The Last Chinese Chef (5 page)
Read The Last Chinese Chef Online
Authors: Nicole Mones
The shape was familiar, yet the dumpling sounded different from anything she’d ever had before, and it sounded
good.
The truth was, she had never really liked Chinese food. Of course, she’d had Chinese food only in America, which was clearly part of the story. She’d always heard people say it was different in China. Yet even three years before, when she had visited with Matt, they had eaten at more Italian and Thai places than Chinese.
good.
The truth was, she had never really liked Chinese food. Of course, she’d had Chinese food only in America, which was clearly part of the story. She’d always heard people say it was different in China. Yet even three years before, when she had visited with Matt, they had eaten at more Italian and Thai places than Chinese.
The trouble with Chinese food in America, to her, was that it seemed all the same. Even when a restaurant had a hundred and fifty items on the menu, she could order them all and still get only the same few flavors over and over again. There was the tangy brown sauce, the salted black bean; the ginger-garlic-green onion, the syrupy lemon. Then there was the pale opal sauce that was usually called lobster whether or not lobster had ever been anywhere near it.
The menu in her hands held a square of text, framed by an ornate border in the style of scroll-carved wood. At the top it said A BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO CHINESE FOOD. For tourists, she thought, and started to read.
No matter which way you look at history, the Chinese people have been more preoccupied with food than any other group in the world. Compare our ancient texts to the classical works of the West: ours are the ones dwelling endlessly on the utensils and methods and rituals of food, especially the rituals. Food was always surrounded by coded behaviors that themselves carried great meaning. Consider, too, the economics of dining. Take any dynasty; the Chinese were spending more of what they had on food than any of their contemporaries around the world. China has always revered good cooks, and paid them well. Even the most archaic descriptions of early towns tell of restaurants and wine houses jammed along the earthen streets or riverfronts, doors open to the smells of food and sounds of laughter, banners flapping to announce the delights within. Wu Ching-Tzu, in his eighteenth-century novel
The Scholars,
described these places as “hung with fat mutton, while the plates on the counters were heaped with steaming trotters, sea slugs, duck preserved in wine, and freshwater fish. Meat dumplings boiled in the cauldrons and enormous rolls of bread filled the steamers.” Still today, few things to us are more important.
The Scholars,
described these places as “hung with fat mutton, while the plates on the counters were heaped with steaming trotters, sea slugs, duck preserved in wine, and freshwater fish. Meat dumplings boiled in the cauldrons and enormous rolls of bread filled the steamers.” Still today, few things to us are more important.
It was signed by a Professor Jiang Wanli, Beijing University. What he was describing certainly didn’t sound like the food she knew from home. Moreover, the air around her was undeniably bright with good smells and the sounds of chattering pleasure. Each table was filled. Waiters strode past, steamer baskets held high. Bubbles of laughter floated up. Slowly she took in the shrubs, the tasseled lanterns, the cranked-open latticework windows that revealed other dining rooms filled, like this courtyard, with loud, happy, mostly young Chinese.
Could the food in China be truly exceptional? It was possible, she thought now. Well then, she would eat; she would keep an open mind. Of course, writing the article about the chef would have been the perfect way to find out more. Again she felt the stab of regret that he had canceled, so sharply this time that her hand crept into her pocket and lingered on her cell phone. Should she really let it go? No. She should call him again. One more time.
She scrolled through the recently called numbers to his, took a breath, and hit SEND.
It rang, and she heard fumbling.
“Wei,”
he said when he got the phone to his mouth.
“Wei,”
he said when he got the phone to his mouth.
“Mr. Liang? It’s Maggie McElroy again.”
“Hi.” Pause. He was surprised. “How are you?” he said.
“Fine. Thanks.”
She could hear a scramble of voices behind him. He half covered the phone, hissing, and then came back. “Sorry. My uncles are here.”
“I’m interrupting.”
“No. They want me to talk to you.”
“Why?”
“They’ve figured out you’re a female person.”
“Ah.” Funny, she thought. She had somehow forgotten how to even look at it in that way. “Actually I’m calling one last time about the article. I don’t want to overstep, but — I had to ask you again, since I’m here. Won’t you give it some thought?”
“Look — ”
“I don’t have to write about the restaurant. There are so many things. The book. Aren’t you doing a book?”
“Translating, with my father. We’re doing it together. It’s a book my grandfather wrote.”
“The Last Chinese Chef,”
she supplied.
she supplied.
