Chinese Cooking for Diamond Thieves (19 page)

“And we appreciate it,” I said, “every time we have to stop for thirty minutes at a railroad crossing to let a train crawl through.”

“They formed associations for protection and for socializing,” Corinne went on. “And sometimes to organize crime. ‘Tong' isn't a word we use in Mandarin. We call gangs like that the ‘shadow societies.'”

“Shadow societies?” I said. “Do they have secret handshakes and stuff?” They both ignored me.

“It doesn't sound quite so dramatic in Mandarin,” Corinne said.

“Did you know any shadow society people in Montreal?” Ms. Masterson asked.

“I knew
about
them,” Corinne said. “Everybody in the Chinese community in every big city knows about them. But I didn't know any shadow society people personally. Most Chinese don't. Just like most Italian Americans don't personally know anyone in the Mafia.”

“Do you think it's possible that the men who showed up at the Wing Sung company could have been members of a gang?” Ms. Masterson asked. “Think it's possible that the late Mr. Chu was also affiliated?”

Corinne straightened up in her chair and seemed to be considering it. “Possibly,” she said. “It's probable, in fact. When it comes to Chinese here in the West, most crime is connected in one way or another to gangs.”

Ms. Masterson nodded slowly. “So let's assume, the three of us, that the Flying Ghosts or some other gang has some interest in what happened at Wing Sung.”

“A financial investment?” I said. “Maybe Mr. Sung was on the hook for gambling debts, or they were leaning on him to pay them protection; something like that.”

“Something like that,” Ms. Masterson said. “I just stopped by to let you know we'd identified Chu.”

“Will there be a big memorial service?” I asked.

“I doubt it,” Ms. Masterson said. “Chu did not seem to be an imposing figure. The information we got on him from the cops in Montreal is that he was a small-timer. Pretty low in the organization.”

“A
wu ming shao zu,
” Corinne said. “A little soldier with no name.”

“Chinese gangs have lots of those kinds of people in them?” Ms. Masterson asked.

“Sure,” Corinne said. “That's who does all the work. Lots of times they're in the country illegally. They're usually not very well educated. They might not even speak English. They get used by the gang. They're dispensable.”

“Rough life,” Ms. Masterson said. “Same way back in the old days for Italian immigrants, Irish.”

Corinne shrugged, then nodded. “It's not like the choices for them are joining a gang or going to med school. It's a chance to make money, to feel like you're important, like you're part of a group. That's pretty attractive compared to the other stuff they could end up doing.”

“Like working in a Chinese restaurant, for example,” I said.

“Good point,” Corinne said. “But at least we're not found beaten to death.”

So far,
I was tempted to say.

“What were you doing in Seattle earlier this month?” Ms. Masterson asked, suddenly. It was a police technique. Quickly change the topic when you're questioning someone, and it's more likely something will slip out. Assuming Corinne was hiding something that might slip.

“Qingming,” Corinne said.

“Oh,” I said. That was at least one question answered.

“Oh?” Ms. Masterson said.

“I wondered,” I said. “Makes sense.”

“Not to me.”

“Qingming is a Chinese festival,” I said. “It's when you go to your ancestors' graves and clean them up, sweep up leaves or whatever, and leave offerings.”

“I went to my parents' graves,” Corinne said.

“Like Memorial Day?” Ms. Masterson asked.

I nodded. “Only not many people on Memorial Day decorate their ancestors' graves with bottles of liquor, roast chicken, rice dumplings, stuff like that.”

“Chinese ancestors like to eat well,” Corinne said.

“Speaking of eating well,” Ms. Masterson said, “am I ready for the second lesson?”

“We've just been talking about a dead guy, a dead guy we both went to look at, and you're thinking about food?”

“Life goes on,” Ms. Masterson said.

“Are you sure you're not Chinese?” Corinne asked.

Rule #44: When it's interesting, you may as well stick around to see how it comes out.

