The Last Chinese Chef (9 page)

“So are you going to use it in the banquet?”

“Not unless I get it perfect.”

She ate another. “I think it’s pretty great.” There was a silence while they both ate and her eyes wandered to the prologue. “Could I borrow this?” she said, touching it. “I’d like to read it again.”

“Take it. I printed it out for you.”

“Thank you.”

“I’ll give you more of the book later, if you want.”

“I do. But right now I’m going to clear out and let you work.” She packed everything up into her bag.

“I hope you’ll come again,” he said. “Come on. I’ll walk you out.”

They pushed through the door and crossed the large, darkened dining room, him moving a few steps ahead to hold open the wood-and-etched-glass door out to the courtyard. “You know?” he said. “We’ve been talking about food all this time. I didn’t ask you — what’s the other thing you’re doing here, in Beijing?”

She turned, halfway down the steps. The raw sadness of the last year came back over her, the sudden slam that could never be undone, the frantic constriction, the struggle to get control. Sometimes even the ministrations of her friends couldn’t get through to her. It was in her job that she’d found a small tunnel of light, especially during the weeks of each month she spent away, writing about other people’s lives. There’d been the kindness of the Malcolms, the retired Maryland couple on the Eastern Shore who worked six commercial crab pots and consumed their entire catch, eating crab at every meal through the season. There was Mr. Loeb, the stout pastrami man in Nebraska, delicate and graceful with a knife, the last counterman in the Midwest to slice the fragrant rosy slab by hand. Being with those people helped her. In their normalcy they relieved her. They didn’t ask questions. She didn’t have to tell them about the mess that was her life.

Now Sam Liang was waiting.

“I’m a widow,” she said. “A year ago my husband died.”

She waited while he took this in, while compassion, and some of his own fears, crossed his face. She had seen it in people’s faces so many times by now. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“Thank you. It’s been difficult, but I’m better. It’s been a year.” That, she thought, was enough to say. He didn’t need to know how raw it still felt. And he certainly didn’t need to know about the widening sea that separated her more and more from other people, about the long days this summer she had spent lying on the bunk on her boat, ignoring the messages on her cell phone. She made her voice brisk. “My husband did some work here, and some matters in China came up related to his estate, so I had to come.”

“I see.” A lift of his eyebrow acknowledged the potential for a challenge. “I hope it goes well. Good luck. Are you very busy with that? Do you have the time to come back again?”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “I’ll be going out of town in the next day or so, but until then I’m okay.”

“Do you want to come tomorrow, late morning?”

“That will work,” she said, and stepped past him over the sill.

“Maggie,” he said, as she turned for the street. “What you told me. I’m really sorry.”

“Thanks.”
Not that you know anything about it.

“See you,” he said.

She raised a hand and walked all the way to the turn in the road along the lake before she looked back. In that blink she saw him withdrawing, his blue jeans, the old-ivory skin of his hands, and then,
click,
the gate closed.

Let us return for a moment to the popular view that poverty, specifically scarce food and fuel, stimulated China’s culinary greatness. Certainly it is true in the case of cooking methods, and when it comes to the unsurpassed ingenuity of Chinese cooks in making delicious dishes out of everything under heaven, all the plants of the earth and sea, all the creatures, all their parts. These are the legacies of scarcity. Yet truly great cuisine, food as high art, did not arise here; it arose from wealth. It was the province and the passion of the elite. Throughout history, gourmets and chefs tended to reach their heights in conditions of plenty, not need.

