home, keeping a separate jar of cash tips until he had saved enough for the flight. But when he finally accumulated enough, he had found a change in disposition that came from a growing willingness to withstand the difficulties of his new daily life.

He worked in the restaurant nearly every day. They were open seven days a week, and soon Mr. Chang began giving him more managerial tasks working with food suppliers and paying bills. He had almost never considered that he could be an essential part of something bigger than himself until now. Mr. Chang had opened a fourth restaurant and so had to spread more and more of his time among all of the locations. Before Edison knew it, he had begun running the operations of the small basement takeout around the corner from Columbus Park, where there were only five tables and where he now found people lining up outside to get a seat.

Edison had of late felt a change in the air, both of summer becoming fall and of New York City itself. He felt he was on the precipice of something, witnessing and taking part in some kind of global change. All around him he saw people from everywhere else – Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Ghana. There seemed to have been a great migration happening all around, maybe just one more of the many that had preceded or were bound to follow. But he couldn’t shake the sense that this one was different, that he and this generation were at some kind of inflection point in human history, where now bankers from Wall Street would come in with their giant mobile telephones and buyers from the garment district would come to make deals with their counterparts in India or Vietnam.

He grew closer to Mr. Chang, who had now forced him to take at least one day off every other week, and to his wife, who he’d often see taking strolls around the park with their youngest daughter Esther, who was nearly one now. Edison often spent his one day off exploring other parts of the city. He so rarely had any time outside his busy work schedule to leave Chinatown, let alone the walls of the restaurant, that he would sometimes take the subway as far as it would go on a single ride.

He was still frugal, so he often found himself at The Met, where admission was free – or more strictly speaking suggested, but might as well have been free – or at Central Park, where admissions was actually technically free. He never did anything that cost too much money, always of the mind that money saved for later would be more useful than money spent now. Still somewhere in the hundreds of subway rides and thousands of orders he placed, he had found himself without even realizing it, becoming a New Yorker. 

It had surprised him at first. He began saying things he wouldn’t have ever expected to hear himself say out loud, like how he’d exclaim, “The 6 train is down. Again!” or how he’d always, always avoid traveling through Union Square or how he’d scoff at the tourists who’d talk about their hotels near Times Square when he knew they could’ve stayed in a nicer place for cheaper if they had looked closer to midtown. And he began railing against Reaganomics, mostly following Mr. Chang’s lead, but deciding that it had sounded more like the name of a constellation than an economic policy. Still, the growing talks of international diplomacy in South America and the Middle East seemed a distant threat to them and were mostly reserved for talking points about which they could all share a collective groan.

Month after month, Edison diligently began to carve out his own small place in the world for himself, and he waited patiently for the day Jiayang would arrive and they might start a family. He still didn’t have any real friends in the city outside the Changs, who would always invite him to social outings, and the few regular customers whom he knew now by name, though their interactions were strictly limited to the restaurant. There was John Robinson, who always sat at the corner table near the fish tank; and Philip Jackson, who only ordered chicken fried rice and a side of egg rolls; and Mr. and Mrs. Freiman, octogenarians who had both grown up in the city. And there was Francis Cunningham, Jr., whom Edison probably liked the most of his regulars because he had taken some Mandarin in college and had always come in to practice speaking with Edison.

Francis, who told him to call him Francis even though he often went by Junior, short for Frank, Jr., which was the only name his parents ever used, was an exceptionally congenial fellow with the most pristine table manners Edison had ever seen in a Chinese takeout restaurant. Edison couldn’t help thinking the way Francis ate was closer to a ballet than it was to eating. But it wasn’t show-offy either – it was understated and a reflection of the care he took doing everything in his life. Francis was really a handsome man too and he was probably no older than Edison himself.

Francis worked as a buyer or a sales rep for some international brand – it was always so vague and hard to explain, according to Francis, not worth the hassle. But much of his work had increasingly required him to talk to his Asian counterparts, most of whom were from mainland China. “China,” he would say, “it’s the next great great.”

