The Last Chinese Chef (16 page)

We were town people. We did not suffer like those in the countryside, but still, of 1961 I remember mainly hunger. We hoarded every grain, every stalk of wilted vegetable. An egg was a miracle.

We sold everything possible to get more food. Nainai, my grand-mother, wanted to sell her coffin. At this my father put his foot down. “Impossible,” he said. “You have had it for years. Leave it.” And indeed the coffin was one thing they never sold off, and she was to use it to be put in the earth as she planned, five years later.

But what I remember, back further, is the day in May 1956 that Nainai went to buy the coffin. She journeyed to a dark little shop in a small village outside the city, on a day deemed auspicious by her almanac.

At seven, I was too young to accompany her, but I did go with her in the years that followed. We would travel to the village together to visit the shop, where she would look at her coffin and reassure herself that no one had made off with it and that it was indeed as fine as she remembered.

It was. The renowned local wood was oiled to a dull gleam, and there was a strong iron latch to seal it tightly within the earth. To see it comforted her. She knew that safe within, she would never have to wander in some murky, in-between world. She would remind me of this as the old man hunted through the stacks of coffins in his little warehouse to find the one that belonged to her.

When he located it in the pile he would light a little bean-oil lamp for us in the darkened storeroom, so we could sit there for a while. “A good coffin is important,” she would say. “How else are the Gods to know I led a supremely good life and am to be treated well in the next world?”

“They will know,” I used to tell her. She was to be buried in her ancestral village, after all, which lay in the hills a little farther to the south and from which one saw a long way, across a green valley. The beauty of the place alone would bring her to the Gods’ attention, I felt — if there even were Gods. At that time we were taught that there were not. In fact at certain times it was dangerous to even say such things aloud, but we were in a warehouse at that moment, out in the countryside. No one was near. So I let her talk.

After the famine passed her health declined. She had grown very thin, like all of us, but when we rebounded, she did not. It was another five years or so until she went away. In those last years she was small, sharp-edged, but still clear. Mother dressed her bound feet every day, and her long linen dressings hung in looped rows at the end of her bed, their peculiar fragrance dusting the air around them even when they’d just been washed. She did not so much walk as plant one foot in front of the other, and when she went outdoors she usually had one of us at each elbow. In her walk there was a delicate pathos, graceful even in her advanced age. I can say that now. Back then, when I was young and saw her as a feudal old lady with little more left in her than a whiff of dry breath, she infuriated me. She was the past. She was everything we hated. I thanked the heavens I was born in my own time, so I could serve my country in free, natural health.

Up to the end, though, once or twice a week, she cooked. She made the dishes she loved from her childhood, fried tomatoes and tofu, hot and sour cabbage, soup noodles with pickles. Once she made a rich soup of tilapia with matchsticks of daikon. To buy a live tilapia at that time was sufficiently extravagant to attract attention. Once was all right; it could be explained as a family celebration. But she could not cook it again.

My mother sat down with Nainai and explained why. “The idea now is that everybody eats simply. You know,
cu cha dan fan.
” Crude tea and bland rice. “We should eat only the most basic foods. To cook anything else is not wise, even if we had the money, which we do not.” She was gentle and clear. Nainai may have nodded submissively, but she was already deciding not to listen. She may not have called for tilapia again, but within her constraints she cooked what she wanted.

In August of that year the railways and hostels were thrown open to youth, free of charge. We could ride anywhere we wanted in China, mix with
laobaixing,
or old hundred names — the masses. Our job was to talk with people and in this way advance revolution.

I had to go. I was compelled by my age, by the times, by the depth of my beliefs. People don’t like to say it now, but those times, though they were bad, also had some good. We were living for something. Between people there was a kind of
ren qing,
human kindness, which I don’t feel anymore.

It was a flame I was, at that age, unable to resist. My little bag was packed in minutes. My mother begged me not to leave. She said it was dangerous. She wrapped her arms around me as if she could keep me. I lifted her hands off. “Do you think this is something for me and my friends? We are supposed to exchange revolutionary ideas. Besides, I am seventeen. I’m a grown woman.”

