The Last Chinese Chef (2 page)

“You mean me,” she said.

“I don’t know who else. It’s important, Maggie. We’ll help you. Give you a translator. You can use the company apartment. You still have Matt’s key?”

“I think so.”

“Then get a flight. Come in to the office when you arrive.” He paused. “I’m sorry, Maggie,” he said. “About everything, about Matt. It’s terrible.”

“I know.”

“None of this was supposed to happen.”

She took a long breath.
He means Matt, hit by a car on the sidewalk. Killed along with two other people. Random.
“I’ve wrestled with that one,” she said. “So this child — ”

“A little girl.”

She closed her eyes. “This girl is how old?”

“Five.”

That meant something would have to have happened six years ago. Maggie scrolled back frantically. It didn’t make sense. They were happy then. “If you’ll give me the months involved I’ll go back through my diaries and see if he was even in China then. I mean, maybe it isn’t even possible. If he wasn’t there — ”

This time Carey cut her off. “Winter of 2002,” he said softly. “I already checked. He was.”

 

The next morning she was waiting in the hallway when Sarah, her editor, stepped from the elevator.

“What are you doing here?” Sarah said. “You look terrible.”

“I was up all night.”

“Why?”

“Bad news about Matt.”

“Matt?” Sarah’s eyes widened. Matt was dead. There could be no more bad news.

“Someone filed a claim.”

Sarah’s mouth fell open, and then she closed it.

“A paternity claim.”

Sarah went pale. “Paternity! Let’s go inside.” She unlocked the door and steered Maggie to the comfortable chair across from her desk. “Now what is this?”

“A woman filed a claim against him in China, saying she has his child.”

“Are you
serious?
In China?”

“Yes, and because of the agreements between our two countries, this claim can be ruled on in China and collected from there.”

“Collected,” repeated Sarah.

“Generously,” said Maggie.

“What are you going to do?”

“Go there, right away. I have no choice. I’ve never asked you, in twelve years, not even when Matt died, but now I’m going to need a month off.”

“Please! Doll! We run old columns all the time when someone has an emergency. You’re the only one who’s never asked for that. Don’t even worry about it. And a year ago” — Sarah looked at her, eyes soft with unspent empathy — “I told you to take off. Remember? I practically begged you.”

“I know.” Maggie reached over and clasped her friend’s hand. “The truth is, work kept me going. I needed it. I’ve always been like that. I’m stronger when I’m working. I don’t know how I’d ever have made it through without it.” She looked up. “I’m better lately. Just so you know.”

“Good. By the way, your last check came back.” Sarah showed her the envelope. “Do you have a new address?”

“I got a new P.O. box, one closer to where I’m living.”

“Where are you living?”

“In the Marina,” she said, and left it at that.

Sarah wrote down the new mailing address. “Thanks. Anyway, of course you can go, take a month off, we’ll use an old piece. Don’t even think about it. Maybe it’ll be good for you, actually. You should make the best of it. Recharge.”

Maggie spoke carefully. “Do you feel I need to recharge?”

“No. No, it’s not that, it’s just . . .” Sarah paused, caught between friendship and responsibility. “Lately you don’t seem that excited about food. You must have noticed it too. I don’t get the old sense of wonder.”

I don’t either, Maggie thought sadly. “In which stories did that bother you?”

“Well. The one on the Pennsylvania Dutch. Couldn’t you have found anything charming about them?”

“You’re talking about people whose principal contribution to cuisine is the pretzel. Who make perfect strangers sit at a table and share fried chicken. Whose idea of a vegetable is a sliced tomato. And don’t get me started on their pie!”

Sarah smiled. “See, you’re as wonderful as ever. Just go off like that. Let yourself go.”

Maggie laughed.

“And don’t forget that part, too. You always found the happiness in food.”

“I’ll try.”

But now Sarah’s small smile melted, and concern took its place. “Do you think — there’s no possibility this is true, is there?”

“You mean Matt? I have no idea. Did he tell me anything or lead me in any way to think anything? No. He went to China on business sometimes, but so did all the lawyers in his office.”

“You went there with him.”