Edison had never been to China, even though Taiwan was just a hundred miles off the coast. Relations between the two nations had been fraught, to say the least, but for Edison, he honestly harbored no ill will toward the Chinese people. He couldn’t separate his own history from theirs – after all, it sprung from it. He was Chinese, practically speaking. He worked in a Chinese restaurant, spoke Chinese, looked Chinese. There was no way around it. Besides, the distinction was too subtle for it to matter, especially in a place like America, where either you were from here or you weren’t. Just like Francis’s job, it was hard to explain, not worth the hassle.

Whenever Francis came into the restaurant, Edison would always greet him with a casual colloquialism in Mandarin, always with the most exacting annunciation, as an offering of sorts, as if to say Francis was free to speak without hindrance. They’d immediately exchanged pleasantries, and Francis would order his meal, and then as he sat waiting for the cook to do his work, they’d chit chat about the city or the weather or about Edison’s neverending plans to renovate the restaurant into a finer dining establishment. Francis would never talk much about his family, nor would Edison, but at times he would mention his sister Mimi, who was much younger than him, an “accidental baby,” he would joke, who still lived with their parents near Chicago, where Francis too had grown up.

Edison had always suspected that there was something different about Francis, that all the put-togetherness of his carefully tailored outfits and the composure of his physical movements were there as some kind of way to distract the world from seeing a pain he carried around with him. Edison suspected Francis was gay, and of course didn’t mind the fact. But it was more than just that. Edison had almost immediately sensed it, as if it were nagging at Francis, always about to burst out uncontrollably, and that it was something that he had to keep carefully in check at all times. But because they either spoke in broken Mandarin or in broken English or some half-mix of the two, the conversation never found the vocabulary to raise it above surface level. 

But he liked talking to Francis. Their conversations were perhaps the most extended ones Edison had in his life these days. It wasn’t about what they talked about, it was about the time they spent talking and the regularity of it. And even though Edison always objected, Francis insisted on leaving a substantial tip after every meal, which Edison would always split, like all other tips, with the rest of the service staff. Edison had long considered his life like the chipping away at a massive boulder, slowly and steadily and never ending, until all the unnecessary parts had been carved away and all that was left was a single, unbroken slab of rock that, if he were lucky, remotely resembled the lives that others had. 

But Francis seemed to have all the markers of a good life, at least outwardly. He had gone to a prestigious college, found a high-paying job in an exploding sector, and lived in one of those newly built high-rise towers, where money could now invent new living space on a crowded island where there was nearly none left. Edison, of course, imagined what Francis’s life was like outside of that tiny restaurant. He wondered if his apartment looked like the ones in those architectural magazines, wide open, all concrete, with white leather couches and metallic surfaces that would immediately show fingerprints with even the most casual use.

Most of all, he wondered whether Francis was a happy person, or whether he was just very good at playing the part of a happy person. There was always an unspoken rule about the intersecting lives of the patrons and the servicemen who waited on them – their lives were only ever to touch tangentially, momentarily, never to extend farther into each other or for much longer than proper social rules allowed. These rules, much like the ones that seemed to guide the actions of the bankers on Wall Street these days, were all tacit. They weren’t written in law books or even spoken outright, but they kept the world in check. Certainly, New York had a way of giving the most disparate of people tiny corners to share, where millionaires could cross paths with doormen and even those who owned yachts still took the subway. But whole streets or city blocks or – in some sense – whole worlds were always out of the question. What they were allowed to share were the mundane, everyday transactions of life, not the ones that were so fundamental to who they wanted to be.

It had been months now that Mr. Chang had put Edison in charge of running the Columbus Park location, and he had become closer and closer to the family. Mrs. Chang was throwing a small party for Esther for her second birthday and had invited Edison to come to their apartment. Mr. Chang had purposely thrown the party during one of the slower times so that Edison could rest assured he wasn’t wholly neglecting his duties by leaving the restaurant to the other wait staff and attending the party for just a few brief hours.

