The Last Chinese Chef (28 page)

Hide where? I thought. How? But we came to a small cove and the captain took the dinghy down and put me off in calm, waist-deep water. We parted like brothers, with promises to meet again in this life or the next. I waded ashore in what felt like liquid ice, with my dry clothes over my head. They hauled up the dinghy and waited until they saw me emerge on a beach of pebbles and dry myself before they reversed their engines. Even then I stood waving until the lights of the boat had receded far out onto the water. Then I turned and walked straight inland.

The trouble was, there was no land. Once I stepped off the pebbles I was in knee-deep water. I thought if I kept going I would be out of it, but the opposite happened. I was swallowed by water. Darkness fell. Creatures awoke. I heard the calls and slithers of every kind of inhabitant. I sloshed forward. I didn’t know where I was. I was not cold; instead I burned with fever. I had to stop, lie down. I couldn’t find a dry spot big enough. The best I could do was to sit in a wet lap of roots, half in the water, half out, my head against the tree, until I lost consciousness.

When I awoke I was lying in a flat-bottomed boat, warm, heavenly, covered with a blanket, looking up into the freckled face of my mother. She was poling the boat. Surpassing Crystal, with her kind face and her strong hands; what was she doing here? Sitting behind my head with his hand on my shoulders was a young boy. It was myself. It was a dream. No. It was death. I had died. That was it.

I was not dead, I was ill, and I was taken through the sweet milk of human goodness to a rough house on stilts, where I burned and sweated with fever. The woman cared for me. Hers was the face of God to me. She rarely left me when it was at its worst. She cooled me with wet cloths. The boy, called Longshan, came and went, helping her.

I grew better. They lived in the swamp, far from their nearest neighbors in the rural commune. I sat on the porch, weakened, watching the light change over the waterweeds, which teemed, full of life, even in the approaching winter. Liuli — that was the woman’s name — was a deft hunter and trapper. Her job in the commune was trapping eels for the workers’ kitchens. This was the year when Chinese had to cease cooking at home and eat their meals in mess halls run by their work units. Luckily Liuli lived far from the village, and so from this particular social experiment she was excused. She delivered live eels twice a week and in return she received a modest quantity of rice, flour, oil, matches, and other staples.

Naturally she was able to supplement this with the skimmings from her catch, but eel was only the beginning of what Liuli managed to bring to the table. She and Longshan went out and came back with snakes, waterfowl, frogs, and all manner of waterweeds and lily bulbs and lotus roots and aromatic marsh plants. I watched them with awe and ate their good, simple food. I grew strong again.

They understood that no one should know I was there. Liuli said nothing on her trips to deliver the eels, and outside of that they saw almost no one anyway. The boy did not go to school. He had no father. What became of the man who begat him I never knew. He was a lonely child, half-wild; he attached himself to me as quickly as a water vine.

I could have stayed there forever. Liuli was a simple woman, almost too shy to look me in the face, though she had nursed me away from death and washed every part of my body when I was sick. I respected her and would never have so much as looked at her in the man-woman way without her invitation. But I loved her. I don’t know if I loved her as a woman or a sister or an angel, or in a part of the heart where those things don’t matter. Yet with her and the boy Longshan I was, in those weeks, as happy as I have ever been. Barely able to communicate — for she spoke only a local Fujian dialect I could not understand — we had come to know each other’s human spirits through the unfolding days, first of sickness, later of laughter and shared chores.

One night, before I left, I cooked for them. I waited until they were out trapping eels. They knew nothing of who I was or what I could do, so when they returned and found my meal upon the table their chins all but brushed the floor. Such heights of pleasure I felt then.

I had prepared eel, of course, but not the stewed eel she made almost every night. Instead I made salt-and-pepper eel, thin little crisp-fried slices of fillet with a pungent wild pepper dip. I roasted a duck in the manner of Tan Zhuanqing, using the method passed down by my father, and then I made a second duck entirely of soy and gluten, and stuffed it with lotus root and lily bulbs and dried tofu and wild garlic, all bound by a mince of the dark green waterweeds that grow among the grasses. I roasted it until its skin was as crisp and shiny as that of the real duck.

The food was too much for them. The way it looked and smelled and tasted overwhelmed them. They had never had such dishes, even though each was prepared from the same foods they ate every day. Their faces lit up when they tasted it, and yet it made them almost frightened of me, of the fact that I could turn their food into a meal such as this. Liuli carried the things to the sink afterward and refused for the first time to let me help her clean. She deferred to me. She avoided my eyes.

That night, I mentioned going. She was neither sorry nor glad. Of course I had to go. I did not belong there. I was not of their home or their lives. By cooking for them I had broken the bubble. Our separate-ness, the vast differences between us, now defined us. Liuli was self-conscious in front of me. She held herself away. I wanted to reach for her more than ever, but I did not. She was a good woman, a good mother; she and the boy had saved my life. Above all I had to show respect. I spent my last days on the water, playing with Longshan, unable to stop myself from casting long, speculative glances back up at the house where I knew she sat, divided, thinking of me.

In the end she gave me some money she had saved, and that decided it. She pressed it on me; she insisted. I think we both knew if she hadn’t done this I might never have left, and she didn’t want that. She knew I would never have been able to look at her straight across, as an equal, which is the least any woman deserves.

