Chinese Cooking for Diamond Thieves (16 page)

“I think I've never heard anyone in the law enforcement community use the words ‘whereabouts' and ‘disinclined' in the same conversation.”

“Well,” Ms. Masterson said, “keep your eyes open and pay attention to what's going on and stick around. I have a feeling there are going to be some more new experiences for you coming down the road.”

Rule #35: Cultural stereotypes are invariably narrow-minded and unreliable, and don't ever be surprised when they turn out to be true.

 

“You teach police lady make fried rice?” Mr. Leong asked me the next afternoon. There were only a few customers in the dining room, late lunches. The lull. I was using the time to prep for the dinner rush, slicing through the root stems of big heads of Chinese cabbage so I could separate the leaves. I'd pack the leaves into a pot in layers, putting baseball-size balls of ground pork in between them, pouring on some broth, then cooking it for the next few hours to make
shitzi tou,
“lion's head,” a braised stew from eastern China. Mr. Shen had already made reservations for dinner that evening. I knew he'd want the lion's head on his table.

“Yep,” I said. “I gave her a lesson. I think you might want to think about hiring her now. We could use another cook around here.”

He ignored me. “You remember before you leave go get your girlfriend, I tell you something, I want to talk with you?”

I didn't. I'd forgotten all about it. I nodded anyway.

“You think maybe you best Chinese cook in city?” he asked.

“I don't know.”

“You think anybody better?” he asked. “You think you friend Wu better?”

“He might be close,” I said.

“You like chance? Chance prove it?” Mr. Leong said. “We have contest.”

“Who we?” I asked.

“We,” Mr. Leong said, vaguely annoyed. “Us.” It never seemed to bother him when I answered him in his same pidgin. I'd been around Mr. Leong long enough to get away with ribbing him a bit by responding to his pidgin with some of my own. He was irritated because I didn't seem to be getting whatever the idea was.

“Lots of owners of Chinese places here in town. We decide to have contest, see who best Chinese chef St. Louis.”

“Oh,” I said. Being the best Chinese chef in St. Louis was, I thought, roughly like being the best downhill skier in Haiti.

“We make bet.”

“Ohhh.”

It would be culturally insensitive to suggest that gambling is to a lot of adult Chinese males what heroin is to a junkie. Or that it is what a big, warm yard light is to moths on a June night. It would be racially stereotyping to note that historically Chinese gamblers have lost fortunes, houses, everything they own, betting on anything from card games to cricket fights. It would be an act of cultural insensitivity to note that much of the crime in Chinatowns all over the country, Chinatowns all over the world—as well as much of the socialization, parties, and get-togethers there—all revolve around gambling in one form or another. From old ladies playing mahjong to bigtime gangsters betting on horse races or on whether the next woman who walks by will be wearing yellow. I dislike stereotyping. And racist generalizations. And cultural insensitivity. That said, I was not completely floored when Mr. Leong mentioned that there was a bet involved in the proposed competition.

“I tell them you best,” he said to me. “You prove me right, yeah?”

“I do, what I get?” I asked.

“You be famous,” Mr. Leong said, breaking out into a broad grin. “You be most famous Chinese cook in St. Louis who not Chinese.”

“Sad to think I've already peaked so young in life, isn't it?” I asked. He'd already walked out the kitchen though, leaving me to the cabbage leaves.

Rule #72: Never depend upon luck, but don't ignore how really valuable it is.

 

It wasn't quite spring yet, not in the “birds are singing and flowers are in blossom” sense of spring. Not yet. It was still chilly. Langston and I weren't talking. We didn't talk much when we were practicing together. We were going through a sequence, exchanging attacks and counters, sort of like sparring boxers. We knew them so well, we could do them on autopilot, letting our minds drift, the same way a pianist can cruise through a piece of music without focusing directly on it all the time. If we did that, if we did start mentally drifting, we weren't doing
xing-i
anymore, though. The second either or both of us lost focus, it just turned into dancing. We didn't dance. We concentrated on what we were doing.