He had been racking his brain for weeks as the day of the party approached, still unsure what to buy the little girl who seemed to like the boxes gifts came wrapped in more than the gifts themselves. Before the restaurant opened, he would wander through the shops on Canal Street or even venture further uptown to peruse the department stores where he saw white clientele buying toys and clothes at exasperatingly high mark-ups. He hadn’t worried about spending the money on the gift; he wanted to overpay, in fact, as a show – even if just to himself – of how grateful he was to the family that had provided him a chance at a life in this new enormous city.

And he deeply adored Esther, who even at such a young age had a fully formed personality, both kind and unwavering. Esther, whose eyes were enormous, like two large, glossy obsidian rocks. Edison had often thought if he’d had a daughter identical to Esther, he couldn’t imagine wanting anything more. He had thought he would be a good father, an adoring one, and he would give her anything she needed, anything she wanted. It’s why he had continued to save every penny he could, at the prospect that one day, at a far later date perhaps, he might share it with his own family.

But in the months that he had settled into his life as the manager of the restaurant and as a proper New Yorker, he had grown further and further away from starting a family. Just a few months earlier, he had received word – not directly but through mutual friends – that Jiayang had abandoned her intentions to move to the United States to join him, and that she’d, in fact, had their marriage papers annulled. He had even heard that she was pregnant, expecting a boy with a man who worked in a small paper factory in Taichung.

He had, admittedly, been dreading her arrival and the certain upheaval it would bring to his life in the city. He had become so fond of the routine he had created for himself – the morning walks before the restaurant opened, the opening of the restaurant itself, the jogs he would take sometimes late at night, only after the restaurant had closed and everyone had already gone to bed. It had been a small life, mostly existing in the few blocks between where he lived and worked, but it was a life that was all his. He would always think back on his first few years in New York with fondness, even having so little – so little money, so little space, so few friends – because it felt like the promise of something, which to him was so much more often better than the actual thing itself.

Francis had come in one day during his lunch hour and settled into the two-top along the wall of the restaurant which he had always taken if available. Edison hadn’t seen him slip in, but had heard the ding of the bell above the door, announcing his entrance. It was perfect, Edison thought. He could ask Francis what to buy for Esther. After all, Franics lived in another world, a world where people expected good things, things of quality, a life of quality. And he had a sister named Emilia – who went by Mimi, because all white Americans needed a nickname – to whom he’d often mentioned sending gifts, so he must’ve been an expert in the buying of things for little girls.

When he finally saw Francis waiting to give his order, Edison rushed over to say hello. It had only just then occurred to him that Francis’s Mandarin and Edison’s English had improved greatly over the past few months, so much so that they were now on equal footing in either one of their respective new tongues. “Very good!” Edison would often say with force as if he were talking to a child, encouraging them to keep up the good work. And Francis would excitedly comment on the way Edison sometimes extended the vowels in words, just like the patrons who came over from Brooklyn to have dinner.

But now Edison spoke in delicate, measured English: “Can I ask a favor?” Francis nodded, smiling. “I’m looking for a gift for a girl.”

“A girl, huh?” Francis said as he leaned in curiously.

“A two year old. Her birthday. I don’t know what to get her.”

“A two year old? Hm...” He turned to the wall as if it might jostle an idea free from an unknown crevice in his brain. “A stuffed animal? A nice one, not the ones they sell at the mall, but from one of the boutiques.” Edison raised his eyebrows, nodding slowly, as if to say he appreciated the idea but really had no idea how to go about sourcing a thing like that. “Here’s an idea,” Francis went on. “If you’d like, I can pick something out for you and bring it back for you to give to her.”

