Deng Wei
Bartender, Cook

Deng Wei is the bartender and cook at Patty's, an inn built in a large pre-War train station. Patty's is notable for being one of the few areas not controlled by raiders in the Sprawl, a vast expanse of ruins about two days southeast of San Francisco and Shi-town. Patty's status as the economic and social center of the area is cemented by the small maze of shacks and gardens built in the large open area in front of the main building, as well as the guard posts at the two corners of the semi-circle courtyard directly outside the main entrance.

"We maintain the guard posts," says Deng. "They're only manned at night, though we're thinking of making it round the clock. We've been having trouble recently with people trying to shoot out our windows."

It's an impressive building. We're not really sure how it survived the War, actually, given the kind of condition the buildings just a little further east are in. But it's worked well for us, with a lot of big spaces to set up rooms and to put brewing equipment in. And then the main foyer—well, you went through it, you know how big it is, with the big paintings set into the wall and the ceiling design. It's a nice space to set up for having people hang around in. We lucked out in finding this place, really.

The little settlement area out front is an interesting story. My parents wanted to clear out this entire south wing over here to set up more of my mother's brewery equipment, since that was when we'd just started getting into more large-scale production with it. But the wing was where most of our longer term residents were staying, either the people who rented a room from us every week or two or the people who were out and out living here. So to get the wing back, my parents told them, hey, we'll help you set up little shacks and gardens outside, and then you'll pay us a little rent for the land, and then after you pay us off for supplies and labor and other costs, you'll own it outright.

Most of them jumped at it, and those were the first few folks that we had out there. Then other people got interested in setting up their own places, and that's how that sort of little village started up. They've got all sorts of things growing, too—tatos, mutfruit, the usual stuff, but also some grapes and apples. Some of the people toward the outskirts own a brahmin or two, so they make fertilizer for the rest of them. We work with the growers to get seeds and fruit from them, which we then use in our fields, which ends up getting brewed into new drinks. So it's a real back and forth we have with them. My father and I mostly negotiate with the folks out front, and then my mother takes everything and tinkers around with it to make it into the drinks we serve.

"My mother and father are from Shi-town, originally. My mother was a researcher who worked on making new kinds of fuel and finding different ways to power things, and my father was one of the farmers that worked with the agricultural research division. They were both kind of weird, is what they told me—they didn't fit in very well. That was how they met, actually, was they both noticed that the other hung around outside the different groups, so they started spending time together and one thing lead to another….

"My mother's always been the kind of person who's very interested in travelling around, exploring, finding new things and learning about them, and I suppose that wasn't a big thing to do in Shi-town. Or, it was, but not so much interacting with other folks. So my mother got married to my father and not too long afterward ended up leaving after some kind of big…well, I don't know if it was a fight. But they told me that leaving isn't looked on very well, especially if you're a researcher, so for my mom to do that was a big deal. But she was getting restless, so she convinced my father that they'd be better off striking out on their own. This was around '52, a few years before I was born. So she and my father managed to get out of Shi-town and headed south, following the bells [built alongside a route locals call the Real, one of the main roads into San Francisco] until they made it to the Sprawl, where they settled down. And here we are, over twenty years later."

It was my father's idea to start up Patty's. Once they got here, it was rough. The Sprawl isn't a nice place to live by a long shot. The raiders were a lot worse when they first arrived, if you can believe that. There were a lot more of them, and they were better armed and a lot meaner. My parents were out on the very outskirts for a while, which is where they had me, and they survived through scavving and selling off what they could. So it was pretty tight for a long time for us…but then things started clearing out around here—a lot of the bigger gangs started moving north up along 880 or northeast back along the Real, and they were passing by where we lived pretty often, so my parents decided to head further into the city.

Eventually they found this place, and after staying here for a while, my father said he wanted to turn it into something permanent, a home for the three of us. A bunch of raiders had been in here for years before we came, so it was just trashed with a lot of nasty stuff. He and my mother worked to clear it out, and afterward they both thought it would be a good idea to set up some rooms to rent out. Word had started going around that the Sprawl was getting to be safer, so those first few years most of the people that stayed here were scavvers picking over the buildings. A lot of business, then. I was about…10 at that point, maybe, so I'd say that was around '65.

The name comes from a sign that they found in an old building just a little ways outside the houses out front. [Deng points up at a rusted metal sign hanging above the bar: "Patty's Inn - Since 1933."] They liked the design of the sign and the ring of name, I guess, so it's stuck with us.

