The glazed fruit added a startlingly light contrast to the meat. When we bit in, the meat was warm, moist, and tender. In an unusual move that had given this restaurant its write-up in the Times, the chicken was layered with a hearty handful of cut fruit: avocado, raspberries, blueberries, and a few slices of jalapeño. Underneath its sprinkling of white sesame seeds, the skin of the chicken pieces beckoned with its coy, crisp, perfectly golden color. The fried chicken, unveiled from its styrofoam lid, glistened with a honeyed texture. When I put the tray on the table, he said, “This chicken looks amazing.” “Grab some radish, too,” Dake reminded me as I pushed my chair back. “Half-and-half spicy sauce and soy garlic,” Mr. The rain made the strip mall look muted, pretty, the neon lights taking on a fairy-tale aura as they blurred through the pane. Kang’s chicken restaurant, we watched the rain drizzle over the billboards and blinking lights advertising the other stores in the strip mall: the Thai restaurant, the shaved-ice cafe, the boba-and-crepe shop, the Tofu House, and the aspirational artisanal grocery store with the twenty-six-dollar charcuterie plates. Aggressive Porsche 718s and equally aggressive Honda CR-Vs competed on right turns, raising miniature tsunamis over the sidewalks.
Water poured down from rooftops and pooled in inconvenient potholes. It was raining in LA, a slurry of wet in a city never designed for it. But it had always been true that if we were a little bit younger, a little bit fresher, then we’d be a little bit better. Perhaps there had never been a point when we really felt like we wanted to be older, only to have the things we thought being older entailed: freedom, money, privacy, love.
It was hard to articulate the point at which we switched from wanting to get older to feeling like we could stand to be a little bit younger. Youth.” an exclusive online excerpt from Cleo Qian’s new short-story collection, Let’s Go Let’s Go Let’s Go, available August 15 from Tin House.
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