Yat

Yat.

I searched for Yat Wong online. I don’t know what made me think of Yat, fully 35 years after I last saw him.

I got the business listing, defunct since 1995, for the Golden Lotus restaurant in Hamilton. That was him, and his brother, ‘Jack’, and I washed dishes there in the early to mid-1980’s.

The business was incorporated a few months before I was born, coming into being in March 1969. I wonder what Hamilton was like then, for a young man who didn’t look anything like the burly farmers who made up most of the Waikato back then. What it was like for a young father and husband looking to make a living cooking Chinese foot in a town where most meals would have still involved meat and three veg.

I don’t think the building would have changed much in the 20 odd years before I worked there, it was a stand-alone single storey building set back from the main street of Hamilton, Victoria Street, which ran parallel to the river dissecting the city and suburbs, the Waikato. I wonder what the building had been, who used it and for what. It would have been quite new compared to the buildings around it when it became the Golden Lotus.

It sat between Resene paints on one side and something on the other, I have a feeling it was a private practice of lawyers or a conveyancing company. My father would know, or think he does. I can hear him going, ‘no, that was, oh you know, that stock agent, what was his name?’ It was that kind of town, a city by New Zealand standards, 100 thousand residents if everyone was home, and most of the buildings were tenanted by people whose name was the business.

There weren’t many restaurants in Hamilton at all. 

I have a vague memory of a birthday trip to a restaurant which wouldn’t have been out of place in a movie like American Graffiti, a long space with booths on either side. It was called the Red Rooster, long before Red Rooster franchises popped up in every suburb. I think I caused consternation because I wanted to order snapper, because I thought I was going to get one of the lobsters that was scrabbling about in the tank ranged along one side of the restaurant. Not that I had a clue what a lobster was.

Lots of the birthdays in years afterward were spent at ‘The Woolshed’, which wasn’t that far from the Golden Lotus really. It had things like mushrooms on toast on the menu. As in button mushrooms on white bread.

The Golden Lotus was one block from where my dad spent the last decades of his working life, the Wrightsons building, which was on the same side of the wide road and further down towards the centre of the CBD.

I went to primary school with a boy whose parents had arrived from Malaysia as refugees. They set up a ‘Chinese’ restaurant at the shops not far from our home, and that was our families introduction to the food, I think, certainly it was mine. Dad would look at the menu for ages, and then almost always get Chicken Chow Mein, or combination Egg Foo Yong. We loved it, we barely ever had takeaway and it seemed so exotic. 

It was much later on I realised how dad’s chicken chow mein was the chicken and veges mum served, if you put it in a bag with some rice and spun it above your head.

I was always starving in the 80’s, no reflection on mum, that’s just the way it was. I remember one of the yoghurt brands had a slogan about enjoying the stuff any time, and I turned around from the fridge with one in my hand a little too late at night and she was standing there and said something like ‘I know they say anytime….’

One of the greatest treats of working for Yat was that I would get there about 4pm, do the dishes from the preparation work that was done before opening, cutting up lots and lots of veges etc, and then Yat would make me something to eat, a great big plate of all sorts. I would sit and eat it off the top of the huge chest freezer that ran along the back wall of the kitchen. I would have a juice out of the fridge to wash it down. 

Yat would be standing at his wok or woks not far away, Jack would be up the other end, getting his stuff ready. Jack always wore a light jersey, Yat varied. They were both very lean, and their trousers hung a little.

They would just ‘chew the fat’. They both made this noise which I have always thought equated to their version of saying ‘Aaaah, or Uuuum’, before you really know what you want to say. One would start making that noise and the other would just wait, and eventually they would be chatting back and forth.

I had been washing the dishes for more than a year when I got to realise that I was an important part of the busy life my uncle Quentin led out on the farm over August with all the lambs coming in. I am still proud of that above a lot of things.

I always thought Quentin was fantastic, he taught me all sorts of stuff out there every school holiday. I never really thought I was much of a help, and he seemed as if he could have done everything single handed standing on his head.

Mum came and got me at lunchtime one Tuesday, Quentin had dropped me back at Grandma’s place, which bordered onto his, after we docked a paddock of sheep in the morning. She drove me back to Hamilton, and then she dropped me off at the Golden Lotus.

Mr Wong dropped me off in the evening once we had closed up the restaurant. It was never very late because I think I worked Tuesdays, I had football practice Monday and Wednesday. When I walked up the long driveway Quentin was sitting in the lounge waiting for me, talking with mum and dad, and then we drove home across the pitch darkness of the New Zealand countryside.

My brother went out with Lisa Wong, Yat’s daughter. She was a fantastic woman for your brother to be going out with, she was lovely to me.

Years later I stayed with Lisa and her partner for a while when I first landed in London.

I don’t have any memory of talking to Mr Wong, but I really liked him. I hope he knew that.

At the end of every shift I would take the big metal rubbish bin from the kitchen and empty it into a skip which was down the back of the restaurant, down the stairs and across the gravelly carpark. When I had finished, I would wash the bin out and leave it upside down next to the stairs. And by then Mr Wong would have locked up, and he would come down the back stairs, and we would shove my ten-speed bike into the cavernous boot of the old Ford Falcon he had parked in the same spot every day.

We would drive home, largely in silence, I think. Yat smoked and he would roll down the window and puff slowly on a cigarette. He changed gears so slowly the car would almost stall in between each change, the Falcon had a stick on the column and he would put in the clutch and then it would be tick, tick, tick as he let his hand just rest there while he took a drag on his smoke with the other.

It summed him up, for me.

He never seemed concerned about anything. Who knows what Yat had seen, and coped with, over those years? I think he thought life was pretty good, which is great to know.

It was only a fifteen-minute drive, and Yat would pull into the driveway leading up to mum and dad’s and stop between the tall photinia bushes which stood sentry at the mailbox. I would say thank you Mr Wong, get out and pull my bike out of the boot, and he would reverse out and head for home over on Hukanui Road five minutes further away.

That was always a bone of contention with my family, that Mr Wong gave me a ride home.

I think it was part of the difference between me, and them, as a group. They often seemed to think similar things and I often seemed to see things slightly differently, and when there were three of them it was hard for them not to see the difference as me being obtuse, or difficult, or in this case, lazy.

I think Yat liked my company, saw bits and pieces he recognised. He was a pretty relaxed man, I can imagine him in a bustling part of Macau, where he grew up. He would be teenager, working hard at a job like washing up the dishes in a market stall, and the owner would be a man who worked hard all night over the roaring woks of food, had a well-earned smoke, and gave Yat a ride home on his puttering little motorbike when it was all done, them riding along in silence, enjoying it.