We opened more rooms and set up a small general store and kitchen for the travelers. But then my mother found some small-scale brewing equipment out in an old restaurant while she was scavenging north of here. She and my father hauled it back here, fixed it up, and then she jumped into playing around with it, seeing what kind of alcohol she could come up with, and that was how we decided to open up a full bar. Before that we'd sell, you know, some homebrew beer or whatever hard liquor we could salvage, but with the equipment my mother found we could make larger batches, and we could make it higher quality than we'd been able to do.

We started selling so much booze that the general store aspect pretty much just fell off to the side, especially since we had people starting to come out specifically because they'd heard of what we were brewing up and how good it was. There aren't a lot of places this far west that make their liquor fresh, you know? It was mostly beer, at first, since we'd already been growing wheat and so it was easiest to just work with that, but we moved up to vodka once we got our hands on enough tato seeds and land and water to make that viable. Whiskey, too, once the corn started coming in.

My mother loves it, loves tinkering around with recipes to get different strengths and flavors. She was getting kind of stir-crazy after a year or two of just running the inn with my father, so once she got her hands on something she could experiment with she just ran with it. Thank god, because I think we might be out of business at this point if it weren't for what she comes up with. Recently, she's been playing around with something involving mutfruit, and she's working with two of the guys that live out front to track down enough grapes to make some "real wine," as she calls it. I started off helping my father serve drinks, then once I got a little older and we expanded our fields out to what they are now, and added in the animals, my father took over the outside production and I was in charge of the bar. Which is how it is now.

Running the bar works fine by me. Cooking's a real treat. My mother managed to fix up the grill-slash-stove back here to run off of coals instead of piped gas, and we've held on to some different pots and pans and other utensils that we've found in our scav runs. With the brahmin we have and some occasional meat that traders bring through, plus what we grow and the couple of chicken nests we have, I can make some really interesting stuff, compared to what I think most people can put together themselves. How many places have you been to that have a menu anymore?

Sometimes my father and I swap places, mostly so I can get experience working the fields and with the animals, since it's going to fall on me someday. Our fields are out to the right of the station, the area that's pretty well fenced off—used to be a parking lot, so we had to tear up the concrete that was left—and then we have the pens and the coops out to the left, in another parking lot we converted. We're thinking of expanding it further, teaming up with the folks out in the village that have brahmin and making it something where they can roam around and graze a little more than they can right now. But we'd have a lot of work cut out for us with all the clearing that would require, so…we'll see.

The best part of the job, I think, is getting to talk to people like I do—the regulars, the ones I see every night, as well as the people that pass through. I'm very good friends with a lot of the original people that built homes out front, since I've known them pretty much my entire life, and since I've been working I've gotten to know the others that set up here later on. Some of them even had kids here way back who are some of my best friends now, since we kinda grew up together. That's pretty amazing, I think.

We've actually had some of the people in the local gangs come through because they heard we had the best brew for a hundred miles. They're…rowdy, and rude sometimes, but we've had talks with them and told them we wouldn't serve them if they kept making messes. That, plus a bunch of locals with their guns out, got them to calm down, and now they're pretty much regulars, more or less. I like telling people about that; they never believe me, so it's always interesting seeing their faces as they hear about it. I mean, come on, when have you heard of raiders that just come in, pay for their drinks, spend some time around, then leave peacefully?

I hear a lot from folks that pass through about how rough things are out there—even NCR folks who grew up in the Hub, Boneyard, Dayglow, the little towns in between, had a lot of rough times. A lot of things up in the air, like food and shelter, or they were always dealing with raiders or bandits or other people trying to take what they had. People that left and never came back, or that died in fights right in town. Maybe the picture I'm getting is rougher than it actually is, but I'd bet it isn't that far off. So, you know….

I've thought about going out and seeing the world more, but I don't know. People have asked me if I'm bored of being here, since Patty's has been around pretty much my entire life. I am, but I'm not. At the end of the day, it's good work, and I'm proud of what we serve. It's a hell of a lot of energy to keep everything running, sure, but I'm proud of it, and for right now I'm happy with what I'm doing. So I'm not seriously thinking of wandering off any time soon, no.

And anyway, we've had some NCR people out here talking to us about the railroad, given that we have the rail lines that run through our building. They're looking to come out into this area, mostly to try and get closer to the Shi, I think. They want to set up the railroads again between here and some larger settlements out east. Vault 15, NCR, maybe all the way out to that big city past the mountains. That'd be good for business—very good. We'd be a major travel hub, traders and everyone would have to come through here. So we're hopeful about it, overall. Things are tough out here but we're getting by just fine, and I'm happy with that. Thrilled, even. That's not something you hear about very often, things working out for people. Just hope it keeps going.