While I was probably listening to “We Three Kings of Orient Are” on my Christmas cassette or whatever pop hit 104.1 FM was playing (the morning DJ, Roula of “The Roula & Ryan Show,” had gone to my high school so I felt loyal), the music playing out of cars in the Timmy Chan’s parking lot, so loud the neighborhood around them shook, was primarily chopped and screwed. But as swiftly as she had pointed, Timmy Chan’s flew past my window and we continued, speeding steadily through the city.
In these stories, she was a little girl pulling pranks with her brother or a college student quickly rolling egg rolls between classes, surrounded by chefs’ knives flying through bushes of scallions. In my child-mind, Timmy Chan’s was where my mother had spent her own childhood, and it was the stuff of legends. One time, she quickly pointed out the window as she drove past a building with a yellow and red awning and said, “That’s a Timmy Chan’s, but not ours.”ĭriving by, it looked smaller than I had imagined. She was always kind enough to push the tape into the deck for me, even on scorching summer days as I sat in the backseat in a sticky sweat, shrinking away from the hot, metal seat belt buckle. I was almost always listening to the sweet voices of children from the cancer center sharing Christmas wishes ringing out in the wet, Houston heat as my mother sped, stopped, pat-patted to stop and start along the highways of Houston. I listened to those Christmas carols all year, every year, from age 5 to too long. The first time I ever saw a Timmy Chan’s was riding in a car - a 1990 Toyota Camry with my beloved MD Anderson Cancer Center Christmas tape in the cassette deck. At the time, there were more grassy fields than houses, and cattle would graze by the railroad off the highway going into Houston. I grew up in Sugar Land, on the outskirts of the city. The food is not the highest quality but it is the experience of going and getting mountains of rice and chicken at rock bottom prices. They can be found throughout the great land of Houston and they have become an integral part of the city.
The restaurants are a good place to go when you are broke and don't have enough dough. Timmy Chans is a chain of restaurant in Houston, tha land of the playas and pimps. All he had to do was a low-key Google search and was shocked to find an Urban Dictionary entry: That maybe it had been in a music video? My husband’s interest was piqued. But this time, she elaborated, telling us that she’d heard a “rap person” talk about my grandparents’ restaurant in one of their songs. And after my grandparents had sold their restaurants in the 1980s, the restaurant had become a well-known quick service chain that served fried chicken and rice.Īs a child, I’d heard all this before. On one car ride, my mother casually mentioned that she had managed a couple restaurants with my grandparents.
On my now-husband’s first visit to Houston, my parents took him to see all the “sights.” Sights for us anyway: Chinatown, our favorite dumpling spot, the strip mall where I took ballet lessons.
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