Edison considered the idea, which admittedly gave him pause. How much would Francis decide to spend on the gift? What was expected in the world in which he lived, in the fancy Upper West Side brownstones and the summer houses to which he and his cronies must’ve flocked during the summer weekends? Undoubtedly, Francis had a wholly different, much more expensive idea of how much a person should spend on a two-year-old’s birthday, and it was a risk to send him off to his own devices. But Edison had decided he couldn’t refuse – it had been such a meaningful gesture, one that wasn’t offered across the divide between social groups.

He knew that the wealthy didn’t talk about money, at least not practically. Sure, it was fair game if they were speaking in hypotheticals: interest rates, mortgages, options trading. But to speak of money in dollars and cents was outside the purview of the well-to-do. They had accountants and personal bankers to handle the logistics of those transactions. So often was the case that they simply needed to talk grand ideas and big picture and leave the rest to their underlings. So Edison nodded, but before he could reply, Francis pre-empted him with a “I won’t take no for an answer,” to which Edison replied, “That would be appreciated, thank you.”

Edison mostly made breakfast at home. He’d cook rice porridge at the beginning of the week that would last until Friday and fry up some eggs each morning to add on top. It was one of the last bits of his old world routines that he continued. He had now adopted drinking coffee over tea. He liked ketchup and barbecue sauce and could hardly remember the last time he put soy sauce on anything. While he still bought groceries from the Chinese supermarket, he loved sneaking the packaged Hostess snacks or ridged Lays potato chips the storekeepers had relegated to a relatively small section of the store where they kept the other American foods. He still sent letters back to his parents and sometimes packages with things he knew they couldn’t get in Taiwan, but he rarely spoke to them over the phone. Long-distance calls were expensive and seemed like a luxury set aside for people with business expense accounts or inclusive international minutes, but for working people like Edison, the sound of a person’s voice would have to be imagined from memory. So he reserved phone calls back home for once or twice a year.

But with the many hours he now worked at the restaurant, he had managed to set aside a bit of spare pocket cash, even going as far to quit all the side jobs he once had to supplement his income. He splurged on a few things for his apartment – he had bought a new set of sheets for his bed, not even the cheapest he could find, but ones that had come highly recommended by Mrs. Chang, and even purchased a television set of his own, albeit a used one from a friend of one of the waiters at the restaurant. Mr. Chang had admonished him for not coming to him first, saying he would’ve given him one of the still perfectly good television sets he had lying around in their storage shed. 

Edison mostly found it endearing when Mr. Chang chastised him like he was his own child. It was always over something inconsequential, but it was always a coded way of saying, “I would’ve taken care of it if you had asked.” But Edison never wanted to ask. He liked his independence and didn’t want to be seen as someone others needed to take care of. He wanted people to feel secure that he was taking care of himself. The few times he called his mother over the past few years, she would sometimes come to the phone sobbing, trying her best not to let him hear it over the receiver.

He had told her not to worry, that he was doing really well, and that someday she and his father would have to come visit. He knew they never would, but he always wanted to leave the invitation open. He had sent photos of his apartment and the restaurant and some of the places he frequented as evidence of all the work he’d put into his new life, a life he had built all on his own. But when he next spoke to her on the phone and asked her if she had seen them, all she could say was, “Why no people?” He hadn’t even thought about it. He had taken the photos himself, to show them all the things and places in his life, but of course all the photos were empty. “Only buildings,” she would say.

She was secretly afraid her son was lonely. Of course, Edison was too busy to feel lonely. And in a place as crowded as Manhattan, no one ever felt completely alone. But yes, if he thought about it, he probably was a bit lonely. He didn’t really have anyone to talk to. He didn’t see anyone outside of work or the Changs, who were really just an extension of work. The news about Jiayang hit him hard, and he still hadn’t recovered completely. He had no time to meet any new people, let alone find a woman to date. He had resigned that if it were meant to happen for him, it would happen. For now Edison had a sense of purpose and it was enough to get him from one day to the next.