“You know,” he said.
Naturally. You’re my assignment.
“We could write about that.”
“We could write about that.”
“I’m sorry, but it’s the wrong time. I should do that when the book comes out.”
“True,” she admitted.
“Also,” he said, “I’m swamped.”
She was getting the signals, but she never heard
No.
Not the first time, anyway. “Swamped by what?”
No.
Not the first time, anyway. “Swamped by what?”
“By an audition to get on the Chinese national cooking team. The 2008 Games in Beijing are going to have their own Olympic competition of culture — things like opera, martial arts. It’s an adjunct to the opening ceremonies. Food is one of the categories.”
“An audition for the national team?” She digested this. “What do you have to do?”
“Cook a banquet for the committee. There are ten chefs competing for the two northern-style spots on the team. The rest of the team has six spots — two for southern style like Cantonese; two for western, which includes Hunan and Sichuan; and the eastern school, which is Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang, basically the Yangtze delta.”
“So ten of you are competing for two northern spots.”
“Right. Each night for the next ten nights, one of us puts on a banquet for the committee. They’ll choose two. Seems I drew the last slot — mine is a week from Saturday. The tenth night.”
“The last one. The best. So two win out of ten. What sets you apart from the others?”
“I’m the only one rooted in imperial — it’s very rarefied. The emperors had dishes brought in from all provinces, so in some ways I have more flexibility, but also a more rigid artistic standard.”
“And you have ten days to prepare.”
“Yes. Well, nine. The first banquet is tonight.”
“But as a story for the magazine, this is wonderful! Forget the restaurant. Really, Mr. Liang.
This
would be great.”
This
would be great.”
“Sam.”
“Sam. I could follow you through the process. I would not get in your way. You could tell me things — just a little, just what’s comfortable. I’d do a good piece. Contests are one of my specialties.” Why was she having to work so hard to sell this? Most chefs paid PR companies to get them features in places like
Table.
Table.
But he said, “I don’t know. I might not even have a chance. I’m kind of an outsider — the only one doing true traditional, on top of everything else.”
“Whether you win or not, it’s a great story. I can almost guarantee you’d be happy with it,” she said. In fact, with just this one glimpse she could see it take shape. Beijing was a gleaming new city, all that steel and glass forming only a partial façade over its celebrated past. The old and the new were locked in a dance. The winner would be the last one standing. Would it be the old or the new? Some jazzy avant-garde local or this guy, who came back to take up where his grandfather had left off? Whatever happened, it was alive. She hadn’t had this kind of feeling about an article in a while.
Please,
she begged him silently.
Please,
she begged him silently.
“Let me think.”
“I’ll come to where you’re working — only when you say.” She stopped. This was as far as she could go.
Again she heard the little bubble of whispered Chinese behind him. “Shh!” he said, and came back. “Okay. They’ll kill me if I say no. And you’re right. It would be good for me.”
She waited on the edge.
“But you have to forgive me. I can’t dress nicely and meet you in restaurants and hold forth. Not now.”
“Why would I want to do that? I’ll just come and watch you work. You talk when you can. I’ll listen.”
“All right. Let me think — I’m basically going to be slaving every minute in order to get this together. Tomorrow? You want to come tomorrow?”
“Okay.” A smile rose around the corners of her mouth. Again the same strange feeling, of something good.
“Afternoon? Two?”
“Fine,” she said.
“Call me when you’re getting the cab. I’ll tell the driver where to go.”
“Okay,” she said, and just before he disconnected she heard him talking to his uncles, switching back to Chinese with them in mid-thought, without a breath, the melodic pitch, the soft rolling sounds of the words, and then
click,
he was gone. She grinned at her phone for a second, giddy with relief, and then tapped in a text message to Sarah:
Thanks for your message. I’m getting by. Meeting the chef tomorrow. Love, M.
click,
he was gone. She grinned at her phone for a second, giddy with relief, and then tapped in a text message to Sarah:
Thanks for your message. I’m getting by. Meeting the chef tomorrow. Love, M.
She looked up. A waiter was moving toward her through the pools of electric light and the clanging dishes and the voices — was his steam basket for her? Yes. She leaned toward it — delicate, translucent wrappers and a savory mince of vegetables within. The aroma encircled her. She felt she could eat everything in the room. She tried the dipping sauce with a finger: soy, vinegar, little circles of scallion. “Thank you,” she said in English, looking up. But he was already gone in the crowd.
