The Last Chinese Chef (30 page)

Her man was not in town. He was in Taipei with his wife and children, which was why she could receive these people. She wouldn’t want the man anywhere near an encounter like this. He did not know she had a child. If he did, he would end her employment. That was unthinkable. Shuying and her parents lived on the money she sent home every month, though they had no idea what she actually did. She sent home almost everything she earned. She did nothing except work out in the gym, which he paid for. She ate in the apartment, taking as little as possible. Sometimes she walked. She never bought anything, she just walked. When he came she bought the foods he liked just before he arrived. While he was there her only thought was to please him.

Before Shuying was born, life had been different. She let out an ironic laugh. She certainly was not living the life her parents had once had in mind for her. Far from it.

They were old-fashioned, the first people she knew to express nostalgia for the Cultural Revolution. They continued to see it as an experiment of tragic but also noble dimensions. Having been a child in the optimistic eighties, when state-owned enterprises were closing everywhere, Gao Lan remembered being embarrassed by her parents’ pronouncements. Standards of living were improving vastly. Everyone else welcomed the change. It seemed to her back then that her mother and father were the only ones who looked back with longing.

They thought she should seek a simple life close to home, but she had other ideas. She went to school, did well in English, and moved to Beijing to work. There was work in the international sector. The pay was modest but sufficient. It was never stable, for businesses came and went, but there was usually something.

And it was wonderful to be young and unattached in the city at that time, with things opening up so fast. She went with her friends to clubs, to parties, to receptions. She learned about life, and being on her own, and falling in love.

She saw girls around her during those years who went out at night as she did, forming liaisons as she did, yet who turned out later to be married. The husband lived in some other city. Sometimes there was a child, and in that case the child was usually with the grandparents. The women lived as if single. They were not libertines, but if they fell for someone, they had an affair. Gao Lan remembered how shocked she was the first time one of them admitted to her that she was married, that she had a little girl. “I have two minds,” the woman had said. “Two hearts. One loves my daughter and misses her. The other one is here.”

In time Gao Lan had come to understand that many of these girls, when young, had married men toward whom their parents had steered them. At that age obedience was all they understood. Now, though, the deed done, they found it easier to live apart from those husbands and maintain lives of their own.

Gao Lan had been proud then, when she was young, that her life path was hers to choose. Now of course she was alone forever, most likely — especially considering what she had been doing the last few years. Back then, though, she had only been full of joy and freedom.

Her fourth year in Beijing she started a relationship with a foreigner. He was marvelously exciting to her at first — perhaps simply because he was foreign, and so different. He was strong, for one thing. He handled her with confidence. She loved it, but in time she came to see the dark side of the relationship: always, he had to control. He would make a date with her and be effusive in his anticipation, then call her an hour before to break it off. He became cold if she showed too much feeling for him.

Get rid of him, her friends told her. But she felt empty when she tried to do so. Unwise as it was, she cared for him. She kept going back to him, even when he infuriated her. It had become like a game between them, to be cared for, be accepted.

During this time she met Matt. She was in a club with some friends. The other man had angered her and she hadn’t spoken to him in a week. She was bored, tired; even though it was still early she was ready to leave. Then she saw Matt across the room at the same moment he saw her. It was impossible to say who approached whom first; they walked toward each other, smiling. They talked. He was courtly and charming. She wanted to know everything about him. His English was clear, easy for her to understand. She told him about her life, her childhood in Shaoxing, her parents. He seemed to take an interest in everything she said.

After a time his friend, another American from his company, thinner, older, more sinuous, wanted to leave. Matt refused to hear of it. He wanted to stay with her. The other man grew annoyed. Finally Matt said they could go if she could come with him. The other man resisted. They argued, in English too fast and slurred for her to understand; then suddenly it was all right and she was leaving with them. They went to another bar. She and Matt sat close, talking. They went from place to place. She sensed the other man’s displeasure, but neither she nor Matt was willing to leave the other’s company.

Finally at four A.M. the three of them left the last bar. She and Matt left first. They climbed into the back of a car, close.

“Do you want to go someplace else and keep talking?”

“Yes,” she said. She wanted never to leave his side.

His face was a few inches away in the night-dark. “Or do you want to come home with me?”

“Yes,” she said. “That.”

He leaned forward and gave his address in memorized, approximated Chinese, and as soon as he was relaxed in his seat again he slipped his hand under her skirt. He amazed her. She had never known anyone so free. It was as if her saying yes had burst the tension of not knowing that had held them apart all these hours, and now he couldn’t wait another second. Her excitement rose with his, and by the time they got out at his building they could barely make it inside and up the elevator.

He was pure and joyous with her; she felt she had never known a man so openhearted. She was breaking all her own rules by being with him —
If a foreigner, it must be someone who lives here, never a tourist or a visitor, never, for such a man will soon leave
— but she also felt unaccountably happy. He was present. With him she felt
seen.

Afterward he didn’t drop immediately into sleep as she expected. He was awake again, talking. He told her about his life, his travels. He talked about his wife. She lay on top of him like a child, listening, following, realizing things were not simple. It was good with his wife, but not perfect. He loved her, yet he wanted a baby and she did not. How strange, Gao Lan thought, her hand idle on his chest, that she would say no to him.

He had already told her he was coming back to China in several weeks’ time. He promised to call her. Then he left. As the days went by after that, as she relented at last and took her other boyfriend’s calls, she understood a little better that she in her own way had been using Matt. She felt better after their night together, more confident.

She started up again with the other man. Almost at once it turned difficult. She began to think of Matt. By the time he returned she was aflame with anticipation. The day he had mentioned came and went. She watched her caller ID screen constantly. If he was in Beijing, why had she not heard from him? She held out another half-day, then called the cell phone number he had given her.

