2
Three qualities of China made it a place where
there grew a great cuisine. First, its land has everything under
heaven: mountains, deserts, plains, and fertile crescents; great
oceans, mighty rivers. Second, the mass of Chinese are numerous but
poor. They have always had to extract every possible bit of
goodness and nutrition from every scrap of land and fuel,
economizing everywhere except with human labor and ingenuity, of
which there is a surfeit. Third, there is China’s elite. From this
world of discriminating taste the gourmet was born. Food became not
only a complex tool for ritual and the attainment of prestige, but
an art form, pursued by men of passion.
— LIANG WEI , The Last Chinese Chef
Sam Liang turned the phone off and replaced
it in his pocket before he turned to face his First and Second
Uncles, Jiang Wanli and Tan Jingfu, who stood glaring at him. They
were older by thirty-five years, friends of his father and, with
Xie Er in Hangzhou, the nearest thing he had in China to clan
relatives. They’d also been his guides in the kitchen and his ties
to the past. From every conceivable angle, they had unlimited
rights to harangue him.
“Was that a female person?” demanded Jiang in the
Chinese they always spoke.
Sam sighed. “Yes.”
“I trust you invited her to meet you?”
“No, First Uncle.”
“The times I’ve told you to try harder are more
than a few! Have we not talked of this? Yet whenever an opportunity
crosses your path with a female person, you show your white
feather!”
“Uncle. That was a business call. Anything else
would have been inappropriate.”
“Huh!” Tan raised a finger. “My English is not so
poor! She was from the American magazine. A writer. Probably a food
specialist!”
“Exactly right,” said Sam. “And the restaurant is
off for now. There is no story.”
“You are not trying very hard,” said Jiang. “You
should do an article with her. It would bring you attention.”
Tan leapt in. “You could have at least suggested
the two of you drink tea! You could have discussed the matter as a
civilized person.”
Sam understood. A civilized person meant a Chinese
person. After the first few years of instructing him in the kitchen
— the two of them barking directions, shouting at his mistakes,
harrumphing their approval when he cooked well — the two old men
had turned to teaching him etiquette. They showed him the web of
manners and considerations that held together the Chinese world.
Unfortunately, he had been raised in America; he was possessed of
willful foreign ways. And he was only half Chinese. Luck was with
him that the other half was Jewish, as Jews were admired for their
intelligence, but still, here in China, it was bad to be only part
Chinese. This was always the first thought of Sam’s
detractors.
Those critics called him an outsider even though he
was old-school. They didn’t seem to care that he was one of the few
still cooking in the traditional way, that all the other top cooks
in China were showcasing some modern edge. But he had determined to
do what his grandfather had written and his uncles had taught him.
He knew cooking well was the best revenge.
“I wish you had invited the female person to meet
you,” Tan said.
“Yes, Uncle.” Sam did not argue. In their minds,
being single at his age was almost an affront to nature. It was
something they felt a duty to correct. He had long ago understood
that the best way to love them was to let them interfere. Let them
scold him and insist upon meetings with the female relations of
their acquaintances. These meetings were at best a waste of time
and at worst painful — and not only for him. What he’d quickly
realized was that the women didn’t want the introduction any more
than he did. They too were there only to appease elder
relatives.
Certainly there were beautiful, intelligent Chinese
women to be met in the internationalized top layer of Beijing
society, but so far Sam had not found the connection he wanted.
Part of it was them. For Chinese women who liked foreigners, he was
not foreign enough. For those seeking a man who was Chinese, he was
too foreign. His status placed him somewhere below all of the above
on the instant-desirability scale.
It had not been like that at home in Ohio. There,
his dark, high-cheeked face had seemed exotic to women, especially
corn-fed girls with athletic strides and sweet smiles. The women
here were lovely too, but different, sinuous, cerebral,
fine-skinned. They were cultured. He found them fascinating. It was
never hard to begin affairs with them. What was hard was to
connect.
