The Hibachi
The smell never left my car. Garlic, butter, soy sauce, fried rice, eggs and bacon from the morning cafeteria shift infused into the upholstery by Louisiana summer. I drove home at two in the morning with the windows down even in winter because the smell wouldn’t leave. Somewhere between Pinhook Road and the apartment I started to understand that the smell wasn’t on me. It was me.
I performed hibachi at a Japanese steakhouse in Lafayette, Louisiana, for parts of three years in the late 1990s. I was a Malaysian Chinese man in my early twenties, on a student visa with work authorization, sleeping four hours a night, working the breakfast shift at the university cafeteria, and then driving across town to perform Japanese cooking for Louisianans who had never been to Japan and didn’t need to.
This essay is about three things the hibachi taught me. They took me twenty-five years to put into words.
The first lesson was about the show.
I learned within a few shifts that the Americans tipped better when you made mistakes. Not real mistakes but designed ones. A shrimp slipping off the spatula at the right second, your hand catching it half a beat late, the table erupting because the performer was just human enough to be charming. The tip jar got heavier the night I first dropped a shrimp on purpose.
I was twenty years old and already learning the architecture of American attention. They wanted me exotic but not foreign. Asian enough to be authentic, careful enough to be safe.
The hibachi performance is not Japanese cooking. I want to be clear about this because it took me years to understand what I had been doing. Hibachi as practiced in American restaurants is mostly an invention of the 1960s, refined for American audiences who wanted Asian food as entertainment. The onion volcano is not Japanese. Neither is the flipping shrimp into the chef’s hat, or the choo-choo train of stacked onion rings spitting fire.
I, a Malaysian Chinese man who had never been to Japan, performed an American invention of Japanese cooking for white Louisianans who thought they were experiencing authentic Asian cuisine. The whole transaction was a series of mistakes the room had agreed not to notice. They thought the food was Japanese. They thought I was Japanese, or close enough that the difference didn’t matter. The room ran on the assumption that we all knew what we were participating in, and the assumption was wrong, and the wrongness was what made the show work.
I learned that night what Asian-American performance actually is. It is the willingness to inhabit a role America has pre-written for you, performed in a costume America has decided is convincing for an audience that pays you to confirm what they already believe.
The shrimp was just a shrimp. The lesson was about who I had to become to make the room safe enough to tip.
The second lesson was about mistakes.
My parents had raised me to believe mistakes were what kept you out. My mother was a school principal. My father walked through houses calculating the worth of other people’s failures. They had taught me that mistakes had consequences and that the consequence I had to fear most was not being chosen.
In Seremban, I had not been chosen. I had failed my way out of every door my parents had hoped I would walk through. The door that finally opened in Louisiana was opened by an older man in admissions who took a phone call on my behalf because of a debt my mother was owed. That was the door I came through. I arrived knowing I had no margin for further failure.
And then the hibachi grill, on a Thursday night in my second month, told me the opposite. The dropped shrimp made the table love me. The almost-burned hand made them tip in twenties. The grill was telling me what my whole upbringing had told me was suicidal: imperfection as currency. Vulnerability as performance. The seam shown deliberately, so the room would feel let in.
I could not absorb the lesson at the time. I was too busy failing to fail without consequence. The 1.0 GPA was confirming what my parents had warned me about. The phone bills to Asia at forty cents a minute were confirming it. Every late-night drive home with the smell in my upholstery was confirming it. I believed that perfection was the only currency that would let me stay.
But the lesson was working in me even when I refused to learn it. The dropped shrimp was a permission slip. It said: you are allowed to be visible while imperfect. You are allowed to let the seam show. You are allowed to be a Malaysian Chinese man cooking food from a country he has never visited, and the imperfection is not the failure. The imperfection is the reason they come back.
I did not believe it then. I had to flip every shrimp. I had to fire every volcano. I had to perform a man America was willing to keep.
It would take twenty-five years and a stage IV cancer diagnosis for me to understand that the grill had been teaching me how to survive the rest of my life.
The shrimp was never the point. The drop was. The body learning that survival sometimes requires letting go, and that the people who love you will love you more for the letting go than for the holding.
The third lesson is the one I am still learning. It has to do with disappearance.
There is a moment in the show, somewhere around the fourth or fifth course, when the performer stops being a person and becomes the performance. The hands move without consultation. The patter runs on its own track. The face holds its smile through the burn of the grill and the bark of the manager and the table that wants the choo-choo train one more time for the birthday kid.
This is what the show is for. The show is so the performer can leave.
The grades, the phone bills to Asia, the calls home where my mother said we’ll manage and meant the opposite, none of it had to come to the grill. The grill was a country with no immigration paperwork. As long as the volcano fired, the performer was a citizen.
I learned this on the hibachi line and I have been doing it ever since. Through the green card. Through the corporate contracts that renewed every six months until they didn’t. Through every meeting where I was the only Asian person in the room and the show I had to put on was a different show, but the same architecture. Tell them what they expect to hear. Let them think they understand you. Disappear inside the role until the role becomes the only door back to yourself.
But the disappearance has a shadow. The boy who learns to leave his body during the volcano never quite finds his way back. The performance becomes so seamless even he cannot find the seam. He performs a marriage. He performs competence. He performs a son. He performs a husband. He performs a father. The roles run on their own track and the man inside them gets quieter and quieter until he can barely hear himself.
What pulled me back was my son.
My son does not perform. He has never once in eleven years dropped a shrimp on purpose to make a stranger like him better. He turns his face into the wind on a go-kart track and arrives somewhere I cannot follow, because he has never had to leave his body to be loved. He is autistic. He has been wondering since before he could walk. The accusation that has followed me my whole life, that I lacked the heart for wondering, was never about him. It was always about me.
The hibachi taught me how to perform. My son is teaching me how to stop.
The volcano was a brilliant trick, and I was good at it, and I made enough tips to stay in the country and finish the degree and build the architecture. But the cost was that I forgot the difference between being seen and being known. The grill made me visible. The grill also made me invisible.
I drive past where the steakhouse used to be. The building is something else now. Insurance, I think. The hibachi tables are gone. The car was sold years ago. The smell finally left.
The hibachi taught me how to be loved for the show.
My son is teaching me how to be loved for the silence.
Until next week,
Eddie