“I did, once, for a week. Three years ago. Nothing. And you know me. I am watchful. Being attentive is the way I write, and it spills over. I sensed nothing. But this, if it happened, would have been a few years before that. I can’t think like this, Sarah, is the truth; I’ll go crazy. I have to go and get a lab test, and that’s that. Then on from there.”

“It’s going to be a difficult trip,” Sarah said, now as her friend.

Maggie nodded. “And just when I was getting the guy kind of settled in my mind, you know? And in my heart. Plus, to be honest, Sarah, even though it’s necessary and all, it’s not really a good thing for me not to be working, even for one month. I perform better at everything when I’m working.”

“Are you saying you’d rather work?” said Sarah.

“Of course I’d rather work, but I can’t. I have to go there and see to this.”

Now a new smile, different, the impish smile of an idea, was playing on Sarah’s face. “Would you like to work while you’re in China?”

Maggie stared. She wrote only about American food. “How?”

“File a column from there. We can run an old one — I already told you, it’s no problem, you have some classics I’d love to see again — but we also have an assignment in China. It just came in. I can give it to anyone, in which case I’d have to send someone. Or I can give it to you, since you are going, and it can be one of your columns.”

“You don’t think I’m an odd fit?” said Maggie. She did do ethnic food, of course. From the Basque country-style platters of the San Joaquin Valley to the German sausages of central Texas, it was impossible not to. American cuisine had so many incoming tributary tastes. She knew them all. What she never did was
foreign
food.

“It’s a chef profile. American guy, born and raised here, but half Chinese.”

“Hmm. That’s a little closer.”

“He’s not cooking American,” Sarah said. “The opposite — back to the old traditions. He’s descended from a chef who cooked for the Emperor and in 1925 wrote a book that became a big food classic,
The Last Chinese Chef.
Liang Wei was his name. The grandson’s name is Liang too, Sam Liang; he’s translating the book into English. He’s a cook. Everything he does is orthodox, it’s all according to his grandfather, even though Beijing seems to be spinning the opposite way, new, global.”

“I like it,” Maggie said.

“He’s about to open a restaurant. It’s going to be a big launch. That’s the assignment, the restaurant.”

“Look, I won’t lie, for me it would be ideal. I would love to write it,” said Maggie. “Not to mention that it would keep me sane. It’s just — I don’t know how you can give it to me. I’m the American queen.”

“Sometimes it’s good to mix things up. Anyway, you’re going. When are you leaving?”

“Tonight.”

“Tonight! You must have a ticket.”

“I do. And I’ll have a rush visa by midday. Tell you what, Sarah, if you just reimburse me for the ticket, I’ll take care of all the other expenses. I do have to go there anyway.” And she did have the company apartment.

“I can sell that,” said Sarah. She shone with satisfaction. She loved to solve a problem. “Are we there yet?” she said. “Is that a yes?”

They knew each other well. Maggie had only to allow the small lift of a smile into her gaze for her friend to read her agreement.

“Good,” said Sarah. “So.” She handed Maggie the file. “Sam Liang.”

 

In Beijing it was late evening. Yet people were still out, for the autumn night was fine and cool, faintly sharp with the scent of the chrysanthemums along the sidewalk. It was the local life in his adopted city that Sam Liang loved the best, like here, the people shopping and strolling on Gulou, the street that went right up to the dark, silent drum tower for which it was named. Sam barely glanced at the fifteenth-century tower, which rose in the center of the street up ahead. He didn’t look into the brightly arranged shop windows, or the faces of the migrant vendors who had set up here and there on the curb. He searched ahead. There was a cooking-supply store on this block. His Third Uncle Xie had told him about it. Xie lived in Hangzhou; when he came north to Beijing he always stopped there.

Sam was hoping to find a chopping block, heavy, round, a straight-through slice of tree trunk, the kind that Chinese chefs had always used. He had two for his restaurant and he needed a third; a busy restaurant really needed three. Every place he’d tried had cutting boards, but they were the plastic ones — the new, modern alternative that had taken hold all over the capital. Plastic was cleaner, people said, safer; it was the future.