That, he sensed, was his fault; he wanted a
connection that was complete. Here, he could never get over feeling
that he was using only half of himself, the Chinese half.
Everything from before, from America, now hid unseen. And he wanted
to be seen. At home in the West he’d had a similar feeling, only it
was the Chinese part of him that lay dormant. He’d had the idea
that coming here would change things. No. He was still half.
“You could have talked to the American about the
book,” Tan said.
Sam shook his head. “Respectfully, Second Uncle, I
don’t see them doing an article about a book that came out in 1925
— oh, and in Chinese.”
“You are translating it.”
“It’s not done.”
“You’re no further?” said Jiang.
“I ought to be more hardworking,” Sam said, which
was the evasive and Chinese thing to say. Actually it was his
father who held up the translation. Now retired from the post
office, Liang Yeh spent most of his time in a dark room with books
and the things he remembered. Sam couldn’t get him to do his part,
which was rendering his own father’s formal, premodern Mandarin
into a rough English-and-Chinese mix Sam could understand.
He had not told Tan and Jiang this, preferring to
let them admire the old man. To them, Liang Yeh had triumphed. He
had made his way to America. He had established a family. They
didn’t know that Sam had been largely raised by his mother, the
no-nonsense and tireless Judy Liang, née Blumenfeld, while his
father was mentally remote. Exile was in the heart, and Liang Yeh
carried it with him everywhere. He seemed determined to never let
it go. In time exile became his most important aspect, his shadow,
closer to him in a way even than his family.
Therefore, when complaints were raised about the
slow translation, Sam took the blame. It eased a needy and
chronically sad part of him to hear his father praised, and he did
whatever he could to leave his uncles’ good opinion intact.
“You will finish it when you can,” said Second
Uncle, for though they were hard on him they always forgave him.
Tan was walking out of the kitchen now, where he had been fussing
with the tea things.
“Uncle, you shouldn’t,” Sam said. “I’ll make
tea.”
“No!” Jiang raised a hand. “You sit. We have a
special matter.”
“You want to introduce me to another of your
relatives,” said Sam.
“Very good!” said Jiang. “My grandniece is coming
from Jilin. But that is next month. Younger Born! You tell
him.”
“Very well,” Tan said. He set the tray down with
ceremony. His grandfather had been the great chef Tan
Zhuanqing, who had been one of the top cooks in the palace, and
whose apprentice had been the young Liang Wei — Sam’s grandfather.
Great was the Tan name even now. Tan leaned over his cup and
paddled the steam toward him with swollen hands. “Very secret!” he
said importantly. “Only a few know! The Chinese Committee for the
2008 Games is going to run its own Games here, an Olympics of
culture. They are going to have competitions in Beijing and Kunqu
opera, in dance, which is to include martial arts, and in cuisine!
Competitions on TV! All China will watch!”
“You see?” said Jiang. “The Liang name will fly to
the four directions!”
“You’re getting ahead, Uncle.”
“You are on the audition list!” Tan cried. “We can
confirm it!”
Sam felt a twist in his stomach. A great
opportunity, but the timing was terrible. His restaurant wasn’t
even opening. “Why me?”
“Fool!” Tan raised a hand as if to cuff him. “If
we’ve told you one time it’s a hundred! You are in a direct line
from Tan Zhuanqing. Your grandfather was trained by him. People eat
your dishes and they talk about them all across the city. You have
not even opened a restaurant yet, and you are known.”
Sam swallowed. “How many will audition?”
“Ten, for two spots. Two spots for northern cooks
on the national team. The rest of the team will be Cantonese,
Sichuan, Hunanese, and Shanghainese.”
“What’s the audition?” He felt as if he were
clinging to a rope high above the rapids.
“Each candidate will prepare a banquet for the
committee. Nephew! You must make a celestial meal for them!”
