The World in My Kitchen (22 page)

“I missed you. How was your trip? You look great.”

“I missed you to, but I am tired. Give me a day, and I will tell you all about it. Such an exciting country!”

A week later, I started to write the trekking story. I kept in touch with the Aborigine village and Peter. His trekking venture was slowly picking up, and he hoped that soon he could hire more help.

Six months later, once again, I left on a trip: to Corsica for
European Travel.
I felt good and full of energy. On my return, I started a column “Ask Colette” for the
Daily News.
I loved to write this column. I would receive about twenty letters a week. Some were from older women who would ask me about recipes that they used to cook but had now forgotten how to prepare. Others were from younger women who wanted to reproduce recipes that their mothers or grandmothers had prepared for them and today wanted to cook them for their own children. There were letters from men feeling lonely who wanted to correspond with someone. They wrote that my responses were like me chatting with them in the kitchen. Once I even got a letter from a prisoner who read my column and wanted a recipe for a clam bake. He wrote that as soon as he was out, he would prepare one and invite me to share it with him. After publishing the recipe, I never got my invitation or heard from him.

I wrote this column for ten years until the spring of 2004.

I
n 1980, I met Peter Lee,
a young Chinese restaurateur, through a friend, Clara B. Clara’s job was to help Chinese immigrants adapt to New York life and assist them when they wanted to open businesses and maneuver through the city’s intricate bureaucracies. Peter had come from Hong Kong a few years before and had saved enough money to open a Chinese restaurant. The restaurant opened to rave reviews, including mine in
New York
magazine, and Peter was on his way to becoming another immigrant success story. Very quickly, we became good friends. Together we explored all the new Chinese restaurants, and I became very knowledgeable in the different styles of Chinese Cuisine.

Meanwhile, in 1985, Jimmy was asked by the United Nations to go to Bhutan. Every year, Asian countries who were members of the South East Asian Organization hosted, each in turn, a week long conference. Bhutan needed a conference center, and Jimmy was chosen as the designer for Bhutan’s first conference center.

One day while Jimmy was in Bhutan, Peter came to me with a project. He wanted to make a film in China. It seemed that Chinese authorities, realizing the popularity of Chinese food in the United States, had decided to open a new cooking school outside of Beijing to teach young Chinese the art of Chinese Imperial Cuisine. To accomplish this, they had brought out of exile the aging Imperial chefs to teach the new generation who grew up during the Cultural Revolution how to cook. They believed a return to Imperial Chinese cooking traditions would bring tourists and dollars to the mainland. Peter believed I was the perfect person to make a film about this new cooking school. I liked food and was very familiar with Chinese cuisine, at least the Chinese cuisine of Chinatown.

Travel was very difficult in China in those years. Many places were not open to tourists and permission to enter China to make a film required great patience. I was daunted by all the obstacles, but Peter urged me to agree to go with him to China, and he explained that he would take care of me there. He had friends in high places, and many doors would be opened for me as long as I presented myself as a filmmaker interested in the cooking school.

I had always dreamed of going to China. I was also very interested in the Chinese Muslim population there. I had read that they were the largest minority in China and that during the Cultural Revolution, they had defied the government and kept their customs and dress. They also had received a food allowance from the government since Muslims did not eat pork, and lamb was more expensive. I wanted to see if there were remaining food traditions that recalled Arab influences. Going there and exploring the Silk Road had been one of my dreams. Peter agreed that once the film was made, we would explore Muslim towns.

However, I knew nothing about filmmaking and needed to add a professional to the team. I approached a few friends who introduced me to a young film director, Joseph G. Joseph had made several successful documentaries, but he knew nothing about food. He was, however, enthusiastic about going to China. When I expressed my doubts about doing a film on a cooking school, he said, “Don’t worry I will take care of everything. We will need two cameramen. You will tell me what is important and unique, and I will take care of the rest. We will also need Peter to help us translate. Let’s write a proposal and show it to the Public Broadcasting System, Channel 13.”

PBS agreed to the project, made easy for them to approve because the Chinese government was funding the trip. I approached
The New York Times Magazine
and proposed a story on Arab food traditions among the Muslims in China, a story I would research by exploring the Silk Road. The editors felt that this was a fascinating food story. Suzanne Chen, my Chinese friend who had first introduced me to Chinatown, promised that her family would give me the names of people in China who could help me. They researched the names of restaurants, told me more about Islamic China, and what mosques in Guangzhou and Beijing were worth visiting.

