Ahearn: A restaurateur's American success story
By Lorraine Ahearn
Staff Writer
Sunday, Feb. 10, 2008 3:00 am
Just hired, the young Vietnamese dishwasher watched the petite, middle-
aged woman pull on heavy-duty rubber gloves and start scrubbing the
stainless steel kitchen as if her life depended on it.
The dishwasher had to ask.
"How long have you worked here?"
This sent a roar of laughter through the kitchen staff at Phoenix
Asian Cuisine, the city's first top-drawer Chinese restaurant, as
owner Marie Peng composed her reply: "Since Day One."
I guess this is your classic American success story, the moral being
that enough elbow grease can move mountains.
Even so, the place where this story begins -- an escape on foot from
genocide in Cambodia -- is hard to reconcile with where it's ended up.
That is, this quick, savvy matriarch of a businesswoman, sitting at
the marble bar of her own bistro, with fine wood paneling, linen
napkins, a long wine list and Frank Sinatra playing.
They are one and the same, she and the teenager who fled Cambodia with
only the clothes on her back as the reign of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge
rose like a bloody tide.
It's a story that predates "Day One," but began in the spring of 1975,
a moment of unfathomable and cold horror. It was, in the words of the
despot who was about to execute, march to death or slowly starve to
death 2 million of his countrymen, "The Year Zero."
***
When the capital at Phnom Penh fell, it was celebration for the
communist soldiers, like the Chinese New Year all over again. Marie
Peng, traveling near the Thai border with her aunt, thought it was a
good omen.
"We can go home now," Peng, then 16, told her aunt. "The war is over.
Everything is OK."
"No," the older woman answered. "It's not OK."
At the head of a teenage guerrilla army, Pol Pot renamed Cambodia the
Democratic Republic of Kampuchea, which he decreed would be a Utopian
peasant society. First, it had to be "purified" of, among other
things, family and parental authority, churches, health care,
education, money, newspapers, radio, TV, foreigners, bicycles, even --
for some reason -- eyegl*****.
But all Peng and her aunt knew was, the roads and bridges were closed.
And so they crossed into Thailand on a pedestrian catwalk, making
their way to a refugee camp where they lived for six months, sleeping
in a tin-roofed barracks, bathing in a muddy river.
As world opinion drowsily awakened to the Pol Pot nightmare, make****ft
consulates opened in the camp, and the lines formed. Like playing the
lottery, the refugees applied to go anywhere, everywhere -- France,
Germany, Switzerland.
Peng and her aunt found themselves on the way to the U.S., arriving at
the Greensboro air****t one night, then on their way out of Greensboro,
where there were few lights and a lot of trees. The two women spoke in
Cambodian the whole way.
"Uh-oh," Peng whispered to her aunt, as she watched the scenery from
the sponsor's car window get farther from town. "They must be dropping
us off somewhere in the jungle."
In fact, the destination was Asheboro, and a house with a well-stocked
kitchen. They were thankful, but with no English, no friends and no
news out of Cambodia, all Peng had to do for the first weeks was wait
for word from home.
"I cried. I was so alone," recalled Peng, who finally got a letter
from her mother. "My mom said I was very lucky to get away. They were
making them work in the fields and the rice paddies. They were from
the city. They weren't used to this. She said I might have been first
to die."
It was happening everywhere in Kampuchea. Young, ruthless, trigger-
happy soldiers had forced the city dwellers out to collective farms,
where they worked slave labor, 4 a.m. until 10 p.m., and were fed only
a small bowl of rice every other day.
Peng, realizing she now had to fend for herself -- and might be her
family's only hope to follow her to America -- went to work at a
hosiery mill, packing socks for $2.34 an hour.
After that was a succession of waitress jobs -- the Bamboo Palace,
Beijing Restaurant. Learning English on her feet instead of in a
classroom, Peng quickly picked up on local customs such as the "free
refill" and a grayish concoction with crunchy noodles that Americans
called "chow mein."
Her fortunes would change after she was hired as a waitress at Lin's
Garden on East Bessemer Avenue, and eventually bought the place when
the owner moved back to New York. The same year, 1981, she finally got
a second letter from her mother.
The news was part sweet, part bitter. Most of the family had survived
the four years under Pol Pot. But her father and two brothers had not,
the restaurant owner learned. The brothers had starved and the father
had literally been worked to death.
***
The children called it "lucky money," pocket money enclosed in little
red envelopes and given out on the Chinese New Year by grandparents,
aunts, uncles. These were the only gifts, and on New Year's Eve, amid
firecrackers and the traditional Lion Dance, the children would
gleefully tally up their take.
It was one tradition Peng always kept in her new country, with her two
sons -- the lucky money. And a full 15 years after locating her lost
family, she finally used her savings to bring them here, one by one,
24 people including siblings, nieces, nephews, and Peng's mother.
After 26 years on her feet in the kitchen, in the dining room, doing
the prep and cleanup herself to keep the payroll down, Peng decided to
retire a few years ago, after a relative took over Lin's Garden. Peng
wanted to travel the world.
"All those years, I was like a bird in a cage. I wanted to go here, go
there," she said. "I did, for a while. Then I said, 'I have to go back
to work.' "
Just not a buffet. Never again. The sight of all that wasted all-you-
can-eat food always made her ache.
So she and her grown sons, Tommy and David Peng, decided to open a
first-class Asian restaurant. The upfit at what used to be a golf
store behind Carrabba's Italian Grill on New Garden Road was a thing
to behold: 2,200-square-foot kitchen, remodeling by Design One, hand-
painted peacock mural over the bar.
Not the kind of place where you get to keep the chopsticks. No chop
suey to be found. And on New Year's Eve last Thursday, the Year of the
Rat, Peng emerged from toiling over sauces in the kitchen to greet
customers at the packed dinner hour and watch the Lion Dance.
Beforehand, servers offered diners little red envelopes embossed with
gold Chinese characters. They look decorative, like holiday ornaments,
but the savvy businesswoman circulating among her well-heeled
clientele knows better.
She knows what a 16-year-old girl crossing out of Cambodia knew. The
red envelopes represented luck, a future, and life, if she could only
imagine it, beyond The Year Zero.
Contact Lorraine Ahearn at 373-7334 or lorraine.ahearn@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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