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killed along the way. The boulevard was infamous for its number of monthly vehicular deaths so regular that local dress shops kept extra bolts of cheap fabric on hand for covering up the bodies until the ambulances could arrive.
    The Tung Shing House stood in the middle of Forest Hills like a bull’s-eye and was the site of feasts large and small, celebratory and mundane; walk in on any given Saturday, and you might be interrupting a bat mitzvah luncheon like Candy’s. Walk in on a Sunday night, and every Jewish family in town, mine included, was lined up, waiting to order platters of shrimp in lobster sauce.
    At the end of every weekend, my parents and I would gather up Gaga and stroll the half mile down Austin Street and around the corner onto Yellowstone, past my junior high school, which, in the early 1970s had become newsworthy for the regular fights that took place in the second-floor girls’ bathroom, and for Mr. Nedling, the school’s quaalude-addled gym teacher who had a history of looking the other way just as his students sailed over the pummel horse. Every Sunday night, we stood for an hour in the restaurant foyer, waiting for a table, scanning the three-columned menu handed to us by the same brusque Chinese waiter wearing a short gold jacket with black brocade epaulets. And every Sunday night, we ordered the same things: the Polynesian pupu platter—sticky, ruby red–glazed spareribs, fried dumplings, steamed dumplings, fried egg rolls, fried shrimp toast—delivered to our table on a black enameled lazy Susan, the dishes arranged around a live blue alcohol flame that emitted a kerosene stink and utterlyterrorized me. There were heavy bowls of salty, MSG-infused wonton soup laden with flaccid, dark green bok choy that floated on the surface like sea kelp; there was Gaga’s favorite chicken chow mein, thick with clear glop, and into which she stirred half a cup of soy sauce; mucusy shrimp in lobster sauce that my father loved and shoveled onto great piles of burnished fried rice speckled with tiny cubes of red meat the color of blood.
    During those Sunday suppers in our local Chinese restaurant, my father ate silently, carnally, hunched over his bowl of soup dumplings stuffed with meat of unknown provenance. My mother poked tentatively at the segregated piles on her plate while he gnawed on the crimson spareribs like a hyena after a kill, the glaze smearing his lips and cheeks until all that was left were the bare bones. He ate like a starving, voracious child, ravenous with hunger and need, never once looking up or stopping to breathe until his plate was clean. It fascinated and thrilled me; I loved the fanfare, the otherwise forbidden eating with our hands, the tearing of meat from bone, and the belly-patting grunts that my father emitted as he paid the bill and we stood to leave, running into other Jewish neighbors waiting for our table to open up when we stepped outside.
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    I s this
chicken
?” I asked my father at Candy’s bat mitzvah luncheon, as the waiter dropped a pot overflowing with tea between us. I pointed at the familiar narrow shred of meat on my porcelain soup spoon. It was gray and tipped with a bright red splotch, like a matchstick.
    â€œJust eat it,” he murmured quietly, and slurped his soup while his black plastic aviators fogged up.
    â€œ
Is
it?” I asked again, my voice getting whiny and high. I tapped my spoon on my water glass. Then I tapped my bowl and then my water glass and then my mother’s wineglass, which she moved to the other side of her plate. I wanted my father’s attention, but I didn’t want to go overboard; if I accidentally spilled my mother’s wine, I’d spend the rest of the meal banished to the damp tile floor of the restaurant basement, which housed the ladies’ and men’s bathrooms and an old black pay phone hanging from the wall, and where a cloud of