The Last Chinese Chef (14 page)

“I know. But do you have anything else about the situation that might help me?”

“Let me think,” said Zinnia.

“What were they like when you called to make the appointment?”

“For one thing, they did not sound like country people or uneducated, no, the opposite. Right away they agreed to your visit. They said you can see the little girl. They seemed sure she is your husband’s daughter.”

“Hm,” said Maggie.

“So I suggest, when you go, see yourself as their relation. That is not something you say but the feeling you will carry underneath. Do you understand?”

“I think so,” Maggie said, though she wasn’t sure she did at all.

“Also hope.” Zinnia gave her short, no-frills laugh. “Pray. I think that is the best thing, yes. Pray.”

“Okay,” said Maggie, “I can do that.” Even though she had no idea which way she would even direct a prayer, were she to try to make one, having been raised in a world of people who prayed only if they were something exotic, like Buddhist or Muslim. “I’ll pray.”

From the other end Maggie heard the persistent high pitch of a child. “Is that your little boy?”

“It is. Naughty boy! His
ayi
says he knows I am going. Now I am not, but he doesn’t understand that yet.” She hushed him with a quiet stream of Chinese and then returned to the phone. “As for while you are gone, I will return to looking for Gao Lan as soon as the presentation is done. She is in Beijing. We will find her.”

“I believe you’re right,” said Maggie.

“Now, this person . . .”

“How could you know so fast?”

“I told you, Carey called me.”

“He can do a great job.”

“He’s Chinese?”

“Half.”

“He can talk?”

“Definitely.”

“A friend of yours?”

“Not really. A business acquaintance, through my regular job. Someone I am interviewing for a story.” She backed off from it and formalized it, naturally, since she was talking to Zinnia, but she knew there was a little more, and this was why she wanted him, she knew, and not some translator from a service. She and Sam seemed to be in the first stages of alliance people pass through while deciding whether or not to become friends. Already they seemed to be looking out for each other, at least a little. She would do better with him, she felt. He would try. “But actually, Zinnia, I think we’re getting ahead here. I haven’t asked him yet. I need to call him, in fact, right now.”

“Oh. You haven’t asked him. Why do you think he would want to go?”

“He has his own reason. A family matter. His uncle is dying in Hangzhou and he needs very much to get there.”

“Oh! A family matter. That is different. Quick, let us hang up. Call him,” said Zinnia. “Right now.”

Sam had come back to his place, ecstatic with the quality of the fish he was going to get. The first sampling would not arrive for a few days, though, so for the moment he had turned his attention to the tender transformations that were possible with beef shank and tendon. Right now he was steaming a dozen beef shanks in two stacked baths of complementary broths.

As soon as the beef was on the boil he turned to his laptop, which he had carried to the kitchen, and checked for tickets again. The first one he could get was seven days away; that was the night of the banquet. He had to go and come back much sooner. He put his name on several more notification lists for cancellations. Right now this was all he could do.

Now it was up to the Gods. He didn’t keep an altar in his kitchen — that would have been going too far into the Chinese past for his hybrid self — but he had slowly come to sense that his Gods were there. There were times, like now, when he asked them to intercede, but he knew they were capricious and had minds of their own. Sometimes they granted what he wanted and sometimes they did not.

His cell rang. He looked; it was Maggie. “Hi,” he said, leaning close in and smelling the steam from the beef. “Aren’t you leaving?”

“I am. First I need to ask you something. My law firm had a rush come up. The woman I’ve been working with, the one I mentioned who was going with me — now they need her to stay here. It’s not a huge problem for me, they’re going to get someone else from a service, but I just thought — I mean, Sam, you did sort of give me the feeling you might consider it. So I’m throwing it out there. If you’re willing to do what she was going to do, go to this meeting and translate and help me and all, then you’re welcome to the other ticket. You have to tell me now, though. They need to get someone in the next half-hour.”

Sam was holding the phone to his ear in awe. “Are you serious? Are you even asking? Of course I will.”