As promised, Francis returned to the restaurant the following week with a gift wrapped present. He’d had the woman at the store wrap it for them, and he apologized not thinking that Edison would probably have wanted to look at it before giving it to the girl. But the wrapping had been so nice that Edison was immediately impressed. “Thank you,” he said in Mandarin and immediately followed it with, “How much?” Francis had told him he had forgotten how much he’d spent and that Edison wouldn’t need to repay him for it. Of course, Edison knew that someone like Francis wouldn’t have forgotten how much it cost – the very act of forgetting was another generous extension of his original gesture to help him shop for the gift.

Edison, still, insisted that he repay him. He wanted the gift to come from him, and it hadn’t felt right to hand over a present that someone else had bought. Francis understood and replied by saying, “Let’s say it cost about as much as a good meal.” Edison understood what he meant and told Francis to take a seat. As he went to the kitchen, he considered what he might be able to serve him to repay him. They had crab on the menu, but hardly anyone ever ordered it, so their stock was never very fresh. There was also lobster, which he had just gotten in, and steak which was actually better than he often gave it credit for. He had remembered that he had recently bought some black truffle from the market and decided to quickly saute some scallops with garlic, adding thin shavings of the truffle on top.

The chef also cooked up a few of the other pricier dishes, and Edison brought them out to Francis who waited patiently. “That’s a lot of food,” he said.

Though other patrons had from time to time offered Edison a seat at their table, it had always been done as an empty gesture, one to curry favor from the other patrons and staff of the restaurant. But for the first time, Edison carefully considered the invitation to join someone’s meal. He had hesitated only momentarily, but then took a seat and began to dish out a plate for himself. For the first time, he realized, they were on equal footing. Their conversations had always consisted of Edison hovering high above the table with a notepad in hand and Francis seated down below him. 

Now, Edison and Francis could look each other straight in the eyes without straining their necks. And it was curious to Edison how much it changed how he saw Francis. He now realized how skinny he actually was. From above, all Edison could see were Francis’s broad shoulders, but now looking him straight on, he noticed how sunken in his eyes were and how his cheekbones protruded from his face.

Still, there was a kindness in his eyes. Francis had been the only regular at the restaurant who ever really considered Edison. All the other patrons, while cordial and respectful, always maintained a strict formality to their interactions. There was never a moment where they weren’t a guest and he wasn’t their waiter, where if they had needed a refill, they wouldn’t have thought twice about waving for him and he about running back over with a pitcher. Francis, Edison now realized, had all along wanted to know more about him.

And now he felt a bit foolish for always keeping the conversations so superficial, so aloof. And strangely, though he might have found this the opportune moment to ask him about his life, the two of them mostly sat quietly until they had finished their food. And what hit him hardest while he sat across from Francis was not that he hadn’t sooner sat down with him, but that he had never taken the time to consider Francis in the way that Francis had considered him. Those who had come to the restaurant for a quick meal may not have ever considered Edison more than their waiter, but he had been just as guilty.

He had prescribed Francis with a certain set of qualities he had expected from someone like him, not giving him an opportunity to diverge from what he imagined him to be. Finally seeing him now, he realized that Francis himself may have been lonely too, that he may have come to this city just as Edison did, to start a new life or to build one from scratch. He had never considered that Francis and he might actually have shared some of the same problems, that they might’ve actually had more in common than they had differences. 

He hadn’t taken the time to consider that Francis existed with a whole inner life too, that all of them did. Francis had not been obligated to offer himself to Edison, yet he did anyway. And Edison now returned the gesture by sitting down to eat with him. Edison had now resolved to sit down with Francis any time he came in to eat alone, which he realized had so often been the case. He had realized that in every small gesture, a person was offering up a piece of themselves at the risk of not having it accepted. And if the gesture weren’t returned, that piece of themselves might die. And if it happened enough times, a person might give away so much of themselves to have nothing left. And Edison didn’t want that for anyone, especially Francis. 