— LIAN G WEI,
The Last Chinese Chef

 

 

T
he following morning Sam Liang came back home from delivering some birds to his poultry farm outside the city. It was not his farm, exactly; he leased space there for his fowl before slaughtering them. He followed Liang Wei’s dictum, which was that a bird one wished to eat must spend at least the last few weeks of its life running and exercising in the fresh air. This made for better meat, according to
The Last Chinese Chef.
It was a brutal way of looking at it, a Chinese way: care for the creature, love it, pamper it, then eat it. Of course anywhere one went one found eating to be a cruel business. Here, though, there was no pretense. You knew a healthy animal tasted best, and so you raised it or at least fostered it. You knew fresh meat and fish were the most delectable, and so you did the slaughtering yourself. There were even dishes with live ingredients. In drunken prawns in the Shanghai style, for example, the prawns were not quite dead when eaten but so inebriated from being soaked in wine that they lay perfectly still for your chopsticks. No Chinese diner would flinch at the faint flutter of movement in the mouth. On the contrary. To the
meishijia,
the gourmet, this was the summit of freshness.

At first, Sam had been a bit disturbed by this. It seemed to echo the faint streak of sadism he saw in China’s past. Every country had its dark history, but in China there were certain convulsions, like the famine and the Cultural Revolution, that seemed needlessly cruel. And the privatized Chinese business world, right now, in the twenty-first century, was cruel too. Things ran on opportunity, not principle. No one thought in terms of win-win dealings but only about who would win and who would lose. Every man watched his back at all times. In the America of Sam’s youth, he had heard people say they lived in a “dog-eat-dog” society. Here in China, they said “man-eat-man.”
That
was the economic boom.

With each passing year in China, though, he saw that the true situation was more subtle. It was not so much that China was crueler than the West, only more honest. The frankness of life, even of death, was always in front of him here — certainly when it came to food. It was more honest to take home an animal and slaughter it than to buy its meat in a square, shrink-wrapped package, more honest to keep a fish alive and swimming until the moment you wished to devour it. His appetite stirred at the thought. He so loved the
xian
of fresh fish.

As for the business world, it had its treacheries but also a massive and marvelous saving grace:
guanxi. Guanxi
was connection, relationship, mutual indebtedness. It was the safety net of obligation and mutuality that held up society. The best opportunities and connections were kept for the family, the clan, the friends, in an outwardly rippling circle. You gave one thing to the world; you gave something higher to your own group. As an American, Sam had been put off at first by this, for all he could see in it was cronyism. Later, when he came to know it as a way of life, he saw its mercies as well.

He saw too that it was food — people eating together, whether at banquets or daily meals — that kept the engine of
guanxi
going. Perhaps this was why chefs in China had always been so important.

As he walked the last stretch from the subway stop and came to the early-morning edge of the lake, he was also thinking about texture. On his way back he had stopped by a dealer who sold all kinds of dried mushrooms and fungi and water weeds and flowers, just as the man was opening up. Sam had bought several varieties of
mu-er,
wood ear, so called because of the way it grew on trees. One bag was the delicate white ruffles called cloud ear; the others were the more common crisp brown flaps. When reconstituted they had a robust vegetarian crunch, one that no amount of cooking could soften. No taste beyond the faintest metallic sense, easily corrected by other ingredients. All texture. Whether added in slivers or pieces, they could transform many dishes.

He saw his own gray stone wall ahead, set back slightly from the sidewalk. It was noisy here on the street, busy, but inside his place it was quiet. Perfect for a restaurant. And out front was the long, thin tendril of lake. It was classic feng shui, and not in any obscure sense either, for no one could arrive or leave without taking pleasure in the sight of the lake.

This district had changed even just in the last few years. Once characterized by graceful, crumbling residences, moody water, and a few far-off shapes of pagodas and skyscrapers above the willows on the opposite shore, it had become a theatrical sightseeing spot. Young men pedaled tourists in rickshaws. For blocks at a time the sidewalks were crowded with cafés and bars, their doors flung open, Chinese pop blaring.

Nowhere else on this strip was there a restaurant like the one he was going to open, but that didn’t matter. Fate had put his family in this neighborhood. And he loved it. He loved the summer, with its repeating cicadas and hot, hazy air; the winter, when the sky was bright and cold and itinerant vendors sold hot meat skewers and char-fragrant roasted sweet potatoes. In fall the light turned golden and men sang their way along the lake’s edge, under the trees, offering fanned sticks of candied crab apple.