“Sure,” said Sam. With a lurch he saw the
complexity of it. This was not the four or five dishes chefs
prepared on those TV contests — this was a banquet. It was the
complete symphony, the holy grail of Chinese food art. It required
not only great dishes but also concept, shape, subtlety, and
narrative force. “Who are the others?”
“Wang Zijian,” said Tan. “Pan Jun. Also Lu
Fudong.”
“Right,” said Sam. He knew them. Good chefs.
“Zhan Ming,” said Jiang.
“Yes,” said Sam. “He’s good too.”
“And Yao Weiguo,” said Tan.
“Ah.” Here was his real rival. Yao was
exceptionally good. And he did the very thing Sam did not: he came
up with something new each time. He improvised. Yao’s way of
working was like that of a European or an American. He riffed,
cooking in the style of jazz, while Sam remained the old-fashioned
formalist. “I’m worried,” he said. “Yao can cook.”
“So can you,” said Jiang, touching his arm. “It
does not have to be complicated. The perfect meal is balanced, not
ornate. Remember the words of Yuan Mei. ‘Don’t eat with your eyes.
Don’t cover the table with dishes, or multiply the courses too
much. Bean curd is actually better than bird’s nest.’”
“Those are nice, naturalistic sentiments, Uncle,
but don’t you think the people on this panel are going to eat with
their eyes?”
“Yes! You are right! And you must impress them. But
that is secondary. The true perfection of food is a surprisingly
modest thing. It is what is right. There you will find what you
seek.”
Sam sighed. “Zhen bang.” Great.
The next morning Maggie awoke to a tugging fear
about whether the clipping she had brought was still in her
computer case. She padded out of bed and to the small living room,
where she unzipped the case’s side pocket. There it was. A square
of newspaper, with a picture of her husband, knocked down, probably
dead already, at the scene of the accident. It had been snapped
moments after a car driven by an elderly man plowed up onto a
sidewalk in San Francisco and killed Matt and two others. There he
was. People around him, bending over him. A woman kneeling.
She couldn’t bear to look at it. She just had to
make sure that she still had it. She did, so she zipped it away and
turned to the day, just beginning. The morning outside was
gray-shrouded. The buildings were spires of lead.
She took a taxi to the New World Building, where
she rode to the seventeenth floor.
Then she pushed open the door to Calder Hayes and
felt herself stepping back into America. Magazines on the reception
room table — it looked like an office at home. It had been the same
way when she’d come here before with Matt.
“May I help you?” said the receptionist, young,
Chinese, smart-looking.
“I’m Maggie McElroy,” she said, and when this drew
a blank, she added, “Mrs. Mason.”
“Oh! Hello. Welcome you.”
“Thank you. Is Carey here?”
“Mr. James is in Bangkok today. Please wait a
minute.” She pressed a number code into her handset and spoke in a
brief, rapid flow of Chinese. She looked up to see Maggie still in
front of her and smiled brightly, pointing to the chairs.
“Please.”
Maggie sat, pacing her breathing, gathering calm.
Soon a small, sturdy woman came pumping out, pushing black glasses
up her nose. “Pleased to meet you,” she said. “I am Miss Chu.” Her
accent was clipped, precise, faintly British.
“Maggie McElroy. The same. Your English is
perfect.”
“So-so,” the woman qualified. “I’m very sorry about
your husband.” With a frank, sympathetic squeeze she took Maggie’s
arm to walk her back down the hall.
In the conference room, Miss Chu handed her a file
folder that opened to reveal the claim. Maggie scanned the lines of
English and Chinese, which repeated the information Carey had given
her. “I think,” Maggie said, “that first we should go see the
mother. Immediately. I need her permission to take a sample from
the child.”
“You see, though,” said Miss Chu, “right now we do
not know where the mother is.”
Maggie felt her eyebrows squeeze together. “Isn’t
her address in here?” She pointed to the file.
“That is the grandparents. They are the ones who
filed the claim. The child lives with them.”
“Not the mother?”
“No.”
Maggie sat back. “And the mother . . .”
“It is just that right now we do not know where she
is,” said Miss Chu.
