Hi everybody. This is Dee. I going to get Momma to make me a I Survived Mr. Hawkins peach cobbler tee shirt. I’m kidding. It was good. He surprised me. Surprised Mommy too.
Come closer. We call him dough boy. He doesn’t know we’re talking about his pie crust. He thinks it’s a Boyz N tha Hood reference. He won’t be opening any restaurants anytime soon. What’d you say Mr. E?
I’m telling how good that cobbler was. And that crust was special. Me and Mommy couldn’t stop talking about it. I’m not being funny. Whispers “he sure is sensitive.”
Did I tell ya’ll I’m going to have a baby brother? We found out Mommy was pregnant right before Daddy died. I told them about sleeping with their door closed. Wonder what they were doing besides sleeping. Okay Dough Boy, I mean Mr. E, I’ll behave.
It’s a mess around our house. We’re happy and we’re sad. We found out it’s a boy. Mommy is going to name him Bruce, after Bruce Lee. Daddy teased her if he was a boy, he wanted to have another Asian bad ass around the house. Or at least semi-Asian. Mommy used to pretend to get mad when Daddy would call her his Asian bad ass. What, okay Mr. E I’ll stop. Please don’t tell Mommy I curse. Like I told ya’ll Jennifer Hon Thomas doesn’t play.
Okay, okay.
He wants me to talk about circulation. Su, the young Korean woman he planned to interview for this got a job in North Atlanta and just didn’t have the time. So, we’ve been eating Vietnamese on the regular. I better whisper again. I’m glad Su got that job. Hey Mr. E, quit with the cricket jokes! I’ll speak up.
Did you know that in Korea after the war people used to greet each other by saying have you eaten today? Mr. E’s friend Min told us that. They say the same thing in China. Mommy’s from New Zealand but even she knew that. I tease her sometimes and ask her is she sure she’s Chinese. She can’t use chop sticks, can’t make change if her life depended on it and Grandma Hon says Mommy was so bad in school, she swore she was dyslexic. And we won’t talk about her Cantonese.
Daddy used to tease her saying thank God you can paint. Otherwise, you might have starved. Guess that wouldn’t be funny to a lot of Koreans and Chinese. Daddy could always make Mommy laugh. I can’t talk about him. I don’t want to cry.
Ya’ll hold on.
Dee, I’ll take over. You pull yourself together. She’s still struggling.
Are you sure? Okay, I’ll let you talk.
My daddy would want me to finish. Black people talk about recirculating their money. You got to have money to recirculate it. What they need to talk about is getting other people’s money and then circulating it in our community. The Vietnamese man whose restaurants we’ve been eating at for the past few weeks(he has three of them) has lots of Black customers at his fish shop in Riverdale, just like Su’s parents at their restaurant in Riverdale. His Vietnamese restaurant in Marietta has a lot of white and Black customers. We haven’t seen many Asians eating at any of them.
Mr. Hawkins goes to the nail shop every now and then and he told me all the customers there are white and Black. And course all the workers are Vietnamese. Ya’ll see a pattern here.
Daddy used to tell me Dee, don’t you buy that recirculation mess. You don’t get rich spending the money. You get rich earning it. And you do better by going to someone else’s community and bringing their money home.
He’d say Bill Gates didn’t get rich by selling mediocre software to upper middle class white people. He sold mediocre software to everybody. And he’d say Barry Gordy didn’t limit his audience to Black folks. He sold to everybody who loved good music.
He’d say look at Jay Z and Oprah. They made their fortune selling to everybody, especially white people. He couldn’t stand Buy Black campaigns. Daddy would say Dee Buy Black consigns most Black people to working for mainstream corporations so a few Black people can have a chance to be free to plot their own destiny. All Black people ought to have that choice.
Black people have issues with how they are treated at mainstream businesses. Well how about an America full of Black businesses that take the Oprah approach. What’s wrong with that? I learned to answer nothing so Daddy would quit ranting. Mr. Hawkins rants too. Ain’t that right Mr. E. Leans over and whispers Dough Boy. We gone work on that crust.
You should have seen him cutting those peaches with a paring knife. My grandma Leah said doesn’t he write. Dee, you watch him and his fingers. One slip and he might have a hard time typing. I said Grandma he has a hard time typing anyway.
I’ll let Mr. Hawkins finish this up next week. He saw something about the wealth gap increasing even as the number of black college graduates increases. I bet he’ll have something to say. Once we get that crust right, we’re going to open a cobbler shop and get us some of us some of that mainstream loot. Ain’t that right Mr. E.
One last story before we go. Last week we saw six Vietnamese women sitting outside Starbucks yacking it up in Vietnamese. Mr. E took me in, bought me a cookie and bought himself a cup of coffee. When we came out, he went right up to those women and said Xin Ciao. You could have heard a pin drop. I guess they were trying to figure out who this random Black guy is speaking Vietnamese. He told them he was practicing, and they all laughed. One of them even said Xin Ciao back to him.
See Asians come from countries where deprivation is common so they had to learn how to create something out of nothing so when somebody asked “have you eaten today” they could answer yes, I have. Small business and a dedication to education is ingrained in their culture. A way of creating something out of nothing.
Black people come from a country where they have been oppressed by the rule of law. Opening businesses didn’t matter. Ida B. Wells got started writing about lynchings because a friend of hers was a businessman who got lynched by some people jealous of his success. The Black focus had to be on ending Jim Crow. Remember Black Wall Street. Mr. E’s friend Mr. Ross says there were many other successful Black business communities that were destroyed during Jim Crow. Tulsa just gets the pub.
I’m half Black and half Chinese so I see why both communities chose the way out of oppression and deprivation they did. Although Mommy used to tease Daddy about being Black. She would say are you sure you’re Black. Hey, no rhythm, didn’t know a thing about rap when they met, and Mommy loves her some OutKast. She even calls Daddy Big Boy.
I think we can both learn from each other.
Ain’t that right Dough Boy.