I could see how this drained both my mother’s and my father’s faces. They were children of the modern era; they had gone against their own parents, insisting, for example, on choosing their own marriage partners and careers. Of this they’d always been proud. That it was my turn made them less happy. They were silent.

Nainai did not say anything either. Most likely she did not hear anything. She was cooking with her back to us. A friend of hers had visited her earlier with some foodstuffs from the south, and with this she was preparing a meal. I shouldered my little pack and went to say goodbye to her. Despite how old she was I never thought this was the last time I’d see her.

“Deng yixia,”
she said when she saw I was leaving, Wait a moment. “Let Nainai prepare you a box to take.” Before I could even answer she had taken a tin box and begun to arrange food in it.

“I don’t need dinner,” I told her. We needed food to sustain our lives, of course, but according to new thinking, it was a necessary inconvenience. “I don’t want it.”

She was calm. “Who’s going to feed you where you are going?”

I had no answer for this, and the truth was I did want dinner, badly, and so after I had gone one more time to trade stiff, anguished goodbyes with my father and share an embrace with my mother I returned to Nainai, and embraced her too, and took her box.

When I reached the station I was grateful they had not come with me, for the huge hall was an ocean of parents, terrified, tearful. I don’t know if I could have endured their being part of it. As I made my way through the crowd I felt the strangeness of being alone. Which train would I take? To what place? Beijing. That was the heart of the country, and I was the Welcome Rain. I hurried toward the track with hundreds of others like me, part of a moving current. When we got close I saw a stocky comrade up ahead raise his hands and roar,
“Beijing che lai!”
Beijing train’s here! We surged together, one undulating form, toward the great staircase that led upward. There was chattering and laughing around me. I was pushed and buffeted. I shoved and shouldered back.

When I reached the upper concourse I could see, through the windows that gave out onto the tracks, that the train was already full and then some. Young people were climbing on through windows, pushing one another into doors, even staking out spots on the roof.

I stopped. People behind me jostled past and kept trying to get on. I saw it was useless. Older men, tired-looking men in work-stained clothes, got off the engine in front and shouted at people to get off. Youths only stuck their heads and arms out of windows and shouted back at them. Finally some
Hong Weibing,
Red Guards, jumped off from the front of the train and went up and down the track pulling people off. “The people’s train has to run,” I heard one of them admonish a boy as he pulled him off and dumped him on the platform. The workmen climbed back on and the great chuffs swelled to life and the
Hong Weibing
leapt aboard, one by one, as it started to roll. Finally with a scream it pulled out.

“You might as well try to fish the moon out of the ocean,” someone said at my elbow. I turned, and there was a girl my age watching the scene beside me. She had long hair in braids and a white blouse, as I did, but otherwise we looked nothing like each other. She was small, with a face the shape of a teardrop, while I had a more angular face and a longer build. “You have to be waiting up here when they arrive,” she said, “and be the first one on.”

“What we really need is a southbound train that ends here, so it will empty out. I’m Zhang Guolin.” I touched a finger to my nose.

“Huang Meiying,” she answered, of herself. It is a strange thing, because this was a girl I knew for only fifteen or twenty hours of my life, more than forty years ago, and yet I remember her name with utmost clarity. I remember what I thought when she told me, too: Meiying, pretty and brave. It was a common name. A bit old-fashioned, maybe, but because of the “brave” part, most girls felt no need to change it.

We worked together. One held the place in front while the other scouted for rumors of arrivals. Finally there was a southbound train that ended here and would turn around for Beijing, and we were in front. We held our prearranged stations at the platform’s edge. No one would move us. The shout went up and people poured up the staircase, onto the concourse, to the cement expanse where we stood, unyielding.

“Tongzhimen!”
came the howl from the front, Comrades! The engineer, distinguished by his age and the filth on his clothes, leaned from his car. “You will board the cars in an orderly manner!”

