The Last Chinese Chef (23 page)

Then she heard Sam’s footfall on the stairs. Strange that she knew his step already. He reached the door and knocked and pushed it open, then froze at the sight of the three women around her.

“I’m getting a ’do,” Maggie said.

“Ah. I see. Do you want to take a shower? And then we’ll have breakfast.”

Of course, she thought, another meal. “Does someone else need to use the bathroom?”

“Not now. They’re Chinese. They bathe at night. You slept through it.”

The sisters got up and trickled out, sly, smiling, as if now was the time for Maggie and Sam to be alone.

“They like you,” he said. “They told me so.”

“They think we’re together.”

“No,” he said. “I told them we’re just friends.”

“Well, I’m sorry. I took your room.”

“Not in the end,” he said.

She stared, suddenly aware that this was a moment that needed to be broken. “Okay,” she said, “let me wash. I’ll be quick. I’ll come right down.” And he turned quickly and left.

Breakfast was congee, rice porridge with shreds of a briny, pleasingly marine-flavored waterweed and crunchy, salty peanuts. Hard-boiled eggs, pickles, and fluffy steamed buns flecked with scallion surrounded the pot. Two kinds of tea were poured, Dragon Well green, which was Hangzhou’s local specialty, and a light, flowerscented oolong that Sam said was from Fujian. The women sat around her, smiling and laughing. They gave her occasional little pats and presses of affection.
He’s a good man,
their looks seemed to say.
Take care of him.
They misunderstood, of course. They still thought she was his woman. Even the patriarch sent her an indulgent, welcoming smile. She caught Sam’s eye. He shrugged, as if to say he sensed it, but what could he do? Actually she didn’t mind; she liked it. She liked the feeling she had when she was among them.

But soon Sam had to say goodbye. They needed to catch a train in time to make their flight. He embraced everyone for a long time and longest of all his uncle. Maggie embraced them too, pressing her cheek to each of theirs in turn.

They rode down in Songling’s car, with Songzhao in the front passenger seat and Maggie and Sam behind, comfortable, leaning back side by side, easy in the green curves of bamboo light. They came to the lake, with its boats and its tree-shaded serenity, and they curled around it for a while until they reached the hotel. The car idled in the big, looping driveway while she ran up and retrieved her bag, rode the elevator down to the lobby, and checked out. She had never used her room.

They turned away from the lake now and into the crowded streets. Traffic crawled between the tall commercial buildings. Songling and Songzhao were talking softly up front in Chinese. Sam was content, tired. His hair was pulled tightly back in his ponytail, but here in the bright daylight of the car she could see the silver strands weaving back from his temples. “What?” he said, looking at her.

“Nothing.”

“My gray hair.” He reached up and brushed a hand above his ears.

“How did you know I was looking at that?”

“How could I not know? I’m sitting right next to you.”

She nodded, but inside she was thinking no, that does not explain it. Because she had been sitting next to people all her life and most of them never had any idea what she was thinking. Even people she knew fairly well. He seemed to know, though, at least sometimes.

“Maggie,” he said, a bit tentative. “I wanted to say sorry about last night.”

“Sorry why?” she said. “I’m the one who fell asleep in your room.”

“I feel bad, though. I wanted to say something to you. I really did mean to spend the night in the hall.”

Songling and Songzhao were still talking in the front. Songling let out a little laugh and they went right on in Chinese.

“I like you,” Sam said. “I would never want to disrespect you. I went to sleep in the hall
because
I would never do that.”

Got to respect the widow,
she thought with a flash of hurt. “I wasn’t offended,” she said.

“Because I would never do that kind of thing lightly,” he said. “Never did and never have. Well” — he made a small confessional cringe — “I can’t say never. But even though I’m clueless on almost everything, I have managed at least to figure this much out, by this age — that there is nothing casual about people being together that way.”

