I Brought My Immigrant Mother to Smokes and She Exploded

We start in the line outside Smokes. My mother is shivering, not because it’s cold, but because she’s never stood in a line for a bar before. She doesn’t like lines very much; it reminds her of communism, except for that one time she stood in line for a green card in Florida. That reminded her of capitalism. 

And I can think of no better way to keep my anti-communist immigrant mother happy than by bringing her to Smokes, a beacon of capitalism at the school of capitalism. On our way here, I tell my mother where we are going. 

“The bar? Like, a law school exam?” she says.

We stand in line and my mother asks, “Why are so many people out so late on a Friday night? Aren’t they worried about the dangerous Philadelphians who shoot anyone they see past 10 p.m.?”

I am reminded to delete Facebook off of her phone as we enter the institution of Smokey Joes. 

She is amazed by the number of white people inside. She has never seen so many drunk white people except for when she did graduate school at the University of Delaware, but even then I believe that she was too focused on gaining citizenship to have noticed them. 

My mother doesn’t drink much. Instead, she prefers to buy property, amassing generational wealth as a landlord. I offer her a green tea shot, and she accepts, not realizing that it is not a shot of green tea from her motherland but rather a shot of alcohol. 

Upon drinking the green tea shot, she is taken into a facet of American culture that she has not once had the opportunity to experience in her 30 years of living here. Here, at Smokes, she is introduced to what could have been had she grown up here, or perhaps if she had hailed from a rich family in China who sent her to Beijing International School and would have been happy to fund her bachelor’s degree in Francophone Studies. 

This is too much for her to handle, and she henceforth explodes.