In
xing-i,
the idea is to constantly move forward. Even if I stepped back, away from an attack, my hand or my foot was moving forward, striking or trapping Langston's arm, grabbing him, and pulling him in to me. Sometimes I stepped straight in to attack, sometimes I came forward at an angle, sometimes I swerved so I was coming at him in a curving kind of swoop, trying to catch him on a blind side, from an offbeat direction. But always I was driving forward until I completed the sequence, then I began moving back while he unleashed his side of the exercise.

“That's kind of not my personality,” I once said to Langston's uncle when he was teaching us back in Andover. “I prefer to go around things when I get into trouble. I even have a rule about that.”

“I know,” he said. “That's why
xing-i
is good for you. Makes you confront something inside you that doesn't always come out.”

I had a feeling even then that there were probably some things that really didn't need any coming out from inside me. Some things that were best left inside. I shut up, though, and kept training. I was doing the same thing now.

Since we were working out in our alley behind the apartment, there weren't many onlookers. Sometimes people stopped briefly to watch us as they walked to their cars in the stalls behind the apartment building. They usually didn't stay long. Mrs. Trahn continued to ignore us when she walked by on her way home from the market every day. There must have been a time when martial arts were exotic stuff in the United States. That was a long time ago, though. Everyone's seen them on TV, in movies. For most people, what Langston and I were doing was about as exotic as throwing a football around. But probably not as entertaining to watch.
Xing-i
isn't dramatic. Not a lot of jumping around or making gymnastic kicks or twirls in the air. It doesn't look like the stuff on the screen, that's for sure.

Half an hour passed. I was aware that someone had come up behind me and was a few yards away now. If it had been any kind of threat, Langston would have reacted to it. Since I didn't see anything in his face, I assumed it was just somebody hanging out. We finished the set. I turned around. It was Ms. Masterson. And a man. He was a little taller than her. Thin, wiry. Maybe military. More likely: cop. Or, given the company he was keeping: Fed.

Ms. Masterson was leaning against the railing of a back porch. The man stood beside her. I held up my palm to Langston. He stopped. We walked over to them.

“This is Joe Cataldi,” Ms. Masterson said. “My partner.” I introduced Langston.

“Joe's been on another assignment for a while,” Ms. Masterson said. “He's going to be looking into the—uh—circumstances you and your girlfriend have somehow gotten yourselves into. So I thought it'd be a good idea to come by and introduce you.”

“You guys look pretty good,” Mr. Cataldi said. He gestured to where Langston and I had been practicing.

“For a member of the law enforcement community,” I said, “you're not very observant.”

Most cops, most people in law enforcement who actually have to deal with bad guys in a physical way, don't think much of Asian martial arts. With good reason. First, most of those arts, the way they're practiced in the West, are less about real fighting and more about posing or about winning competitions or about indulging in adolescent fantasies. People who get involved with them, especially guys, tend to think they're a lot tougher and a lot more skilled than they actually are. Most of the martial arts popular in this country don't ever require practitioners to actually hit one another or much of anything else in the way of hanging bags or pads. Punching and kicking the air all the time can give an exaggerated sense of skill and power. Very exaggerated. People who have to deal with physical situations on a regular basis—cops, the military—they tend to know a lot more about the realities of fighting than most martial arts “masters” or the guys who strut around with their belts and embroidered uniforms.

“It looked impressive,” he said.

“Maybe, Mr. Cataldi,” I said. “But that's probably about all it is.”

“Come on,” he said. “Masterson told me about the run-in you had out front here. Two guys against just you, and you seemed to handle them pretty well.”

“No,” I said. “I was lucky. It was dark. I came up on them from behind. I got just enough of a jump on them to stun them. Surprise them. We were lucky enough to have a quick escape, to be able to get through a door we could lock behind us.”

“Maybe that was more than just luck,” Ms. Masterson said. “A lot of being successful in situations like that is being prepared to take advantage of the circumstances. Didn't you tell me something about ‘waiting for the east wind'?”

“If one of them had had a gun, that wind would have changed really quickly,” I said. “I'd have gotten my ass burned. Fast. And Corinne would have probably been in even more danger than she already was. I was just lucky I didn't make things worse.”

