Hoy Hing

My first apartment after I graduated from college was in Brighton, Mass. It's not the heart of Boston, but it's the city, enough so that after I moved in I got a letter from the cops: "Hello. Welcome to Brighton. We see you have a Honda Civic. Honda Civics are the most frequently stolen kind of car. Just letting you know. Peace out! -- BPD." (For the record, I never got my car stolen, but someone did steal my H from the hood -- THE BAHSTID.) The apartment, the second floor of a triple-decker, was on a busy street, with frequent bus traffic. This was terrific because I could get on a bus practically outside my door and take it into town. However, the buses (especially the diesel monsters that route was running) were loud, and they ran from like 5 in the morning until almost 1 a.m. It was early September when we moved in. My bedroom was at the front of the house, and I quickly determined that it was too noisy for me to sleep with the windows open.

By the time spring rolled around, guess what? I'd acclimated to the city. It was still loud, not to mention that there were bright lights that stayed on all night, including the bright red neon sign of Hoy Hing, the Chinese restaurant across the street, which was open (on weekends at least) until 3. (I once tried to read in bed without the light on, and while it wasn't bright enough to be practical, I could just make out the words on the page.) But I could hear everything through the closed windows anyway, so I tried sleeping with them open as an experiment, and slept great. In fact, the constant traffic and the buses were a kind of white noise, variable but constant, like the ocean. For as long as we lived in that apartment I kept the windows open throughout the warm months. In the summer I'd have a fan on, but if it wasn't hot enough for that it would be just me and the street.

I witnessed a few fights out my window. After the bars down the street closed, people would wander down and get Chinese food. It was mostly yelling and general drunkenness, but on at least one occasion I saw someone getting knocked down and punched repeatedly. I was just turning to go get the phone when I heard a neighbor, from my building or another one, screaming at them to stop because "THE POLICE ARE FUCKING COMING RIIIIGHT NOOOOWWW." They wandered off, trying to look nonchalant. The yelling would wake me up (and I'd peer out the window, feeling like Gladys Kravitz), but even that was mostly just part of the atmosphere.

The only time I was dramatically startled awake was when a van came careening down the street and crashed into a car parked across from my house. I had leaped out of bed and was standing in front of the window before I even realized I was awake. That may be a cliche, but it is the literal truth -- I'll never forget that feeling of being wrenched from a dream and realizing I was standing at my window. The van had a company logo on it, and the drunken morons in it got out and tottered off into the night laughing, so it's a good bet they were fired the next morning, unless the van was stolen. There was a second crash on a different occasion -- into a car parked in the exact same spot. We tried never to park there.

Hoy Hing was not a great Chinese restaurant. It wasn't the worst or the most MSG-y (that would be China Maxim III on Market Street -- I thought my temples were going to explode), but it didn't pretend to be classy or anything. It had a few booths, but it was clearly mostly a takeout place. The counter was a cutout between the dining room and the kitchen, with light-up pictures of various dishes, in varying degrees of discoloration, around the opening. The booths were padded with red vinyl, much of it ripped. The tables were fake-wood laminate. The walls were wood paneling. There was a windowseat, which was always completely covered in a messy pile of promotional magazines and brochures and out-of-date fliers. In the back, up high on a little wall shelf, was a red altar that I guess was Buddhist, always with a neat stack of oranges in front of it.

The kitchen/dining dividing wall was perpendicular to the street, so the kitchen was also at the front of the restaurant. When we ordered takeout from them, which we did frequently, we used to like to stand at the window of our apartment when we called and watch the owner pick up the phone. My roommate used to swear that one day he would get it delivered -- I don't remember if he ever really did or not -- and we would joke that when told the address she would turn around and see us waving at the window. Other times I didn't even bother to call; if I was getting off the bus from work I'd run in, order what I wanted and hang around until it was ready. I don't think I ever made rice in all the years I lived there -- I'd just go across the street and ask for a small steamed rice, which was a buck. The owner -- I think she was the owner; she was always there when they were open -- wasn't overly friendly, like cheery conversational friendly, but she was always nice and always smiled during our brief transactions. I figured she must have recognized me eventually, but she never said anything and neither did I.

I sometimes felt bad for her when the late-night drunken chaos started. People would be half in and half out of the restaurant, waiting for their food on the sidewalk or in the doorway. Mostly it was a happy atmosphere, but as I said, there were spats, and I always wondered if she ever felt unsafe, since quite often she was there by herself (sometimes there was someone else cooking, but not always). Or maybe the counter served as more of a barrier than it really was; maybe drunk guys in a rage about whatever with whoever didn't see her as anything other than a food-dispensing robot, and maybe she liked it that way (I would have). I don't know if she ever called the cops on anyone -- you'd see cops out there once in a while, so maybe she did. I never heard her yelling at anyone. I wondered how long she'd been here -- she spoke English fine, though with an accent that suggested she wasn't born in this country -- and if she thought Americans were all a bunch of alcoholic food-gobbling assholes or what. Or, since the after-bar crowd was her bread and butter, if she liked them despite the rowdiness. Or if she saw them as nothing but vague outlines that provided her with an income.

Even though it was a busy street, when it got late enough the traffic did die down. On weeknights especially, it would get very quiet. When it was warm, the Hoy Hing people would open the kitchen door -- they didn't have any more air conditioning than we did, and I'm sure it was broiling in there. When everything was stopped, if I didn't have my fan on, I could hear, lying in bed, the sounds of cooking from across the street. Mostly chopping. Sometimes what sounded like a whisk in a metal bowl. Once in a while, the phone ringing and a voice answering. It was comforting in a strange way -- maybe like the feeling of going to sleep as a child when your parents are still up, putting away dishes, puttering around, watching TV with the volume low. The nights full of drunk twentysomethings would come and go, the buses would start and stop, and the lady at Hoy Hing would still be chopping vegetables and making soup. If I was ever still awake after Hoy Hing closed, I felt lonely.

I moved to an apartment on a much quieter, tree-lined street, where it was so dark at night that I had to use a nightlight for a while. First I missed the traffic noise; eventually, I came to appreciate the lack of late-night yelling and sudden diesel-engine revving. Now, in my equally quiet condo, I have the windows closed in winter and the fan (or even air conditioner) blowing in summer, but there are spaces in the spring and the fall -- the spring one will be here again soon -- when I have nothing but open windows and outside air. There are few drunken revelers (thankfully) and no buses. When I'm lying there in the nearly complete dark, sometimes I'll remember the open door of the Hoy Hing kitchen and the quiet cooking sounds, and miss it.