He unlocked his gate and brought the big brass joins together again behind him, carried his bags to the kitchen. He needed to put the food away and leave. It was time to go meet Jiang and Tan.

 

That morning Zinnia called and asked Maggie to meet her at a Shanghainese restaurant near the Calder Hayes office, even though it was too early for lunch. Maggie hurried there, hoping Zinnia would have the tickets. It had been almost two days. After leaving the chef ’s house on the lake the day before, she hadn’t done much except sit in the apartment thinking about Matt. She had been in the same apartment with him three years before, in the same rooms; he came easily to mind. Yes, they had liked being apart. And yes, they were happiest of all when they were first reunited again, in the golden space before questions and qualifiers started, once again, to resurface.

So they specialized in reunions, and in separations; that was all right. They came and went, living on takeout containers, his and hers, one side of the refrigerator and the other, experiencing their joy in cycles. Even on the downslope, when they’d started contracting back into their own agendas and dropping seeds of irritation, they were honest. She always felt she knew what was in his heart, good or bad.

And that was the problem that had kept her up late the night before, looking out at the still, shimmering city. Now there was this claim. So maybe she had no idea what was in his heart.
Did you do it?

She sat on the couch throwing silent questions, imagining answers. She visualized his kind, big-jawed face and felt sure he was saying no: no, it was not true. She decided she believed him, as she always had; then she changed her mind and threw him out of her heart and ceased to accept his denial; then some hours later she took him back again. By the time the deep night had come and the street below had gone silent she was exhausted. She slept as if unconscious, without dreams, and when she awakened she felt tired, as if she’d barely slept at all.

She pushed open the door to the Shanghainese restaurant. Inside, the world changed. She felt pushed back in time. Around her were dark-wood walls and brass lamps, waitresses in old-fashioned side-slit gowns. Only the diners were modern, with their crisp clothes and multiple, faintly chiming electronic devices. Among them she saw Zinnia, who waved her over.

“Sit!” she commanded when Maggie reached the table. “How are you? Are you well?”

“Well enough. Did you hear anything about the tickets?”

Zinnia’s earnest smile evaporated for a second.

Maggie saw she had been abrupt. “I’m sorry — I guess I thought maybe that was why you asked me here.”

Zinnia nodded. “I don’t have the tickets yet. Unfortunately I did not receive your file until I was assigned to help you, and that was the morning you arrived. So I have just started. But I will do my best. You should not worry.”

“You are determined,” Maggie said admiringly. “I believe you’ll do it.”

“I will.
Ni fang xin hao.
That means you should put your heart at ease. The day we met I had a lunch. The person couldn’t help me. But then last night I had dinner with a friend from China Northern. It is one of the biggest domestic airlines. We had ten courses and wine. Very good. Long talk. Now I am waiting for his call.”

“Good,” said Maggie.

Their business clarified, Zinnia looked back at what she’d been studying when Maggie walked in, which was the menu. “I want to have the jellyfish. It reminds me of my childhood. My son likes it too. Have you had it?”

“Yes,” said Maggie. “You have a son?”

“Yes. Two years old. He’s a good boy,” she said proudly, still looking at the menu. “When you had jellyfish, did you like it?”

“It didn’t have much taste.”

“You are right! Actually jellyfish is not taste food. It is texture food.”

“Fine.” Sam Liang had told her all about texture. “Let’s have some.”

“
Hao-de.
Then some other dishes.”

“What exactly did you ask him?” said Maggie. “The guy from China Northern.”

“I didn’t ask him. I only mentioned the facts in passing.”

“I thought you meant you had dinner to ask him for tickets.”

“Yes. But that was the request, the dinner. The only thing left was to mention the matter in passing. I did. Now I must wait.”

“I see.” The jellyfish arrived, handed off by a waitress on her way to another table. “So do you think it’s possible we could leave today?”