Sam didn’t agree. He hadn’t come all the way to China to switch from the traditional tree slab to plastic. Plastic ruined a fine blade. Besides, it was true what his grandfather had said, that wood was a living thing beneath a man’s knife. It had its own spring.

Ah, he spotted the store ahead — its lights were on, it was open. If any place still had the old-style chopping blocks, it would be this one.

More than once Xie had explained how to choose one. “Never buy from a young tree, only an old one. Make sure its rings are tight with age. See that the block’s been conditioned properly with oil, that it has a sheen. Don’t bring home the wrong one.”

“And what kind of wood?”

“When I was young all chefs used soapwood. Now most chefs use ironwood, though some like the wood of the tamarind tree from Vietnam. Listen to Third Uncle. Choose the wood that feels best under your hands. Forget the rest.”

Sam opened the door to the shop. In one hopeful sweep he took in the long shelves with their stacked woks and racks and sieves and steamers. He saw the cutting boards, white plastic, in their own section. He saw only plastic; no wood, no tree trunks.

“Ni zhao shenmo?”
said a woman’s voice, What are you looking for?

It was the proprietress, a white-haired woman Sam recognized from Xie’s description. “Elder Sister,” Sam said politely, “I seek a chopping block, but the old kind, wood.”

“We no longer have them.”

“But why?”

“They are not as hygienic as the plastic. Especially now, you know how it is, everything is supposed to be clean.”

He knew what she meant — the Games. “But if I may ask, when you stopped selling them, did you have any left?”

“No,” she said.

His hope was sliding.
“Zhen kelian.”
Pitiable. “My Uncle Xie told me he thought I could find one here. Do you know him? Your old customer? Xie Er?”

Her old eyes widened. “You know Xie Er?”

“He is my uncle.”

She looked hard at him. He could feel her weighing the Eurasian mix in his face. Everyone did it. He was used to it. It was the light above his head, the air in which he walked. She wouldn’t find anything in his face anyway, for Xie Er was his uncle not by blood but by other ties. “His father and my grandfather were brothers in the palace.”

“You’re a Liang,” she said.

“Yes,” he said, surprised.

She slid off her stool, stiff, and opened a back door behind her. Sam moved closer. She touched a switch, lighting a storeroom of crowded shelves and boxes. “In here,” she said, and he followed her. “This one.” She moved some papers to the side.

As soon as he saw it, he knew. It was about two feet across, seven or eight inches thick, still ringed with bark, everything finished to a dull gleam. A heavy metal ring was embedded in one side, for hanging, as such a block should be stored vertically when not in use. He could imagine it ten years from now, twenty, its cutting surface worn to a gentle suggestion of concavity, changing with him, with his cooking, under his hands. He wanted it.

“I could pay you cash for it,” he said. “I’d be so happy to do that.”

“Do you cook?” She was eyeing him. “Yes?” she said at his emphatic nod. “Then just give me a moment. I’ll think of a price.”

“Please take your time,” he said softly, but inside he was overflowing. He reached out a practiced hand to feel the chopping surface. “And sister, if you happen to know, this is what sort of wood?”

“That?” she said. “That is the old kind. Soapwood.”

 

Maggie stood in the airport in front of the candy counter. Matt had always given her candy corn. It was their signature candy, something she used to say every relationship should have. For them it was more of a sacrament than a food. The first time he brought it home he’d had in mind a joke on her American food specialty, but that was soon forgotten and it became his parting token. He would present her with a little bag before leaving on a trip. She could still picture how he’d looked one morning in their bedroom, in the slow-seeping dawn light, packed, dressed, ready to go. When? A year and a half ago? They both traveled so often that they rarely rose for each other’s early departures. That particular morning she was half-awake, drifting; she could hear the rustle of his pants and the crinkle of plastic as he dug in his pocket for the little bag of corn. She heard him settle it by her bedside lamp and lean down to kiss the frizz of her hair. Just that. Too nice to wake her. Then the click of the door. Remorse bubbled in Maggie now. So many times she had let him go like that.

She walked over to the plexiglass tube filled with orange-and-white kernels and opened a plastic bag underneath. On the day he left for San Francisco, the last day she saw him, he did not give her any candy corn, because he was coming back that night.