3
Yuan Mei, one of China’s great gourmets, once asked his cook why, since he was so gifted and could produce great delicacies from even the most common ingredients, he chose to stay in their relatively modest household. The cook said, “To find an employer who appreciates one is not easy. But to find one who understands anything about cookery is harder still. So much imagination and hard thinking go into the making of every dish that one may well say I serve up along with it my whole mind and heart.”
— LIANG WEI,
The Last Chinese Chef
The Last Chinese Chef
T
he chef lived in a low, ancient-looking building facing a narrow, tree-lined finger of lake called Houhai. The street that ran along the lake was lined with gray, age-polished buildings. Some were houses, with laundry spilling from their windows and women out front, on stools. Others had been converted to cafés and bars, the latter marked by the buckets of empty beer bottles that had been set out from the night before. The chef ’s place faced the street with nothing but a stone wall and a massive red wooden gate, unmarked except for a small house number on the side. Maggie knocked.
he chef lived in a low, ancient-looking building facing a narrow, tree-lined finger of lake called Houhai. The street that ran along the lake was lined with gray, age-polished buildings. Some were houses, with laundry spilling from their windows and women out front, on stools. Others had been converted to cafés and bars, the latter marked by the buckets of empty beer bottles that had been set out from the night before. The chef ’s place faced the street with nothing but a stone wall and a massive red wooden gate, unmarked except for a small house number on the side. Maggie knocked.
From the other side of the wall she heard steps on gravel, and then a man almost precisely her size, with sharp cheekbones and black hair pulled back to a smooth ponytail, swung the gate open. He could have been foreign — South American, Mediterranean — yet in his way of standing, of relaxing against his joints, she saw instantly that he was American.
“Sam,” he said, and put out his hand.
“Maggie.”
“I’m in the kitchen.” He waited while she stepped over the raised lintel, then re-latched the gate.
In front of them was a green-and-yellow ceramic spirit screen. She paused, unable to stop herself from touching its raised-porcelain design of rolling dragons. “Doesn’t this have something to do with evil spirits?”
“Yes. Supposedly they can travel only in straight lines. This has been here a long time. When I remodeled for the restaurant I left it, thinking I needed all the help I could get with spirits. Bad ones out, good ones in.”
“I don’t know if it works,” she said, “but it’s beautiful.” On the other side of the screen lay an open courtyard with potted trees and mosaic-paved paths. Four rooms with ornate covered verandahs faced inward.
“This is the old layout of a Beijing-style house. There aren’t many left. Up here,” he said, and took her three steps up to the covered porch of the room facing the gate.
“Did you rent it, or buy it? Can you buy property here now?”
“Yes, though you don’t have the same long-term security as in the West — things can change. But this house has been in my family since 1925. It was much bigger then — eight courts, not one. By the time we got it back, a few years ago, it had been whittled down to this.”
“I didn’t know people got property back.”
“Some did — if the government had no use for it. And I know there’s a chance I might not have it forever, either. But for now it’s mine, so I’m going to use it.”
“Great room,” she said, following him through a dark, highceilinged dining room, empty but for one table and a gleaming expanse of black tile floor.
“You see the floor? They soak the tiles in oil for a year. They did that in the Forbidden City. Yesterday I took the tables out. I put them in storage. Couldn’t stand to look at them after my investor backed out. Here’s the kitchen.”
He held open the metal swing door for her to walk in ahead of him. She caught her breath. She had been in a lot of kitchens, but this one was stunningly organized. Every inch of wall was lined with shelves that held bowls and containers and bottles and jars filled with pastes, sauces, and spices. Down one side ran two Western-style restaurant stoves and a formidable line of wok rings. Behind were the large refrigerators and prep sinks. An island formed a raised counter down the center, with three cutting boards that were polished, circular slabs of tree trunk. “You have really thought things out.”
“I had great teachers.”
“Who were?”
“My uncles. Two here, one in Hangzhou.”
“It’s a beautiful kitchen.” She eased toward a stool that was tucked under one end of the island. “And I meant what I said, I don’t want to hold you up. Go to work. Shall I just sit over here?”
“You can sit there. That’s fine. How long have you been in Beijing?”
“This is my second day.”
“What do you think of the food?”
She looked up, face brightening. “Amazing! I’ve had only a few meals so far, mind you, but it hasn’t been like any Chinese food I ever tasted. Not that I’m an expert.”
“You don’t write about Asian food?”
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