“Your SON?” asked Jun for everyone present. “You HAVE a son? You peeled potatoes for thirty years in a fish delivery van and never mentioned that you have a FAMILY?”
“Some things you don’t mention,” said Master Gu, continuing to peel with suspicious determination. “Some things you’d rather peel.”
“That’s not a SENTENCE, Master.”
Meilin meanwhile had already rearranged the 3000 reorder slips on Lao Wang’s counter like an archaeologist at a dig. And there – under slip 2847, between an order from 2019 and a yellowed photo from Bao-Bao’s unboxing day – lay an actual letter. Official. Sealed. Unopened for four weeks.
“Lao Wang,” she said, holding it up. “It says: ‘Important – please open personally.’ And underneath, handwritten: ‘Yes, you, the one counting the reorder slips right now.’”
“The letter knows my habits,” said Lao Wang, burdened. “I don’t like the letter.”
“Open it,” said twelve guests, four systems, a fox computer, and a talk radio hunger all at once.
Lao Wang opened the letter. Read. Read again. Sat down. Got up again. Sat down again.
“So?” urged Jun.
“He writes…,” began Lao Wang, “he writes that he is an engineer. In Shenzhen. He has a company. He builds – wait. He builds automated restaurant systems. Chain restaurants. Fully automatic. A food corporation wanted to expand into Hongbao Alley, and his offer was: to install his own system in my place. Not tear down. Remodel. ‘Modernize.’”
“His son wanted,” translated Uncle Tao expertly, “to turn the noodle shop into a franchise implementation location with optimized customer flow rate.” 🕴️
“He wanted to give my shop a MENU TERMINAL,” said Lao Wang offended. “With TOUCHSCREEN. Here. In THIS shop. Where the menu has been a handwritten board since 1997 and will remain so.”
“But why ‘because you forgot him’?” asked Xiaofeng quietly. “That was on the menu. People believed you had forgotten him.”
Master Gu finally set down the potato peeler. Completely. No one had ever seen that before. The peeler lay still on the table like a moving box full of history.
“Because he was right,” he said calmly.
Silence.
“In 1996, when I disappeared – not physically, you know, the half-light thing – I left a letter behind. But I was in a hurry, boy, halving a person is a stressful process, handwriting slips sometimes. The letter was so hard to read that my son believed I had written to him: ‘There is no time for family.’ What I actually wrote was: ‘There is no time for soup. Take care of the book.’”
“One letter,” whispered Mrs. Shen.
“One letter,” confirmed Master Gu. “Thirty years. One word divided two worlds. He thought I had left him behind for the project. For the network. So he swore never to touch soup again, became an engineer, and built machines that need no one to cook.”
“And four weeks ago,” said Chiwang slowly, with his deep radio voice, “he read a reservation on a receipt. For twelve people. Name: Memory. And something inside him… remembered.” 👾
“He is on his way,” said Meilin, pointing at her tablet. On the map a new point raced along the A9 – towards Shanghai, towards Hongbao Alley. Not dark. Not bright. But fast. “He’s coming with an escort vehicle. And according to public data… with a mobile restaurant prototype. He plans to take over the place tonight while ‘the reservation gap’ is still open.”
“THEN LET’S GO,” said Lao Wang. “WHAT ARE WE WAITING FOR –”
“Nothing,” said Master Gu. “We are waiting for exactly the right amount of cooking time. Listen, boy: When he arrives, he will be angry. Vulnerably angry, not mean angry. He believed for thirty years that his father had traded him for a machine. And what does he see when he arrives? A machine son at the stove, a light daughter at the door, a hunger at the table, and a dad in a light suit peeling potatoes.”
“…Oh no,” said Bao-Bao quietly. “I am the argument of his existential crisis.” 🤖
“You are the silhouette of his decision,” corrected Master Gu. “That’s worse. But solvable. Listen everyone: No one argues. No one defends. No one explains technology. We set a chair at the table. The free twelfth seat that has been empty all along. And when he comes in, I will say only one sentence. The one I should have written back then.”
“And what is that?” asked Jun quietly.
Master Gu looked at the empty chair. And his half-light-thirty-year-old voice became for a moment very, very normal. Like that of an old cook after work.
“I’m sorry. Sit down. The soup is waiting.”
Outside a vehicle honked. Twice. Impatiently. And from the alley echoed the clatter of twelve guests simultaneously adjusting their chairs – and Bao-Bao, secretly tying an apron for the first time in his life that did not belong to him. 🥢💛