Work Before You Fuck (Before You Fuck #2) by Margretta Milano

Chapter One
    I came from a traditional Chinese family who had hopes that I would become a doctor or a lawyer. I pretty much defied my parents when I decided to become an interior designer. Mind you, they weren’t doctors and lawyers themselves. They were restaurant owners who aspired to “white collar” jobs. Because they never reached those professional heights (their words, not mine), they pushed my brothers, Matt and Joe, and me to make something of ourselves – and certainly not get into the restaurant business.
    My parents own a small, but successful chain of Chinese restaurants in New York City. They’ve recently even opened a super trendy “bao” shop, one that only sells traditional Chinese buns. It’s a hip trend and they are making serious money with the new shop. My parents have learned a lot over the years about selling and learning about trends. I think they’ve gotten better over time as they learned what worked and what didn’t.
    When I was a kid, both of my parents worked in restaurants near to our apartment in Chinatown. My brothers and I didn’t see them very often because restaurant work is demanding and usually means working into the night. We were passed around from Chinese “uncles” and “aunties,” which qualified as day care. Once we got to school age, we would see our parents at breakfast time and then after school our grandparents would be there to take care of us until our parents got home around midnight.
    Time for even thinking about boys? No.
    Dating? Nonexistent.
    Sex? Prohibited.
    My grandparents were tough on us. When my middle brother resisted doing homework, they got out a bamboo rod and beat him. I learned from that example and buckled down, earning A’s on my homework straight through school. My brothers rose to the top of their classes as well. We knew we had to do well to make lives for ourselves. And we wanted to get out of our parents’ stifling homes to have freedom and be independent.
    I watched how proud my parents were when my eldest brother went to Harvard. Then my middle brother enrolled at University of Illinois – Urbana-Champaign for engineering. At first my parents weren’t happy because U of I wasn’t an Ivy League school, but it had a good reputation so my parents ended up being okay with that. Joe was the brother who wanted to get the farthest away from my parents so it worked out for him to move to the Midwest. Finally, when it was my turn to go to college, I chose Cornell in upstate New York and I was going to major in biology. My parents were excited because it was an Ivy League school. All was well.
    But when I got there, things changed. I went vegetarian – I mean, it was hippy Ithaca after all. My studies in biology were going great – I was getting straight A’s, as usual. But on a whim I went to an interior design course and I loved it. Cornell has a high-ranking hospitality program and I was ready to jump right in.
    I told my parents over the phone that I was switching majors. They rearranged their schedules to drive up the following weekend – that was no easy feat for people who own restaurants. I mean, restaurants get the majority of their sales over the weekend. But that weekend, they got workers to cover and they drove from Manhattan all the way to Ithaca to “talk some sense” into me.
    I called Joe to talk about wanting to switch to interior design because I knew that of all people, he would be the most supportive of any perceived defiance.
    “Go for it, Kai,” he told me, “You’ve always been the golden child – I can’t wait to see how this plays out!”
    I was taken aback by his comments because as the only and the youngest girl, I had felt unimportant sometimes. My parents often called us by our birth order: Number 1, Number 2, and Number 3. But when I really thought about it, I knew that I had been given special privileges over the years.
    It started from birth when my parents gave me a different name than my brothers.