“Okay.” Back up, Maggie thought. “The main thing is
the child, the permission, the sample.” Though I want to see
this woman. I need to see this woman. “So if the grandparents
are the guardians, let’s go to them.”
“But this address is not in Beijing. It is in a
town called Shaoxing. It’s in the south.”
Maggie closed her eyes. “Then let’s go
there.”
“It’s far.”
“How far?”
“Near Shanghai. The problem is tickets,” said Miss
Chu. Her British accent was softened by Mandarin consonants. “One
of our biggest holidays is coming, National Day. Everyone will be
off work. Everything was sold out long ago.”
“Like Christmas?” said Maggie.
“Yes,” Miss Chu said. “Like that.”
“What about a train?”
“Same problem.”
“Can we drive?”
“Possible. We can hire a car. But it will take too
many days.”
“So what do you suggest?”
“I think it is faster to wait. Let me try to get
the tickets.” Miss Chu saw that the American had large, thickly
lashed eyes and would have been pretty if not for the freckles
spattered across her nose and cheekbones, and the excessive, almost
masculine point of her chin. She did have unusual hair, though,
even for a laowai, a dark mass of coiling curls that bounced
around her face and softened her angles. Hair and eyes like these
were assets, but this foreigner seemed not to care. She wore plain
clothes, no jewelry, little makeup. Her hands were knotty. She
looked anxious, too. She had reason, thought Miss Chu. “Try to wait
a bit,” she said. “I have a lunch later today that might
help.”
Lunch? Maggie thought. “All right. I’ll wait.” She
didn’t want to wait, she wanted to move. Her Table
assignment had already bombed. She couldn’t let the DNA test go
down the drain too.
“Let us talk after the lunch. Oh — call me Zinnia.
That’s my English name.”
“Zinnia,” Maggie repeated. “And your real name
is?”
“Chu Zuomin.”
“That’s nice,” said Maggie, “but I’d mangle it.
Okay. Zinnia.” She rose. “Here.” She passed across her business
card with her cell number circled. “That phone’s on all the time.
I’ll be waiting.” She paused on a breath. “By the way, besides
Carey, is there anyone else still here, now, who knew my
husband?”
“I think no,” said Miss Chu. “Only Carey. He will
be back late tomorrow.”
“Tell him I came in,” said Maggie.
On the street she saw herself in a glass window,
face shadowed, her steps moving through the Chinese crowd. She
heard a beeping from her phone. She took it out. When she got back
to the U.S. she would turn it off for a week at least. Zinnia,
already? No, a text message from Table. She opened it.
How’s everything going? Thinking of you, sending
hugs. Sarah.
Guilt tightened around Maggie’s neck. She should
answer. She should tell Sarah that the Sam Liang story was off,
that his restaurant was not opening and he had canceled. She would
send an e-mail or a text message. She stared at her phone screen.
She really shouldn’t wait any longer.
First, though, she had to eat. It had been a long
time since she left L.A., time in which she’d eaten very little
besides the candy corn.
She had brought the apartment’s guidebook. In it
she scanned her sector of city restaurants until she found a
courtyard house, close by, that served nineteen kinds of dumplings.
This sounded good to her, and healthy. She needed to eat. She waved
her hand for a taxi.
At the restaurant she was given a table in a
lantern-strung court and a menu in English, with pictures. Many of
the small creations looked like the Chinese dumplings she’d had at
home, though with exotic fillings. Others were fantastical,
sculpted creations made to look like miniature durian fruits and
white-tipped peonies and plump, fantailed fish with red dots for
eyes. Each was a marvel. But she was too hungry for the exotic ones
and so she chose a plain dumpling, something substantial, filled
with eggplant, cilantro, and dill.
The shape was familiar, yet the dumpling sounded
different from anything she’d ever had before, and it sounded
good. The truth was, she had never really liked Chinese
food. Of course, she’d had Chinese food only in America, which was
clearly part of the story. She’d always heard people say it was
different in China. Yet even three years before, when she had
visited with Matt, they had eaten at more Italian and Thai places
than Chinese.