We were ready to go; the only thing left was to obtain a visa. Once we had a commitment from PBS, Peter and I filed dozens of forms, and we were ready to leave. A week before we were scheduled to go, Peter arrived at our house and told me that a visa for him and me had come through, but that Joseph’s and the cameramen’s visas would come later. They would meet us in Beijing. He suggested that we first spend a week in Hong Kong. Joe was upset, but Peter was confident that their visas would come in time and that we would meet in Beijing in two weeks.

Hong Kong overwhelmed me: the noise; the crowds; the tall, modern buildings; but most of all the food. The Peking duck in Hong Kong was the best I had ever had with its crackling skin, its tiny pancakes made with rice flour and black sesame seeds, the duck meat tender and succulent. I tried drunken shrimps for the first time: Live shrimps are put in a bowl covered with rice wine, to get drunk before you eat them. I had never seen nor eaten so many different varieties of seafood, from razor clams to ten different types of shrimps, lobsters, crabs, and oysters. But what I liked best were the Chinese markets and street food. Ducks, chicken, barbequed birds, and sausages hung in open stands. Vegetables were piled high. Dozens of different kinds of Chinese cabbage from Chinese flowering cabbage to Chinese flat cabbage to bamboo mustard cabbage where the leaves, big and curled, were attached to a long, root-like stem. I saw barrels filled with four types of bean curd, from bean curd so light and soft that it was eaten with a spoon to firm bean curd for frying. I ate tiny barbequed birds on a skewer, just like how we used to eat them in Cairo in the fall. I tried tripe, rice noodles with shrimp and pork, broiled tofu, and many more delectable dishes such as agar-agar smoked ham salad, shark’s fin with Chinese cabbage, lotus leaf rolls, and golden coin mushrooms.

Meanwhile, Peter was organizing our trip to mainland China. He introduced me to his “high placed” friends, whispering in my ear, “These are very important people. Like the Italian Mafia in New York. They’re helping us to make the trip there easy.”

“What about Joe and the crew?” I asked every day.

Peter’s answer was always the same: “Don’t worry; they’ll meet us in Beijing.”

A week later, with the help of Peter’s “friends,” we got two first-class seats on a train to Guangzhou. Peter was extremely excited to enter China again. He had not been home for close to fifteen years. He was carrying an attaché case that he kept near him at all the times. “Dollars,” he whispered to me. “To open all doors in China.”

We were met at the station in Guangzhou by a shabby looking man who spoke English well. Henry (all the people I met in China who dealt with foreigners had two names: one Chinese and one Western) was to be my translator. I called him my spy because he followed us everywhere. Henry smoked cheap cigarettes endlessly; and while we were driving around the town, he would point out garish new buildings with great pride. I learned that he was single. “Too expensive to get married, no apartment,” he would tell me. For Henry, learning English was the door to a better life.

Since I was traveling with Peter, I was considered by the government to be, like Peter, an “overseas Chinese.” We were housed not in American hotels, but in Chinese luxury hotels or guest houses where no one spoke English. Henry handed me a schedule for the next five days. I was expected to visit a school, a food-processing factory, a calligraphy museum, and other sites in which I had no interest. I told Henry that I wanted to visit the Muslim quarter and market, the mosque, and several restaurants that friends in New York had recommended to me.

The next few days were a nightmare. I was bored visiting factories and eating in hotels, and each time I asked Henry about restaurants I wanted to see or markets I wanted to go to, the answer was “They are closed; it is too far…it no longer exists.” Peter was no help with Henry because he was always away organizing the trip to Beijing, Xi’an, and Harbin. This is when I decided to take things into my own hands.

Every night when Henry brought me back to the hotel after one of his boring trips, he would say, “Are you alright? Are you tired? Do you want to sleep late, or shall I pick you up at eight?” This time when Henry popped the usual questions, I said that I was very tired, that I wanted to sleep late, and that could he pick me up at eleven.

The next morning I got out of the hotel at six o’clock. Across from our hotel was a park. I walked over and saw men and women of all ages doing Tai Chi. The streets were jammed with bicycles pedaled by people going to work. I took a long walk, found a market, and saw vendors selling different types of noodles, vegetables, meat, and live poultry. There were also poor and forlorn old people selling their few possessions. By ten o’clock, I was famished. I found a sidewalk restaurant. The smell of the cooking food was intoxicating. Without hesitation, I sat down and had a bowl of soup filled with rice noodles, pork, and dried shrimps. Then I ate steamed white chicken stuffed with scallions and was given a dipping sauce made with grated ginger, scallions, and oil. The chicken was moist and tender and the sauce spicy: the best food I had had in a week. Suddenly I realized that I only had dollars in my purse. How was I going to pay for this great breakfast? With gestures to the cook, I tried to explain my lack of Chinese money and handed him a five-dollar bill. The cook laughed, pocketed the money, and offered me a dessert made with tapioca and melon. It was refreshing, not sweet, enchanting; alone worth the five dollars.

