The Last Chinese Chef (26 page)

The door jingled and her husband came in, flush from the climb up three flights, string bags of vegetables and a fish for their dinner bouncing against his legs. He put the food down and beamed as the little boy toddled to him. She watched them with love. “We’ll find her,” she said to Maggie on the phone, her eyes on her two men. “We’ll make sense of everything. There
is
a pattern. Always. We just have to see it.”

 

When Sam had finished reading the long document in his father’s jumpy, idiosyncratic English, he went back to the start and began to smooth it out. It went quickly, since this time there was no need to compare the approximated English with an original text in characters. He liked doing it, just as he liked working with his father on the translations; it was the only way they had ever really collaborated. When he was done, he felt close to the old man, sure they’d be able to talk. He called him again.

“Ba,” he said when Liang Yeh picked up, “I love what you sent me. Can we make it the epilogue of the book?”

“Maybe.”

“Think about it. But Baba. What happened to you is not unique. Everybody had a bad time — but it’s the past. I can’t say it’s not cynical here, and internally bankrupt in a certain way; it is. Maybe that’s what’s left, now, of everything that’s happened: nobody believes anymore. But as far as life goes, and whether it’s safe or not — believe me, they have left all that behind.” “Do you think I have no heart?” Liang Yeh shot back. “I do what I can. Do you know how often I call Little Xie now? Every day! That’s right! Do you know how much that costs?”

Sam heard fumbling, and then his mother came on the line. “Sammy,” she said, “I know it’s hard. But let him be.”

He hung up, disappointed. He read his father’s story through again. It wasn’t enough just to read it. He wanted to show it to someone.

Various friends went through his mind. The one he kept coming back to was Maggie. She had been to Hangzhou. She had met the Xie family. She would know.

He rooted in his pocket for her card with her e-mail address. No. He didn’t know where he had put it. He took out his phone to call her.

 

At that time Maggie was scrolling down her computer screen through all the e-mail messages Matt had sent her, everything from the last two years of his life. For the first time she was thinking about blocking them and deleting them, all of them. There was no backup. She could erase him. Push all this out of her life once and for all.

She blocked them. They all turned blue.

Her phone rang.

She didn’t want to answer. She was busy. This was important. She was getting rid of Matt. But the small screen said it was Sam Liang.

“Hello,” she said, “can you wait a minute?”

“Sure.”

Carefully she clicked through the sequence until she had unblocked the messages and exited the program. If she deleted them, she wanted it to be when she was paying full attention. Not now, with someone on the phone. “Okay,” she said to Sam, “I’m back.” There was a vulnerability in her voice, but she covered it. “How are you?”

“Fine,” he said. And then: “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Maggie,” he said.

“You have so much to do. You don’t want to hear my problems.”

“I’m asking,” he said.

Still she hesitated. Infidelity and lies had a taint to them; she knew telling him could be a mistake. But he already knew half the story. “There is this picture from the news, of my husband’s accident. You can see Matt on the ground, part of Matt, dead, and a woman leaning over him.”

“What part of Matt?”

“His feet and legs.”

“Okay,” said Sam slowly, as if visualizing it.

“This woman. Nobody ever got her name. It was odd because usually people like that come forward. But then today I happened to show the picture to this guy in the law firm here. He thinks he recognizes her. He thinks it’s Gao Lan.”

“With your husband when he
died?
”

“That’s what he says.”

“Is he sure?”

“No. The face is not distinct.”

He was silent with her for a minute, or at least his voice was silent. She could hear him chopping. She liked that they could be quiet together. It was like being in a room doing things, different things, two people in proximity but separately productive. It had been that way with Matt, even if they needed their time apart to keep it working.

“I feel like I can’t think about anything else but finding her. It’s like with Shuying, where I had to get the sample, I had to see her face, but even more powerful. I need to see for myself what kind of woman this is.”

He was silent for a minute. “I just hope when you do see her, it’s going to make you feel better.”

“It’s always better to know.” Maggie needed to place the woman in her ladder of esteem, drink in her aura of looks and personality, judge her. She needed to steady herself that even if this woman had attracted her husband’s attention she still was no match for Maggie. That she had never been. It was basic female power restoration.

“I can’t believe it when I hear myself,” she said to Sam Liang. “I tell you the most personal things.”

“I like that,” he protested.

“I think I’ve told you too much.”

“Why? I’ll tell you one about me. Will that make you feel better?”

“Yes.”

“All right. This happened right after we came back from Hangzhou. By the way, it was strange, wasn’t it? Coming back from Hangzhou. After being together for two days. Always the two of us, and then boom.”

“It was strange,” she agreed, glad he had said it.

“So we came back. I called my father. I told him this was it, Uncle Xie was dying, please come. Get over your fears. He needs you. And by way of explaining why he couldn’t, he sent me the story of his life, up to the time he escaped from China. As if I was going to read this and say, Oh, Dad, I see now, you’re right, this was so bad you should definitely never come back to China. But I didn’t feel that way. I called him and said, I understand, but really, you are safe, nothing will happen, and please please come see Xie before he dies. You must. Please. I begged him.”

She felt a pang for him. “Did it work?”

“No. He said no.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Even me, his son, asking like that, it wasn’t enough.”

“You can’t change him. I don’t know what his deal is, but most likely it’s beyond your reach.”

“You’re right.”

“At least now you have his story.”

“It was worth the wait.”

“Will you send it to me?” said Maggie.

“Yes! That’s why I called you, if you want to know the truth. I want you to read it. But I can’t find your e-mail.”

