- When it was Ah Wings Café
- on Cahuenga Blvd. in Hollywood,
- they'd come to study their lines
- in the noirish booths by the kitchen
- where steam and cigarette smoke
- merged with the shadowy faces
- of Newman, Brando, Mitchum,
- who took breaks by walking
- to the Vine Street newsstand.
- For years, my mother kept
- Raymond Burr's five dollar i.o.u,
- hoping he'd remember, before
- television made him an icon.
- When the business moved
- to Little Tokyo in the 50's
- and became Lem's Café,
- Keye Luke and James Wong Howe
- would enter through the back door
- asking for their hom yu, as my father
- sipped the egg flower soup
- and nodded their way
- toward the pink table cloths
- reserved for special guests.
- It was almost forty years
- since my mother, an extra
- in D.W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms,
- looked out at the damp pavements
- of Limehouse. But, still, the gas lamps
- rising through the mist and fog
- of life glowed in her eyes
- while she flirted with actors and
- directors slumming J town.
- Hosting big parties
- during Nisei Week was not the role
- she and other Chinese haunted studios for.
- But while the men became Japanese
- stereotypes in the 40's war flicks,
- she was working on a marriage
- with the man who got her away
- from the railroad tracks on Alameda
- only to fit her onto a tract
- of property his father owned.
- So when the old man decided to turn
- an abandoned movie theater into a restaurant
- and cast my father as cook, Mother
- found her audience in a reel that never
- stopped running, Family Business.
- on Cahuenga Blvd. in Hollywood,