“Just one problem. You’re in a huge hurry to get to Hangzhou. I understand. But I’m in a hurry too, that’s the thing — ”

“Of course,” he cut in. “Your thing first. We’ll go to your meeting. Then — what were you going to do with the sample?”

“I was going to come back here and express it.”

“No,” he said. “Express it from Hangzhou. It’s a hub. Save half a day.”

“Good,” she said, surprised.

“And then I’ll go to my uncle’s. Only then. How’s that?”

“It’s great.”

“How long are the tickets for?”

“Two nights. She booked one night in Shanghai, second night I thought in Shaoxing, but I guess now it will be Hangzhou. Then back here the next morning.”

Perfect, he thought. “Is this okay with your husband’s company, that I go?”

“I don’t know why they would care. Actually the woman I was going to go with, when I was just talking to her, she asked why an acquaintance of mine would be willing to do this. I explained about your uncle. She said since it was a family matter I should call you right away and make the arrangements. As if that trumped everything.”

China, he thought, loving the place. “Well, you know my answer already, don’t you? Yes. I will do it. Thank you.”

“No problem,” she said, and he heard the touch of relief in her voice, too.

“When are you leaving?”

“Flight takes off at seven-thirty. Can you pick me up at five?”

“I’ll pick you up at four. I’ll pick you up at three.”

“It’s past three now,” she told him.

“Is it?” He looked again at the double-steaming shanks.

“It’s three-thirty. You’d better get ready. Can you make it?”

“In my sleep,” he said, counting the pounds of meat in front of him and judging cooking times as he tried to remember where his suitcase was. “Don’t worry. I’ll be there.”

Yi Yin was the greatest of all Chinese chefs. Three and a half thousandsonifies years later, his writings are still read and discussed. He personifies the sanctity and power of cuisine through China’s history. He was born a slave. Yet he could cook so brilliantly that the Emperor appointed him Prime Minister. A man who could fine-tune the mysteries of the bronze tripods, the Emperor knew, could run the state and manage its alliances. This dynasty lasted six hundred and forty-four years.

— LIAN G WEI,
The Last Chinese Chef

 

 

W
hen he heard Sam’s voice on the phone saying he was on his way to Hangzhou, Xie Er had himself carried down to the kitchen to wait. He told his son and daughters he would not move until Nephew arrived.

The Xie family lived in a two-story, four-bedroom, white-tiled house up in the hills beyond the botanical garden. It was quiet there, everything a soft shade of green, one of the last places on a two-lane road that petered out under stands of bamboo. The fronds were dry now, in the breezy sun of late September, and rustled all around the house. The bamboo had never flowered in Xie Er’s lifetime. This was not surprising. Bamboo did its spreading underground and sometimes did not flower for a century or more. Still, he had lived a long time. He had thought he might see it. He listened to the soft, clicking fronds as he lay on the rattan recliner where they’d settled him to wait for Nephew.

He would not see it bloom. He knew what was coming even though they did not tell him. Huh, old Dr. Shen, he was a fool if he thought Xie could not grasp his euphemisms and decode his grave glances to Wang Ling. Actually, it wasn’t so bad. The pain he had felt in his limbs for so long was gone, replaced by numbness. His body was failing, spiraling away from him, his hands quivering when he could raise them at all. Yet he was clear. Steel cables sang in his mind. He remembered everything about his life. And while he could feel the next world, feel its sounds and urges and movements beyond the veil, at the same time he knew he had never been sharper or more astute about this one. He saw everyone and everything, not the surface but what was true inside. Most of what he saw made him content.