“Send it,” said Maggie, and dictated her address.

He moved over to his computer and clicked a button. “There. I just e-mailed it. Let me know what you think.”

“I will.” She felt a little better, talking to him. The way he was, the way he thought, left her feeling lifted. He reminded her of the world beyond herself. What was more, he had the makings of a great cook. She felt he deserved this prize with every inch of his soul. “Do you know what I want more than anything?” she said. “I want you to win. I want you to have this.”

She could hear a smile in his voice. “Then for you I will try to get it.”

“Not for me! For your family.”

“Okay,” he said. “For them.”

The most important thing is to preserve civilization. As men we are the sum of our forebears, the great thinkers, great masters, great chefs. We who know the secrets of food must pass them on, for our attainment in food is no less than our attainment in philosophy, or art; in deed, the three things cannot be separated. These are the things that make us Chinese. In the West, it is different. There, Plato is one of their favorite sages. He teaches them that food is the opposite of art, a routine undertaken to satisfy human need, no more — worse, a form of flattery. We Chinese look instead to the Analects of Confucius, where it is written that there is “no objection to the finest food, nor the finest shredding.”

— LIAN G WEI,
The Last Chinese Chef

 

 

I was born to my father late. He may have been one of the great chefs of his time and written a book that made him gastronome to a generation, yet he did not have a son — not at least until his wife died in 1934 and he at last — for he had long ignored the urgings of his friends — took a second. He could have done it sooner. Many men in those days did. They chose a concubine. Liang Wei could have done it without raising an eyebrow, for his wife had proved barren, but he never did. He wanted to be modern. He was a traditional chef, a product of the Forbidden City, of feudalism, but he would not take a second.

And then she died. He put on a grand funeral, more than he could afford. The sutras were chanted for forty-nine days. When Qingming came in the spring, the day of Pure Brightness on which the dead are honored, he offered his prayers at her grave. Then he sent for the matchmaker.

He wanted someone young, he told the older woman, but not too young. He wanted wide hips for bearing. And he wanted a girl who could cook. Someone had to oversee his kitchen at home while he ran his restaurant. His own hired cook was not enough. For my father, even the food at home had to scale the heights. He was one for whom every mouthful, even the most insignificant snack with tea, was worthy of talent and attention.

Wang Ma the matchmaker brought him my mother, age twenty-four. Her name was Chao Jing, Surpassing Crystal. She didn’t look anything like her name. She was a plain jug of a girl with a flat, freckled nose. Yet her eyes sparkled with intelligence and humor. She was strong in the kitchen and superlative at the market, the latter a skill for which my father had not dared to hope. No one could outdo her, not even Ah Heng, the hired cook. It was Ah Heng’s right to do the shopping. He gained a critical slice of his income through the small commission he took on each purchase and, like so many cooks in Peking then, he had used that little cash stream to build up a gambling operation that he ran in his family home nearby. Despite all that, he would step aside sometimes and let my mother shop. She cared about food; the vendors knew it and they loved her. They all wanted to please her. She always brought home superior ingredients at a lower price.

And she ran a great kitchen. I think often of the banquets my father served at home almost every night, taking a few hours’ leave from the restaurant to come home and dine — great meals that he could never have staged without Ah Heng and above all my mother. Even if the meal was a simple one, even if the guests were few, he always expended as much care and love on each dish as if he were entertaining Yi Yin himself, the greatest chef in history, who like him started as a slave. He would think many days ahead and call together friends whom he loved. He would send out a poem of invitation. All the recipients would fall into a passion of expectation. There would be a thematic reason to gather: the Osmanthus Festival, the anniversary of the birth of a poet, the first crabs of the season. Guests might present a painting or a work of calligraphy to accompany the meal. Remarks on cuisine would lead naturally to remarks on poetry, the two subjects sharing to a surprising degree both vocabulary and a style of critical expression. Eventually poems themselves would be invented, inspired by food, lubricated by wine.

People think of the history of cuisine as being a story that is told in restaurants, but in China it is very much told in the kitchens of the great houses. It was true of my father. His reputation had three legs, like the bronze vessels of yore. There was his famous book, there was the restaurant, and there was the cuisine of his home and family. Sometimes I felt that his home kitchen on Houhai was where he really created his food, with his wife shopping and helping. This was his real child in life, his bequest: Liang Jia Cai. Liang Family Cuisine.

Preparations for the evening meal started early in the day. I learned there was no better place to be than behind my mother on the way to market, weaving under the crystal autumn light through the crowd on Hata Men, soaked in the gay chatter and the golden laughter and the calls and whistles of the sweets vendors with their bright, fluttering flags. The world was a festival to me, one that could not be dampened even by the Japanese occupation with its columns of soldiers and its strange kimonoed women. Once we got to the market we were back in our own world, the Chinese world, and we chose with unfettered joy from the capons and bamboo shoots, water shields and fresh duck eggs, prawns, succulent live river eels, wild herbs from the marshy estuaries of the south, and three colors of amaranth. Walking home we would sing songs.

As I grew, my father and Ah Heng let me watch them cook. They loved having me there, even if they usually grumbled and shouted me out of the way. Then one or the other would hiss me over to his side, pull out a secret ingredient — some crumbled herb or paper-wrapped bit of paste — from his pocket, send out an exaggerated, theatrical pretense of a glance to make sure the other wasn’t looking, and then add it to the dish. As if they had anything hidden from each other. But each loved the special surge of face that came from imparting a rare secret, and so they played the game. And I learned.