So she gave the money and I took it. Living as she did, on the water, she knew people who plied the sea for their living and could not be contained by governments or laws. Such people would take a man to Hong Kong and drop him on an outlying beach amid incurious fisherfolk — all it took was money. In China there has always been the
hou men,
the back door, which can be opened by money or relationships and through which many things can be negotiated. Thanks to her that door opened for me. When I went through it I was to keep going until I reached America, but I didn’t know that then. I only knew it was the last time I would see her. I climbed into a boat at the edge of the swamp. She poled away backward, her eyes on mine, her face still, remarkably, like the face of my mother.

In the Peking dialect of my youth, food was always used to describe the basic things. To have work was
jiao gu,
to have grains to chew. To have lost one’s job was
da po le fan wan,
to have broken the rice bowl. These words made the difference between life and death for people who were poor. So these words contained a world.

— LIAN G WEI,
The Last Chinese Chef

 

 

O
n Thursday evening, after several days of cooking and sleeping and more cooking, Sam found his eyes straying to the clock. Tonight was Yao Weiguo’s banquet for the committee — Yao, his main rival. Tonight was Yao, tomorrow Wang Zijian, and then, Saturday night, the last and tenth night of the competition, Sam. Although radio call-in shows had been burning with exchanges over the merits of the ten chefs, and wagers had been laid, the panel itself had kept completely quiet. None of them had leaked anything about the banquets thus far. Everything in the media was speculation. Sam had not heard a thing.

He felt blessed to have the last slot. His flavors would be the final ones to linger in the judges’ minds. On the other hand, they might be exhausted. He would take care not to overwhelm them. Better to reach for greatness in simplicity. This was what he had in mind anyway.

He had forty-eight hours left. What remained was the last rehearsal of each dish, especially the ones that were new to him — these had to be done over and over. He was also still assembling bowls, plates, platters, paintings, and calligraphy in tune with the arc of the meal. Once any facet of the meal had struck a resonance in the diner, he wanted everything else in the room and on the table to multiply the effect. The effect could not be overt. It had to build quietly.

He looked again at the clock. There was so much to do. He should work. But he felt a nervous and unceasing tug to go out, too, to go to Yao’s side of town, to walk down the
hutong
that ran behind Yao’s restaurant, the Red Door, to get close to his banquet, see what he could feel, what he could hear, what he could smell. He closed his eyes.
Don’t do it.
But he knew he would.

Night was dropping as he locked his gate, shadows growing, and he felt a familiar wave of love for the area he lived in. His neighbors felt the same. He could see it in the way the grandmas walked the small children, the old men shouted over their card games and in hot weather pushed their undershirts up to their armpits. It was in the way packs of young girls walked the lake, showing off their gazelle bodies in the latest formfitting clothes. He loved it for all these reasons, and then doubly, because in addition to everything else he was living in the house in which his family had lived, on and off, for more than eighty years.

The amount of effort and money Sam had poured into restoring all but the small north-facing room was another sore spot in Liang Yeh’s refusal to come back. Sam wanted to bring him here. Show him.
Here, Ba. Look.

He had told him as much when he called him again, this morning. “The main thing is, Xie needs you. He’s hanging on to see you. And you should come. Your house is waiting, your father’s house. It’s safe.”

In response to this, at least, Liang Yeh had been merely silent. This was an improvement.

Sam walked to the subway, went south and changed lines. A few stops to the west brought him to the neighborhood of Yao’s restaurant. He walked for a while, distracting himself as if on an aimless stroll. In time he gave in and drifted into the
hutong
that ran behind Yao’s place. No one would see him walking. It was dark.

The high rear windows of the place were flung open. As he crept closer he heard laughter from inside and the clink of dishes, then a rising cheer.
“Hao! Hao!”
came the voices, Good! Good! Sam felt the reflexive curl of tension. He shouldn’t have come.

He heard a sound to his right and turned to see a figure step out of the shadows — no, not one figure, two. Who?

Sam made a silent mental shriek. It was Jiang. And Tan. Their mouths dropped in recognition too.

The long stare devolved into suppressed laughter, and in a second all three of them were heaving and holding their sides. They hushed one another, which only made it worse.

“Shh!” Sam sent a look to the back windows of Yao’s restaurant, which were open.

“Come!” Jiang croaked, wiping his eyes. “Why should we stand here? Let us walk over to the Uighur night market. It’s just a few blocks. Have you eaten? I have not. I may faint from starvation! I may die! Come.” And the three made their way down the
hutong
.

In the market, cheap lights were strung across the alley and vendors shouted behind great wok rings with lids that lifted off to stately puffs of steam. Row after row of Uighur men with dark Eurasian faces ran charcoal grills, where they produced lamb in every form, from skewers to the tender minced meat that was marinated, griddle-fried, and stuffed in split sesame flat cakes.

No doubt Yao’s meal had been brilliant, Sam thought as they walked through the people and the tables and the hot smoky aromas. But what was that to him? His meal would be brilliant too. He felt confident when his uncles were beside him.

After much surveying, they settled on thick hand-cut noodles with green vegetables in broth and a huge platter of dense, chewy, cumin-encrusted lamb ribs. They ate in the companionable silence of relatives assigned to one another long before any of them were even born.

As Sam ate, his eyes roved the crowd. After a minute he saw a distinctive curtain of black hair coming toward him — Xiao Yu, the girl he had seen David Renfrew approach that day in a restaurant. “Hi,” he called out when she came close.

She looked over, surprised. “Oh, Liang Cheng,” she said, using his Chinese name. “I read the article in the paper about the competition. I hoped for the best. How was your banquet? Was it successful?”

“I haven’t gone yet,” he said. “Saturday night.”

“Wish you success.”

“Thank you. And you? How are you?”