 

These carp, unlike the ones Corinne and I had seen a few days earlier at the fish market, were still alive. Like the catfish back at the riverside lunch place where we'd eaten, they were swirling lazily in the tanks of the market, looking me over with their big, expressionless eyes, moving on after considering me as a possible food source. I wasn't. But they were. The day wasn't going to end well for one of us.

I'd parked the Toyota behind the Eastern Palace and walked down to Seafood City, a few blocks away. It wasn't even nine o'clock in the morning yet, but the place was already busy. Cooks, amateur and professional, in lots of cultures make a big deal of going shopping first thing in the morning. Chinese, in particular, seem to think that food tastes best if it's purchased not long after the sun comes up. Or maybe they think that's when all the good buys are. I've never known why. Now, though—while the chill of the night still hadn't lifted outside, making me zip up my jacket on my walk there—the place was filled. I liked to listen to the bickering and arguing between the guys behind the counter and the customers, mostly older women, on the other side. I could pick out several dialects of Chinese as some of the women chattered among themselves. Other customers added Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian. Behind the counter, it was all Spanish. The two sides came together in broken English marked by accusations and protestations and lots of intercultural exclamation points.

“You charging that much for those shrimp? How old those shrimp!”

“Those shrimp fresh!”

“Fresh, yahh! Mebbe they fresh las' week!”

“Why you bussing me ovah dis? You tink I own dis place? You tink I getting rich here?”

It went on and on. It was good-natured. Neither side expected the price to change. It seemed like it was enjoyable for all of them to bicker. It was kind of like the UN.

I waited my turn, pointed to the fish I wanted, then waited again while a fishmonger hauled it out of the tank in a dip net. He tossed it, thrashing in the air, to another, who heaved the fish onto a wide flat stainless steel table beside a sink. The carp still thrashing, the fishmonger whacked it hard, then hard again on its head with a short, nasty-looking club.

“You want cleaned?”

I didn't. I took the fish after he'd bagged it and paid at the counter, then walked back toward the Eastern Palace. The sun was up enough now to cast long shadows. Mine stretched out in front of me, holding a plastic sack of fish.

Five willow fish is one of those Chinese dishes—there are literally dozens and dozens of them in China's culinary lore—that has at least a couple of stories behind its creation. Like most dishes with those kinds of stories about how they were created or developed, few of the tales are really all that credible. But they are interesting. The best one concerning five willow fish explains how a hermit living in a lakeside hut created the recipe's particular method of cooking fish. The story might be legend, but the hermit, Tao Yuanming, was real. He was a middle management office worker during the Eastern Jin Dynasty, in the fifth century. When he got tired of the bureaucracy, he chucked it all to go off and live in a hut on the shore of a lake. He became one of those semi-crazy eccentrics who lived in isolation, writing poetry and thinking deep thoughts.

I explained all this to Ms. Masterson, who had been waiting for me at the rear door of the Eastern Palace that morning when I got back with my carp. She was there for her next lesson, the one I'd promised after our conversation with Corinne about Chinese gangs the day before.

“Was that a popular job in China back then?” she asked. “Being a hermit?”

“China back then was lousy with 'em,” I said. “The Chinese have a thing for the eccentric, the iconoclast, the person who goes off and lives by himself, lives a life of contemplation and doing artistic stuff.”

“Kind of like guys who take off from their home and their college and go out to master Chinese cooking?”

“Kind of,” I said. “But I don't drink enough wine to qualify as a real Chinese eccentric.”

I had the carp stretched out on a cutting board in front of me.

“You want to learn to cook Chinese food,” I told her, “you need to be able to dismember animals. A carp's a good place to start.”

“So how come the knife's in your hand?”

“Because it's a cleaver, not a knife. And because I'm going to show you a way of cleaning a fish that takes a lot of practice. You might want to watch it first.”

“A gracious way of saying I'd be in over my head,” she said.

“I'm the soul of graciousness.”