They had finished every last bit of food on the table, perhaps in an effort to extend the meal as long as possible. And finally Edison stood up, taking the dirty dishes in hand, and returned to the kitchen. He walked back to clear the rest of the table as Francis began putting his coat on to leave. They stood there for a moment, not sure what to say next, but then as if by coincidence, they both said the same thing in opposite languages: “Thank you.”

By the time Edison had arrived at the birthday party, the apartment was already filled. He didn’t realize Mr. Chang had so many friends, or perhaps it was Mrs. Chang who was the social one. Whenever they had invited him over before, it has always been for a small dinner with at most a few extra places at the table. Their apartment could hardly handle more than a handful of guests, but for Esther’s birthday party, it seemed that the rooms were overflowing. He soon discovered there were guests from a number of social cliques to which they belonged. There were the rotary members and their families, members of the local YMCA where Mrs. Chang dropped the girls off at daycare each day while she did aquarobics classes, and of course the neighbors with small children who often played in the street with Connie, the older of the two girls. 

Until walking into the apartment, Edison realized he hadn’t been in a social gathering this large since he had come to the States. And after a brief survey of the living room, he realized he didn’t know anyone besides the Changs. Though it had now been almost four years living in New York, and he had been working hard getting back to his old convivial self, he had wondered now whether he had completely lost the ease with which he used to navigate a room full of people. Perhaps, he now wondered, it was a sacrifice one had to make in coming to a new country, that one could not come expecting to be left wholly intact.

Back in his younger days, he had always felt comfortable walking up to a stranger and starting a casual conversation without the fear of retribution. But now, all at once, he realized how much he had sidelined himself from those types of interactions since he moved to New York. Even in small ways, he had silenced the voice he once had. He no longer made small talk at the grocery store checkout or with bus drivers or with people waiting in line behind him. The only place he now felt truly comfortable was at the restaurant, and his sociality was one of the job requirements. 

Fortunately, Mr. Chang nearly immediately spotted him and ushered him into the kitchen where Mrs. Chang and the girls had naturally found themselves cooped up. Mrs. Chang was frying up dumplings and cooking more rice, while Connie sat looking through a picture book and Esther wobbled across the linoleum floors. “What do you want to drink?” Mr. Chang said, raising his thumb and pinking as if to mime a sip.

Before he had a chance to answer, Mr. Chang had already forced a bottle of beer into his hand. Edison had realized he was still holding onto the gift for Esther. “Present,” he said. Mr. Chang took the gift from his hands and walked out of the room as Edison awkwardly backed himself against the wall as if to make himself as unobtrusive as possible. He watched as Esther made her way from the kitchen toward the adjacent room, but just as soon as she disappeared out of sight, Mr. Chang had returned with her in arms.

“Say hello to your Uncle Shen,” he said.

The name had taken him by surprise, as if he hadn’t heard it for decades of his life. At this moment, he realized that he hadn’t heard it since he left Taiwan, and the name sounded almost foreign to him now. No one except his parents ever called him that anymore, and mostly they addressed him as “son” whenever they spoke on the phone. The company that had put together the visa paperwork in Taipei had mentioned that U.S. customs preferred processing forms with Western names. It was best to adopt a new name in favor of one that might be hard for Americans to pronounce or spell or remember. He had thought it rather silly, to be honest, the idea that a name with one syllable and four letters would be hard to pronounce. Still, what was important wasn’t the complexity of the name but whether it had an American ring to it.

The agent had given him a list of English names that might help him choose. He quickly spotted the name Edison and was immediately reminded of the great American inventor, thinking if the name didn’t satisfy the request, then at least he’d have given it a good effort. So he became Edison on paper and then in life when he first stepped through customs at JFK. He hadn’t even remembered telling Mr. Chang his name, but then Edison realized that as part of his own accounting process, anytime he double-checked the page of a purchase order or a bank statement, he would quickly sign the corner with his Chinese character to remind himself it had been looked over by him. Of course, he must’ve seen it written all over.