Mr. Cataldi nodded. “That can happen no matter how well you're trained, trust me.” He asked me about techniques he could use when confronting someone he wanted to arrest. “We had some CQC at the Academy,” he said, and he translated for me. “Close-quarter combat. But a lot of it was how to respond to an attack. Guy grabs for you or punches in your direction, tries to take away your gun, here's what you're supposed to do. Thing I always wanted to know more about was how to be the aggressor, how to approach someone who doesn't want to be subdued. Get him arrested and into handcuffs. It seems to me that martial arts, close-quarter stuff, all of it depends on
reacting
to aggression and not being proactive and initiating contact.”

“Good point,” I said. Then I shrugged. “I'm not really the person to ask. Cops, anybody in law enforcement, are going to have a different perspective than a regular person. If I punch out somebody, there will be a whole different outcome than if you do it. But I think what you want to do is make the bad guy start things, make him think he's being the aggressor, when really it's you who is starting the action and then taking advantage of his reaction.”

“Show me,” Mr. Cataldi said. He was still standing beside Ms. Masterson, who was leaning against the porch railing. He took a couple of steps away so he was in front of me. His hands were dangling loosely by his sides.

“Oh boy,” I said.

He wrinkled his brow.

“The old ‘show me' thing,” Langston said. He'd been standing beside me, taking it all in. Langston could be chatty as a grandma over tea. Or, like now, he could be so quiet you would forget he was there until he finally spoke. “Let me explain to you how ‘show me' works in a situation like this,” he said to Cataldi. “If Tucker tries to show you and you wipe his face with the ground, he looks stupid. If he shows you and he accidentally hurts you, he ends up looking like a bully, going around beating up untrained people.”

Mr. Cataldi snorted and smiled. “Come on,” he said, “I'm just curious about—”

While he was still talking, I shot my open hand toward his face, like I was stretching out my arm to stop a door from opening. He reacted automatically, raising his arms to just above his waist to intercept my push. I dropped my extended hand so it just touched his elbow. My father had showed me the way cops like to put an arm bar on someone they're trying to arrest, reaching in so their arm slides past the elbow of the suspect, then bending and wrapping around to grab the back of his upper arm, curling it around so the suspect's arm is bent behind his own back. Cataldi, by his initial reaction, was expecting that. As soon as I touched his elbow, I relaxed my hand and my arm. Becoming hard and tense is natural in a fight. It doesn't let you “listen” to an opponent's body when you're touching him, though. I relaxed and felt him start to squeeze his arm against his side. He was anticipating me trying to slide my arm in between him and his side, to make the arm bar. Instead, I let him draw the arm back. I followed, my hand still just touching his elbow, and went with the direction of his energy. At the same time, I stepped, putting my foot between his, and pushed him slightly in the direction he was already going as he tried to pull away from me. His foot caught on mine, he started to stumble, and as he did, he opened his arms again to try to regain his balance. I brushed my hand down, from his elbow to his wrist, then twisted, so his arm came up behind his back. With my free hand, I reached up and took his ear, gently, just grabbing hard enough to hold on. It wasn't going to hurt him unless he tried to pull away. He didn't. It is always surprising for a person to find out just how much it can hurt to have his ear grabbed and pulled.

“Ahhh,” he said, “I get it, I get it, I get it.” I was behind him, controlling one of his arms and controlling the rest of his body by pinching his ear.

“Got a pair of handcuffs I can borrow?” I asked Ms. Masterson. She was still leaning on the railing.

“That'd be a little too dramatic, don't you think?” she said.

I let go of Cataldi. When he turned, I saw he was still smiling. That was a good sign. Sometimes when you show up a man like that, make him look helpless, he doesn't take it all that well. A lot of guys, even if they've never been in a fight in their lives, secretly think they're fairly bad-ass when it comes to dangerous situations. A lot of other guys secretly think they aren't. They worry about not being tough. So you've got guys who think they're tough but aren't and guys who think they're wimps and probably are, and in either situation, when you make all that painfully obvious, they can react in some weird ways. Added to this was the presence of Ms. Masterson. Males getting shown up in front of females just adds another possible complication to the situation.