I used the Jiangsu method of cleaning a fish, taking out the entrails through the gill slits so the fish remains whole. It's harder than it looks. It makes for a nice presentation of the fish when you're done, if you do a good job. Using my cleaver, I sliced slash marks across its flank. Then I flipped it and did the same on the other side. I cut deep enough to go well into the flesh. My cuts opened wide pink gashes in the meat. I put the fish in a bamboo steamer and covered it, then put the steamer on a wok that was already boiling water.

“That's it for now,” I said.

“You pinched the fish,” Ms. Masterson said. “Then you held your two fingers against your other middle finger. Is that some kind of ancient Chinese cooking ritual?”

“You're observant,” I said. “You'd make a good cop. Actually, it's an old trick to measure the cooking time of a whole fish. You hold the fish at the thickest part of its body between your thumb and forefinger. Then you measure that space on your other middle finger. For every joint of that finger between your thumb and forefinger, you can assume you'll need to steam the fish about fifteen minutes.”

“How did you learn that?”

“Results of a youth wasted in the kitchen of many a Chinese restaurant,” I said. I started putting together the ingredients I was going to use in today's lesson with her.

“Are you worried?” Ms. Masterson asked me.

“Not really. There's no way a
laowai
is going to be named the best Chinese chef in town.”

“I'm not talking about the contest,” she said. “I mean are you worried that someone—some people who seem organized, probably some people who are involved in the kind of gang activity that often features a lot of violence—have made two runs at you? Are you worried about the fact that they are obviously after something and they are just as obviously not going to stop until they get it?”

“About that?” I said. “Oh yeah. Worried like you can't believe. Didn't you have to study psychology as part of your training?”

She tilted her head in acknowledgment.

“Then can't you recognize anxiety in my behavior?” First Corinne, now Ms. Masterson. I was getting kind of tired of having to explain my fragile psyche.

“You don't show a lot.”

“Part of my charm.”

“You have a nice job here, I understand,” she said slowly. “But you're not really tied down here.” She raised her eyebrows.

“What am I going to do? Run? Where?”

When she didn't say anything, I took the other carp from the bag and put it on the cutting board, handed her my cleaver, and began talking her through what I'd just showed her. She did a reasonably good job. When I began to assemble the ingredients we needed for the rest of the dish, she leaned against the counter.

“You're staying because of Corinne.”

“Corinne has even less reason to stay here than I do,” I said. “At least I have a friend here.”

“And she has you, who brought her here,” Ms. Masterson said.

“More like she didn't really have any other place to go,” I said.

When they were done, we ate the fish. I was happy with it. Ms. Masterson ate but not with her usual gusto.

“It's excellent, really,” she said, when I asked her about it. “It's just that steamed carp isn't my usual breakfast.”

“Most important meal of the day,” I said. “Didn't your mother teach you that you should start off with something substantial?”

“If my mother knew I was eating steamed carp for breakfast,” Ms. Masterson said, “she wouldn't think my becoming an FBI agent was the weirdest thing I've ever done anymore.”

When Ms. Masterson left, I cleaned up the dishes we'd dirtied, then started peeling and chopping broccoli. Chinese cooking—the real thing—doesn't use Western broccoli. They even had to come up with a name to describe it when they first saw it. But it's expected in lots of Chinese American dishes; we always had plenty on hand, and while the task really should have gone to one of the dishwashers who served as prep cooks, I liked doing it. It scored me points with the dishwashers, and it was so mindless it gave me time to think.

I thought about what Ms. Masterson had said, about my hanging around just because of Corinne. That wasn't exactly true. Not
exactly.
I had a good job. Friends. No place else in particular to go.
Would I still be here,
I asked myself,
if Corinne wasn't here too? And was it worth it?

I scooped up the broccoli with my cleaver and tossed them into a stainless steel bowl. And it hit me. The same way leaving Beddingfield to come to St. Louis had hit me. All at once. Like it had been forming in my subconscious, and all of a sudden, standing there chopping broccoli in the kitchen that morning in the Eastern Palace, it all came out. Clear and obvious.