One night, I got off the L train after working until 11:30 p.m. As I walked under the railroad pass on my way back to the Michigan Hotel, I hoped that I wouldn’t get mugged. My friends in Knoxville told me robberies were common in Chicago. “If you are stopped and are going to be robbed,” they advised, “pretend you do not know any English. Take out your wallet and say, ‘Take money. No harm. Please leave.’”
Just as I walked under the railroad pass, three or four black guys appeared out of the darkness and walked toward me. They were laughing, and one of them said, “Hey man, whatchya got? Hey, you Mo Fo.”
Without hesitating, I took out my wallet and held it out to them. “Money. You take. Me no English. New, Chicago.”
One of the guys took my wallet and laughed, saying, “This guy, no English.” They continued making jokes, mimicking my speech, and saying other things I didn’t understand. Then they gave back the wallet and told me to go. Relieved they hadn’t taken my money or harmed me, I hurried to the hotel, where I tossed and turned the whole night. I could not stop thinking about what could have happened, and I did not want to find myself in that situation again.
The next day, I told Chopra about the incident. He agreed that we needed to find a new place to live. At the suggestion of an Indian student I’d met from The Illinois Institute of Technology, Chopra and I found a fraternity house that was more than half empty for the summer. The students living there let us stay for a dollar a night per person. Thirty dollars a month in Chicago with kitchen facilities and furnished rooms was a good deal. The students showed us to our sleeping quarters, a large room where everyone in the house slept on cots lined in rows on either side. They gave us bedding and towels, and we settled in right away.
One late night, two weeks into my job at Stouffer’s, the supervisor approached me as I cleaned the hallway and asked me to clean the area near the locker room. I steered the scrubber toward the locker room and began cleaning the floor. The supervisor followed me and said, “Perhaps you should clean this room too.” He pointed to a bedroom on the other side of the hallway. “Okay,” I said, pushing the scrubber into the room, wondering why he was following me.
“You have been working very hard. You must be tired,” he said. “Why don’t you just lie down on this bed?”
Why was he saying this? I wondered. In all my time working in the US, no one told me to lie down on the job. I felt strange, and I didn’t know what to do because he was my supervisor. Was he serious?
Seeing the questioning look on my face, he said, “I am your manager, and I can fire you.”
It seemed I had no choice but to lie down. To my surprise, he lay next to me and put his arm on my chest. Immediately, I realized this was not right. Pushing him away, I rolled off the bed and walked away as fast as I could.
“Kris, what is the matter?” he said, following me out of the room. “I was just telling you to rest a few minutes. I am your manager, and I can fire you!”
I continued walking and did not look back. I never went back to Stouffer’s to complain or do anything about what happened. Instead, I kept it to myself, not even sharing the story with Chopra, because I didn’t know what he or anyone else would make of it.
To replace the Stouffer’s job, I started working as a cook on the weekends at the Germania Club. Without any German cooking experience, I tried my best. The first day, I received a compliment from a customer, saying the lamb chops were delicious and done just right. But the second day, when the head chef asked me to get the Weiner Schnitzel from the walk-in refrigerator, I had no idea what it was. I couldn’t find it and asked him to show me. He explained, and then, when I asked him to help me cook the dish, it became apparent that I knew nothing about German cooking. He had no choice but to let me go.
Fortunately, Chopra and I found jobs at the MaJournier Brothers factory on Pulaski Avenue in order to make money during the day. The manager put us on a thirty-day probation period, after which they would decide to keep us or not. We learned to read product blueprints, and we assembled the parts, using dye and raw materials they provided us. The supervisors liked us because we were punctual, and after finishing up one job, we would always ask the foreman what to do next.
At the end of thirty days, we received a good review from the immediate supervisor and our coworkers. As official employees, we were required to join the union for a seventy-five dollar fee, even though we could work for only two more months before going back to Knoxville. At the monthly meeting, the union members celebrated our initiation with beer, and they cheered for the two new members at their factory. Seventy-five dollars was a lot of money, but the job paid around four dollars an hour, so in the end, the initial fee was worth the much larger amount on our paychecks.
While I was working tiring physical jobs, I remembered