People laughed at this as the passengers streamed from the train, a river of blue cloth and young black heads which had to part and flow around us because of the way we stood our ground. The instant the cars were empty we pushed and shoved our way on, and found ourselves running, laughing, down the empty aisle of a hard-bed car, rows of plain wooden berths, six in each open cubicle, with one common aisle. It was littered, and it still smelled of close-packed youth, but what was that to us? It was our car. It would take us to Beijing.

Not that we were to lie down; there would be far too many people for that. But we had a place to sit, pressed side by side on a lower berth, she by the window and I next. That was more than most had. Many stood in the aisle, or leaned nodding in half-sleep between the cars through the journey. The luckier ones managed to find space to slump to the floor. But we were comfortable. And because we had each other we could get hot water while it lasted, or relieve ourselves after it was gone. One could get up while the other defended our place.

In our little bay, designed for six passengers, at least twenty had pressed in. Everyone was hungry.

After some hours and the exchange of many revolutionary ideas, it was agreed that anyone who had any food would bring it out for all in our knot to share.

As I dug in my bag I glimpsed the kinds of foods others were drawing forth: peanuts in a twist of newspaper, dried fruit, small packages of crackers. And then I put out my tin box.

All eyes flew to it. It had the weight and size of real food; when I cracked the lid, the aroma rushed out, unstoppable. “What is it?”

“I don’t know,” I answered, for I had taken the box from Nainai without looking inside.

Now I lifted off the lid, and drew in my breath. It was
Guangzhou wenchang ji,
a Cantonese dish Nainai loved. Velvet-braised chicken breast, thin-sliced Yunnan salt-cured ham, and tiny tender bok choy were layered in an alternating pattern. All three were meant to be taken together, in one bite. The arrangement glistened under a clear sauce. As soon as I saw it my mouth longed for it. That must have been what Nainai’s friend brought her from the south, Yunnan ham. So special. It had been meant for me, and now everyone was staring at it. With a plunging heart I realized how opulent and bourgeois it appeared.

“What’s that?” someone said.

“She said she didn’t know,” said another.

“How could you not know?” said a third, this time to me.

I held the tin box, terrified.

Then Huang Meiying, next to me, spoke up with a boldness I had not expected. “She doesn’t know because an old lady handed it to her on the way into the station. I saw it. I was right behind her.”

“What old lady?”

“I never saw her before,” said Huang.

“Did she say anything?”

Silence. It was my turn. Little Huang was looking at me. I cleared my throat. “She said, Long live Chairman Mao.”

“Maybe it’s poisoned,” someone said.

“It’s not poisoned,” scoffed another. “I’ll show you. I’ll eat some.” He tasted it, lifting one set of the three slices in the incandescently simple sauce and dropping it in his mouth. I wanted to scream at him. I was about to collapse from hunger. And this was ham, from Yunnan, made for me by my Nainai. I wanted it.

I still remember the feeling of tears burning behind my eyes when he swallowed and his face registered such pleasure that everyone else had to have it too, and I saw it handed around. Quickly it was gone. Everyone had something to say. It was rich, it was ostentatious, it was not the plain food we were supposed to eat, yet they ate it in a blink. Huang Meiying saw my tears. She pressed my arm. Then someone in the cubicle said he wished he could find the old lady and teach her a thing or two, and after that both of us sat quiet for a long time, afraid to say anything at all.

Hunger kept me from falling asleep that night. It was not the first time or the last. How many young people today could do what I did? Could my own daughter do it, Gao Lan? No. Yet that was when my character was forged, especially when I was sent to the northeast in 1970. And it began four years earlier, that night when I fell asleep hungry, wedged up with my back straight on the train to my adulthood. In my memory hunger is mixed up with those times the train stopped and sat on the tracks, far from anywhere, the window open, the night air cool, the countryside black and formless. I made a promise to myself that night. No matter how much work it took, I would not be hungry, and neither would my children.