The trouble with Chinese food in America, to her,
was that it seemed all the same. Even when a restaurant had a
hundred and fifty items on the menu, she could order them all and
still get only the same few flavors over and over again. There was
the tangy brown sauce, the salted black bean; the
ginger-garlic-green onion, the syrupy lemon. Then there was the
pale opal sauce that was usually called lobster whether or not
lobster had ever been anywhere near it.
The menu in her hands held a square of text, framed
by an ornate border in the style of scroll-carved wood. At the top
it said A BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO CHINESE FOOD. For tourists, she
thought, and started to read.
No matter which way you look at history, the
Chinese people have been more preoccupied with food than any other
group in the world. Compare our ancient texts to the classical
works of the West: ours are the ones dwelling endlessly on the
utensils and methods and rituals of food, especially the rituals.
Food was always surrounded by coded behaviors that themselves
carried great meaning. Consider, too, the economics of dining. Take
any dynasty; the Chinese were spending more of what they had on
food than any of their contemporaries around the world. China has
always revered good cooks, and paid them well. Even the most
archaic descriptions of early towns tell of restaurants and wine
houses jammed along the earthen streets or riverfronts, doors open
to the smells of food and sounds of laughter, banners flapping to
announce the delights within. Wu Ching-Tzu, in his
eighteenth-century novel The Scholars, described these
places as “hung with fat mutton, while the plates on the counters
were heaped with steaming trotters, sea slugs, duck preserved in
wine, and freshwater fish. Meat dumplings boiled in the cauldrons
and enormous rolls of bread filled the steamers.” Still today, few
things to us are more important.
It was signed by a Professor Jiang Wanli, Beijing
University. What he was describing certainly didn’t sound like the
food she knew from home. Moreover, the air around her was
undeniably bright with good smells and the sounds of chattering
pleasure. Each table was filled. Waiters strode past, steamer
baskets held high. Bubbles of laughter floated up. Slowly she took
in the shrubs, the tasseled lanterns, the cranked-open latticework
windows that revealed other dining rooms filled, like this
courtyard, with loud, happy, mostly young Chinese.
Could the food in China be truly exceptional? It
was possible, she thought now. Well then, she would eat; she would
keep an open mind. Of course, writing the article about the chef
would have been the perfect way to find out more. Again she felt
the stab of regret that he had canceled, so sharply this time that
her hand crept into her pocket and lingered on her cell phone.
Should she really let it go? No. She should call him again. One
more time.
She scrolled through the recently called numbers to
his, took a breath, and hit SEND.
It rang, and she heard fumbling. “Wei,” he
said when he got the phone to his mouth.
“Mr. Liang? It’s Maggie McElroy again.”
“Hi.” Pause. He was surprised. “How are you?” he
said.
“Fine. Thanks.”
She could hear a scramble of voices behind him. He
half covered the phone, hissing, and then came back. “Sorry. My
uncles are here.”
“I’m interrupting.”
“No. They want me to talk to you.”
“Why?”
“They’ve figured out you’re a female person.”
“Ah.” Funny, she thought. She had somehow forgotten
how to even look at it in that way. “Actually I’m calling one last
time about the article. I don’t want to overstep, but — I had to
ask you again, since I’m here. Won’t you give it some
thought?”
“Look — ”
“I don’t have to write about the restaurant. There
are so many things. The book. Aren’t you doing a book?”
“Translating, with my father. We’re doing it
together. It’s a book my grandfather wrote.”
“The Last Chinese Chef,” she supplied.
“You know,” he said.
Naturally. You’re my assignment. “We could
write about that.”
“I’m sorry, but it’s the wrong time. I should do
that when the book comes out.”
“True,” she admitted.
“Also,” he said, “I’m swamped.”
She was getting the signals, but she never heard
No. Not the first time, anyway. “Swamped by what?”