Suddenly I looked at my watch, it was 11:30
A.M
. I was late, and I did not know exactly where I was. I saw a taxi passing by and stopped him. However, how do you tell a taxi driver where your hotel is in Chinese? The only name I knew was for foreigners. I remembered that the day before, at breakfast, I had put my chopstick cover in my pocket. If I were lucky, the name of the hotel would be there in Chinese. I showed it to the driver. He shook his head, motioned me to get in, and to my dismay, drove me to the Hilton. I was then nearly an hour late. Once at the Hilton, I explained to the manager that I was an overseas Chinese, showed him the name of the hotel on the chopstick cover. He called my hotel, and something serious must have transpired because suddenly the manager seemed worried and took me back to my taxi who accepted to drive me back after listening to the manager’s angry voice.

Once in the hotel, I was faced with police, several stern men all dressed in black.
Secret police,
I thought; the hotel manager and Henry looked like guilty thieves. I was forcefully reminded that I could not leave the hotel without telling everyone where I was going. I looked at all of them and said very angrily, “I am not going to visit any more factories or schools. I came here to do a story for
The New York Times.
I have a list of places I want to visit, like restaurants where I want to eat, and if they do not want me to do it, I am returning to New York tomorrow!” A silence greeted my outburst. They all huddled together, then finally Henry came to me and said, “We will do what you want. I will take you to the mosque and to the restaurants that you want to visit, but you must promise not to disappear again.” I was astonished by my success and made myself a promise that anytime they would refuse to do what I wanted, I would raise my voice and threaten to leave.

I then called Doctor Chan, a Chinese university professor, a friend of Suzanne’s father. He agreed to show me around. During the next few days, we visited a tenth-century mosque, ate in Muslim restaurants, and visited markets and stores for foreigners. I now looked more favorably on Henry, so I bought him a carton of American cigarettes after he promised he would never again smoke in the car. A few days later, Peter, Henry, and I flew to Beijing.

Once in Beijing, Peter told me that the Chinese government had turned down Joe’s and the camera crew’s visas. They would not be coming. I was furious with Peter. I screamed at him for having misled me. His face became redder and redder. He tried to calm me down, to apologize, but I would not let him finish his sentences. I started to cry, still screaming, “What am I going to do? I had committed myself to making a film and now have no way of making it.”

I realized then that Peter knew all along that Joe and the others would not come to China. “Colette, please don’t worry; the film association is going to provide me with a crew; I will pay for everything.” But I had never made a film and had no idea how to proceed. I was in a ridiculous situation, having come all the way from New York, ending up in a weird Chinese Hotel with a man who did not understand any of the problems I was facing.

There was just one thing to do: call Jimmy in Bhutan and ask for help. “Please. You’re an artist; you will know what to film. Please help me.” Peter, by now, afraid of me, promised to secure a visa for Jimmy. Jimmy arrived a few days later.

Together, we wrote a simple scenario and gave it to Peter to translate into Chinese for the film crew. I sat down with Peter, the cameramen, and the director and tried to explain what I wanted: footage of the school as we approach it, the students working, the chefs teaching, the finished dishes, etc.

The cooking school was located outside of Beijing, about an hour by car. It was housed in an old factory. The average age of the chefs and teachers was about seventy. They had been in exile for over a decade and were overjoyed to be back cooking and teaching. I attended cooking classes followed by the camera crew. I spent hours in the kitchen observing the chefs preparing elaborate dinners, teaching the young students how to carve radishes into flowers or Chinese pagodas. By observing them cooking, I learned about flavors, mixing ingredients, and vegetables: how to cut, slice, or chop; how to stir fry, and steam. To my surprise, I discovered that there were no ovens in the kitchens; just enormous steamers with very high temperatures. Large woks were placed over several circles of gas, and around them were pots filled with salt, pepper, spices, cornstarch, soy sauces, sesame oil, and water. All the ranges had spigots of boiling water. The heat was intense, the cooking incredibly fast. As there were no ovens in the kitchen, I wondered,
how did they bake those ducks that we had eaten the night before? Or those you see hanging in the windows of many food stores in Chinatown in New York?