“It wasn’t like that,” said Maggie. “I made you come in because you were sleeping on the floor. Besides,” she added, as they stared out the window side by side, “I would never do that lightly either.”

“Okay,” he said. The subject was closed. There was a Chinese comic monologue on the radio, punctuated by laughter from a studio audience overlaid by chuckles from the front seat and even, once, a small chortle from Sam. Maggie was getting used to this world she could see around her, the Chinese world, one she could float across like a cloud. It was strange to sense it, to begin to recognize it, but she felt free here. She felt good.

Then they were at the station, and they piled out and hiked the straps of their bags up on their shoulders. Emotional goodbyes went back and forth, and Sam and Maggie exchanged quick embraces with Songling and Songzhao. When she hugged Songling the woman delivered a musical stream of Chinese in her ear, and Maggie gave her an extra squeeze of assent in reply. Whatever Songling said, she agreed with it. Sisterly support. Part of her wanted never to leave, wanted to stay here forever in this place where she couldn’t even understand anyone. The car was running. Sam was behind her. She turned away, reluctantly, and followed him up the steps and through the doors that led into the station.

Chinese cooking accumulates greatness in the pursuit of artifice. Although we say our goal is
xian,
the untouched natural flavor of a thing, in fact we often concoct that flavor by adding many things which then must become invisible. Thus flavor is part quality of ingredients and part sleight of hand. The latter can go to extremes. The gourmet loves nothing more than to see a glazed duck come to the table, heady and strong with what must be the aromatic
nong
of meat juices, only to find the “duck” composed entirely of vegetables. The superior cook strives to please the mind as well as the appetite.

— LIAN G WEI,
The Last Chinese Chef

 

 

T
hey landed and shared a cab into town and pulled up in front of her building. “Well,” he said. A bubble of silence rose between them. They shifted in their seats. Neither had thought of what to say at this moment.

“Okay,” she said. She pulled her bag into her lap, ready to get out.

“Look, I’m going to be working like mad now, but if you have any questions — ”

“Please,” she said, “go ahead, good luck. Don’t worry about me.”

“Thanks.”

“I’m going to start writing.”

“You have enough?”

She laughed. “I’ll say.” She knew perfectly well she didn’t need to interview him or even see him again; all she needed was to know the outcome of the contest. She had enough now for three articles. One of her little books was filled almost to capacity with her notes on what she had seen and observed and heard him say; another book held the obsessively careful printed list she always made of everything she had eaten. Never in fact had she accumulated a list so heavily annotated with descriptors, explanations, anecdotes, as this one was. She had enough. Too much. The hardest thing was going to be sorting through it and choosing where to place the spine of her piece. She turned to him. “Do call me, please, after it’s over, and let me know how it went. To say I’ll be waiting to hear would be a monumental understatement. Five days, right? Saturday night? I’ll be burning candles.”

“Do some voodoo for me.”

“I will, the best voodoo of all. I’ll write your story.”

He laughed, the open, unexpected laugh that she knew somehow, every time she heard it, was the laugh he had brought with him from home. This was the boy part of him. She liked it. She had liked a lot of things about him these last two days. “Good luck,” she said. She took his hands and pressed them between hers, then climbed out of the cab.

Inside the apartment nothing had changed. There was her computer, her suitcase, which she had left behind these last days in favor of a tote. Down the hall was the bedroom where she’d slept with Matt three years before and which she had — admit it — avoided on this trip, staying at night in the living room until she could barely stand, then feeling her way down the hall in the dark and toppling into bed. In the bathroom hung her one towel. Already she had worn her little groove here.

She stood for a while, staring through the darkness at the glittering columns of buildings outside, noticing that she felt different for the first time in many months and interested in the change. It was China maybe, the brash thrill in the air, the unmoored freedom of being far away from her life. Yet it was also the pleasure of the days with Sam in Hangzhou. She still had her grief, but it no longer felt lodged in all her cells and fibers. She had assumed she would grow old with grief, that it would become like her face or her walk or her habits of speech. Now she saw that grief too was a thing that could change.