“By an audition to get on the Chinese national
cooking team. The 2008 Games in Beijing are going to have their own
Olympic competition of culture — things like opera, martial arts.
It’s an adjunct to the opening ceremonies. Food is one of the
categories.”
“An audition for the national team?” She digested
this. “What do you have to do?”
“Cook a banquet for the committee. There are ten
chefs competing for the two northern-style spots on the team. The
rest of the team has six spots — two for southern style like
Cantonese; two for western, which includes Hunan and Sichuan; and
the eastern school, which is Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang,
basically the Yangtze delta.”
“So ten of you are competing for two northern
spots.”
“Right. Each night for the next ten nights, one of
us puts on a banquet for the committee. They’ll choose two. Seems I
drew the last slot — mine is a week from Saturday. The tenth
night.”
“The last one. The best. So two win out of ten.
What sets you apart from the others?”
“I’m the only one rooted in imperial — it’s very
rarefied. The emperors had dishes brought in from all provinces, so
in some ways I have more flexibility, but also a more rigid
artistic standard.”
“And you have ten days to prepare.”
“Yes. Well, nine. The first banquet is
tonight.”
“But as a story for the magazine, this is
wonderful! Forget the restaurant. Really, Mr. Liang. This
would be great.”
“Sam.”
“Sam. I could follow you through the process. I
would not get in your way. You could tell me things — just a
little, just what’s comfortable. I’d do a good piece. Contests are
one of my specialties.” Why was she having to work so hard to sell
this? Most chefs paid PR companies to get them features in places
like Table.
But he said, “I don’t know. I might not even have a
chance. I’m kind of an outsider — the only one doing true
traditional, on top of everything else.”
“Whether you win or not, it’s a great story. I can
almost guarantee you’d be happy with it,” she said. In fact, with
just this one glimpse she could see it take shape. Beijing was a
gleaming new city, all that steel and glass forming only a partial
façade over its celebrated past. The old and the new were locked in
a dance. The winner would be the last one standing. Would it be the
old or the new? Some jazzy avant-garde local or this guy, who came
back to take up where his grandfather had left off? Whatever
happened, it was alive. She hadn’t had this kind of feeling about
an article in a while. Please, she begged him
silently.
“Let me think.”
“I’ll come to where you’re working — only when you
say.” She stopped. This was as far as she could go.
Again she heard the little bubble of whispered
Chinese behind him. “Shh!” he said, and came back. “Okay. They’ll
kill me if I say no. And you’re right. It would be good for
me.”
She waited on the edge.
“But you have to forgive me. I can’t dress nicely
and meet you in restaurants and hold forth. Not now.”
“Why would I want to do that? I’ll just come and
watch you work. You talk when you can. I’ll listen.”
“All right. Let me think — I’m basically going to
be slaving every minute in order to get this together. Tomorrow?
You want to come tomorrow?”
“Okay.” A smile rose around the corners of her
mouth. Again the same strange feeling, of something good.
“Afternoon? Two?”
“Fine,” she said.
“Call me when you’re getting the cab. I’ll tell the
driver where to go.”
“Okay,” she said, and just before he disconnected
she heard him talking to his uncles, switching back to Chinese with
them in mid-thought, without a breath, the melodic pitch, the soft
rolling sounds of the words, and then click, he was gone.
She grinned at her phone for a second, giddy with relief, and then
tapped in a text message to Sarah: Thanks for your message. I’m
getting by. Meeting the chef tomorrow. Love, M.
She looked up. A waiter was moving toward her
through the pools of electric light and the clanging dishes and the
voices — was his steam basket for her? Yes. She leaned toward it —
delicate, translucent wrappers and a savory mince of vegetables
within. The aroma encircled her. She felt she could eat everything
in the room. She tried the dipping sauce with a finger: soy,
vinegar, little circles of scallion. “Thank you,” she said in
English, looking up. But he was already gone in the crowd.