Growing up in the Midwest I never had much exposure to Chinese food, authentic or otherwise. Their may have been a Chinese restaurant in Cedar Rapids but I don’t remember us ever going. In contrast I do remember at least a half dozens different trips to Godfather’s Pizza which involved me gagging on cheese. While my mother would attempt the occasional Chinese dish, she simply didn’t have access to very many quality ingredients, making those meals some of my least anticipated so even once we moved to Wisconsin I rarely, if ever, attempted to seek out any Asian cousine. But once I headed up to the University of Minnesota my world would drastically change.

Take Out is a surprisingly simple film, yet powerfully compelling. It opens with two thugs barging into an overcrowded apartment, searching for Ming Ding (Charles Jang), an illegal immigrant who borrowed money from a loan shark to finance his journey to the United States. But Ming has fallen behind on his payments and the loan shark has sent a very clear message, “I need $800 tonight or your debt doubles!” And just in case that isn’t clear enough the thugs leave a calling card courtesy of a hammer to his back.

Ming quickly sets out to call in the few financial favors he has, and even after that he is still $200 short, with only a single days works as a delivery boy for a local Chinese restaurant as his only chance at scratching out enough in tips. Luckily for Ming it has started to rain, leaving him with a few extra delivery chances while his colleague has promised to bow out for the day, giving Ming a legitimate chance to break even, provided that he works his ass off.

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The girlfriend and I had brunch at Gigi’s Cafe the other day and I had what one might describe as an epiphany. Gigi’s is a quaint little establishment that caters predominantly to those who are on the wrong side of thirty plus the occasional migrant hipster. Not exactly an eclectic clientèle but one that nonetheless manages to habitually visit on an almost daily basis.

On this morning we lucked out in that we somehow managed to avoid both the breakfast and brunch rushes allowing us to walk straight up to the counter and immediately order. Our server was a surprisingly tall, cute Asian woman whose nationality was difficult to discern. This afforded my girlfriend of launching into her thesis on how impossibly cute Asian children are. But while the girls are forever in bloom the boys ripen rather early and rarely retain their cuteness after puberty.

Now she repeats this lecture nearly every time we encounter a cute Asian child, clearly alluding to the fact that she would love to adopt one. But I also know she is incapable of controlling her urges, and what would start out as her wanting to help a poor abandoned orphan would quickly morph her into the Angelina Jolie of East Asia, picking out one from every country to add to her collection. This in turn would usher in the day that I come home from work to find her children hermetically sealed so that she might eternally preserve their cuteness … what a legal nightmare that will be.

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