“Hello, Gao Lan.” His voice had a heavy quality. He didn’t want to hear from her. She dropped as fast and deep as a stone anchor.

Still she was warm and cheerful and said they should get together. “I don’t know,” he said, politely perplexed, as if they were on a business call. “Appointments all day . . . I have something on tonight . . .” She heard him turning pages. “Gao Lan, I’m sorry. This doesn’t look good.”

She was shocked by his rudeness. Her opinion of him plummeted.

“Hey,” he was saying, “I’m only here for a couple of days.”

A torrent of curses burned in her throat, but she limited herself to a few cool sentences. “My opinion is like this. We did too much already for you to leave it that way. Whatever you have to say to me, you may say to me directly.”

There was a silence. She heard a long, heavy breath.

“Meet me at four o’clock at Anthony’s on Wangfujing,” she went on, stronger. “It’s right behind the Pacific Hotel.”

A long silence, and then he said, “All right.”

She was waiting there when he arrived. He came in ready, as if he’d rehearsed, which he no doubt had. He moved his big, square body with ease into the seat opposite her. “Before I say anything else,” he began, “I want you to know our night together was special to me. Exceedingly special.”

She was not moved. He seemed so shallow now. “But?” she said.

“But that’s it. I can’t do it again. I’m sorry.”

“No problem,” she said. “All right. But you can
tell
me. To my face. That’s all.” It almost didn’t matter what she said. The toxic jolt she had felt when he dismissed her on the phone needed to be aired in order to be erased.

“Okay,” he said, chastened. Suddenly he looked helpless. “It’s my wife,” he said, as if bewildered by the force of his own emotions. “I belong with her. I love her so much, I can’t lie to her. She would never know, she would probably never find out, but I still can’t do it.”

“The night we were together you didn’t think this way.”

“I didn’t think about anything else but you! I’m sorry. I take responsibility. But I can’t do it again. Can’t turn off reality twice. I’m sorry.”

“Bu yong,”
she said, Don’t be sorry. “I don’t care,” she added, which was not entirely true, and then, “But I wanted you to say it,” which was.

A short time after that she found out she was pregnant. Late the following summer Shuying was born. To Gao Lan, she was always the child of the other man, for he was the one who had vexed her and hurt her and also carried her to the heights. He was the one who against her creeping knowledge of what was right and wrong had become part of the pattern of her life. There had been only the one time with Matt. One time, and then the insult of his dismissal. What were the chances? None. Next to none. No more.

Gao Lan stayed away from Beijing for almost a year. She returned with a story about having gone home to help with a family illness, but work was spotty. The world had moved on. She was not in demand as she had been before. It was difficult to make money enough for herself, much less enough to send home so her parents could care for the baby.

She was also tormented over her inability to identify Shuying’s father. Because of that one night with Matt she could not be sure. It was as if she were being punished over and over for that night. This doubt had kept her from telling either man there was a baby. She knew this was a mistake. At first, though, she had felt that the best thing was simply to wait a little, until Shuying grew into herself and began to look more clearly like one or the other. Then she would approach the man. Meanwhile she kept working.

She lost her job. She didn’t get another one. She refused to give up. She went out every day on interviews until she lost her apartment, too, and then she moved in with women friends, first one, then another. Her parents were calling. They needed money. Shuying, her little
yang wan wan,
her sweet foreign-doll baby — she was the sun and the stars, but she needed so many things. Then her girlfriend told her she would have to find another refuge, for she was giving up the apartment and moving to Shanghai. And that was Gao Lan’s last stop.

She remembered meeting a woman — not someone she knew well, a friend of a friend — who told her she could do well working for a man, as a woman who was kept. The woman meant this partly as a compliment to Gao Lan’s beauty; not all women were qualified for this work, only women for whom certain men would pay. At the time Gao Lan had laughed, embarrassed. She had waited until another time and place entirely to ask someone what such a man took, and what he gave, and how working as an
ernai
might be arranged.

She still saw clearly the first man who took her, Chen Xian from Hong Kong. Fifty-six, hair dyed black, rich, careful about how much he spent on everything, including her, yet fair. He used her for his pleasure, used her hard sometimes, but that was his right. That was what he paid for. He was always kind to her. Him she remembered with affection.

He had met her for the first interview in a bar off Sanlitun. It was a dim place, and they lounged on a couch together while they talked. She could feel him looking at her. Finally he asked her if she would like to dance. She said yes and they went out on the floor. At first they danced apart, but then he pulled her to him and she felt him feeling her body. She could tell that he liked her. She liked him too, well enough. It would be all right.

They went out together a few more times, and on their fourth meeting he made an offer.

“Here’s how it works.” They were in a bar. He signaled for another round of scotch. His was empty, though she had barely touched her own. “I pay you three thousand
ren min bi
a month, plus an apartment. You’ll have a membership at the gym downstairs. I’m in Beijing only a week and a half a month, maybe two. The rest of the time I expect you to keep my face.”

She swallowed. The pay was far more than she could make at a job, especially considering that she’d have no living expenses. He was old. About that she didn’t care. She saw his hand come up from his lap, brown, assured, perfectly manicured. For a second she thought he was going to reach for her, but instead he counted out money, three thousand, the first month. She couldn’t take her eyes away from it. “What do you say?” he said.

She said yes. They were together eight months and then he left her, but only because his wife insisted on it. He let her stay two more months in the apartment. That was the sort of person Chen Xian was, kind.

Since then she’d had her education. Some of it had been cruel, and some of it had been satisfying — like the money she’d been able to send home.
That
was satisfying. It was good to know Shuying was taken care of.