He watched the square of window with its pattern of bamboo and blue sky, listening for the calls of water birds and the faraway promise of Nephew’s car roaring up the road. The boy was more like Xie’s child than any of his own — except for Songling, who smelled food and tasted it and understood it in all its multiplying facets the way he did, and Nephew did. She would have been his equal had she been a man. But it was not her fate to be a man. She became a restaurant manager. It was a good life for her. Women could not become chefs. There had been a time, in the Song Dynasty more than a thousand years ago, when there was a trend of female chefs in the great houses of Hangzhou, but it was a brief movement, one that died with the dynasty. There were women who were great home cooks and teachers, but not true chefs. They lacked the upper-body strength. They might hold up half the sky, as the saying went, but they couldn’t flip the heavy woks in a restaurant kitchen. No, a female person like his adored Songling had too steep a hill to climb to become a chef, but she could be a
laoban,
a boss, a restaurant manager, which was far better: less work, more money. It was the right choice for her. Everything now was money: houses, cars, phones, clothes, jewels, vacations. Money was life.

Now the world had changed and changed again. His father had died in prison. Money and gourmet food and discriminating consumption — that was evil in the 1950s and ’60s. To have ever participated in it became a crime. His old father confessed to everything they asked of him, made all his self-criticisms, groveled, yet they let him bleed to death in his cell from his stomach ulcer anyway, shitting blood, vomiting it, crying out for a doctor. Fornicators, he thought.

But he, Xie Er, had survived, and with Wang Ling had gone on to produce a son and three daughters.

He also managed to bring back the restaurant after decades of closure, an homage to his father, who surely could not have imagined such a thing during those last days in his cell. When Xie Er reopened in 1993 under the original name, Xie Jia Cai, Hangzhou people flocked back to it as if it had been closed for only a few weeks — old people, who remembered the original, and young people, who had heard the stories. The timing was perfect. Privatization was just beginning. The economy was picking up speed. People needed venues in which they could entertain each other, sit, converse, negotiate, extract information, and ask for help. This was how things got done in the Chinese world. It had always been so. A favor would be bestowed, in the form of a great meal, and a favor asked in return. Then there was the social side of life: families and groups of friends needed a place to gather, lovers a place to meet. All of them came back.

Xie Er ran the place for twelve years and then sold it, his debt to his father repaid, the family secure, his bank accounts safe in Hong Kong and Vancouver. He disliked banks and he disliked foreign countries. He had lived long, however, and had seen China change too many times to take chances.

Outside his window he noticed a change in the bamboo fronds — a deepening of color, a brittle scratch to their movements. He had never seen the plants look this way before. But now everything looked different. The world looked different. He was dying. His boat was pulling away from the shore.

Xie let his eyes wander to his worn copy of
The Last Chinese Chef
on its shelf above his head. How much pleasure the book had given him. How right and correct for Nephew and his father to put it in English. Perhaps now, he thought, the world would finally grasp the greatness of his nation’s cuisine, not to mention its long history. People sometimes said the cuisine’s long history was the very thing that made it special, but it was not the longevity of the art itself that counted — no. Rather, it was the cuisine’s constant position as observer and interpreter. Throughout history chefs created dishes to evoke not only the natural world but also events, people, philosophical thought, and famous works of art such as operas, paintings, poems, and novels. A repertoire was developed that kept civilization alive, for diners to enjoy, to eat, to remember. Almost anything could be recalled or explored through food. Indeed, a great dinner always managed to acknowledge civilization on levels beyond the obvious.

The Western people did not understand this, was what Liang Yeh had told him by phone from far away in Ohio. A meal for them was nothing but food. When it came to the food of China they had their own version, a limited number of dishes that always had to be made the same way with the sauces they would recognize from other restaurants. Sameness was what they wanted. They went out for Chinese food, they ordered their dishes, and they did not like them to change. Liang Yeh said he had met other chefs who’d tried to offer real Chinese dishes on their menus too, but each said the foreigners wouldn’t order them, and each, in time, gave up. Liang Yeh had heard there were enclaves in New York and Los Angeles and other cities where discriminating diners demanded real food, but these diners were always Chinese, never American. There was money in the West but no gourmet, was what Liang had concluded. Xie still remembered the sadness in his voice.

Liang Yeh’s son could change that. This was Xie’s hope. Nephew would be the bridge. So the question was not whether he would succeed in the contest, for he must. The question was how.