She turned away from the window and the city. It was time to start work on her piece, even though Sarah had generously told her she did not have to hurry. “Forget your usual deadline,” she had said when she called from Los Angeles a few days before. Maggie had explained to her that the competition wouldn’t culminate until Sam’s banquet on Saturday night, and the article couldn’t be filed before it did. “Fine,” said Sarah. “Take extra days if you need to. Stay longer. Just get home in time to do your holiday column.”

“Are you kidding? Like I’d miss that one.” Maggie was famous for her holiday columns, which were petulant triumphs of grinch humor. She hated the holidays. Holidays were about home, which, as a societal concept, she had never really understood. Each year she took her column in exactly the opposite direction, writing about having Christmas dinners at lunch counters, or waking up in cheap hotels in winter beach towns, or cruising convenience stores to see who else, like her, slipped out that day to buy a six-pack and some chips. “Don’t worry,” she said to Sarah. “I’ll be back for the holiday piece.”

Now it was time to start on Sam Liang. She moved to the couch with a blank pad, a pen, and her notebooks. She had always worked this way. Before she moved to the computer she began by hand, making a web of all her best thoughts and images and ideas and memories. She read through her notebooks and picked out everything that she loved. That was her first cut; she had to love it. If she didn’t love it, why would anybody else?

Then she traced through her jottings to find lines of meaning and pick out moments. When these were repatterned on a fresh page she could usually begin to sense her centerline. Then she would start to write.

Thoughts tumbled easily through her now, and she quickly filled the page with memories of the Xie family. The truth was she had been happy with them, happy for long stretches, hours. She had managed to forget the darkness and feel like she used to feel — like a friend to her life, engaged. It was Sam, yes, and China, but she had to admit that it was the family, too. They had such a net of connectedness between them. Even though it was not hers, rightly, she felt blessed to have been near it and been bathed in it for a while.

She took a fresh sheet of paper, wrote
Guanxi
in the center, and drew a circle around it.

That was it.
Guanxi.

Then right away she questioned it. Could a column on food really be about the Chinese concept of relationships? But the more she looked at it the more she knew this was the way to write it. Because this was the heart of the cuisine, at least the part Sam had managed to show her. From the family on out, food was at the heart of China’s human relationships. It was the basic fulcrum of interaction. All meals were shared. Nothing was ever plated for the individual. She realized this was exactly the opposite from the direction in which Eurocentric cuisine seemed to be moving — toward the small, the stacked, the precious, above all the individual presentation. The very concept of individual presentation was alien here. And that made everything about eating different.

Food was the code of etiquette and the definer of hierarchy too. Sam had made her see that a meal was food but also a presentation of symbols, suggestions, and references, connecting people not only to one another but to their culture, art, and history.

She paused. She wasn’t sure — did
guanxi
apply only to the connections between people or to ideas as well? She took a separate sheet of paper and wrote this, her first question for Sam, at the top. Then she set this page aside. They had said goodbye for now; she wasn’t going to call him. She wanted to. She found it difficult to get used to being without him. But he needed to work. She would wait.

 

The next morning when he woke up Sam thought briefly about how much money he had spent on his cell phone this month, then decided that it didn’t matter, because this was Uncle Xie. He punched in his father’s number. “Please,” he said when Liang Yeh answered. “Won’t you come? He’s asking for you. You still have time.”

“Do you think I do not want to?” Liang Yeh lashed back. “It is not easy, this thing you say.”

“It’s not. I know. It’s hard for you.”

“You say you know, but you do not.”

“Well, if you want me to know, write it down. You’ve always said you would.”

“I already have,” said his father.

“What?”

“You heard me. You will see! I will send it to you by e-mail.”

“When?” said Sam, thinking,
He may have started, but this could take months.

“Right now,” said Liang Yeh. “My computer is on. Is yours?”