The Last Chinese Chef (6 page)

“No.” Maggie dug her little book out of her bag along with her pen. “I do American food, and not the haute stuff, either — everyday food, regional food, the human story — you know, cook-offs, fairs. Festivals.”

“What a lot of people really eat,” he said.

“Exactly.”

“To the Chinese way of thinking that can be very profound. We have a long tradition of valuing the rustic. Of all food we find it the closest to nature, the most human. How long have you been doing it?”

“Twelve years.”

He studied her. “So why’d they choose you for this?”

“Because I had to come anyway.”

“Right. You said something about other business.”

“I did,” she said, and moved on. The less he knew about that, the better. With him she had a job to do. Besides, nothing made her appear old and pitiful faster than saying she was a widow; she had seen this fact clearly since Matt’s death. “To your question, though. To me the Chinese food here is completely different. I may not be a specialist, but, I mean — I work for a
food
magazine, for God’s sake. I have eaten in my share of Chinese restaurants. And what I’ve had all my life does
not
taste like what I’ve had here. Not even remotely.”

“But anybody who knows the food here could have told you that.”

“Really?” She folded back the book to a clean page.

“Chinese-American is a different cuisine. It’s really nothing like Chinese-Chinese. It has its charms, no question. But it’s not the same.”

“How?”

“Chinese-American evolved for a different reason — to get Americans to accept a fundamentally different way of cooking and eating. They did this by aiming at familiarity, which was kind of weirdly brilliant. From the time the first chop suey houses opened, that’s what they were selling, the thing that seems exotic but is actually familiar. Reliable. Not fast food, but reliable in the same way as fast food. Here it’s different. It’s the opposite. Every dish has to be unique, different from every other. Yet all follow rigid principles, and all aim to accomplish things Western cuisine doesn’t even shoot for, much less attain.”

She was scribbling as fast as she could.

“I’d better get to work,” he said. He lifted an apron from a hook on the wall, looped it over his head, and tied it. He turned his back to her and stood still for a second, head bent, silent.

She stared at his ponytailed black hair for a second, and went on writing.
Casts his eyes down while he ties his apron. Looking for something, like an anchor falling, seeking the depths.
She watched, saying nothing.

First he piled plump shrimp in a colander and tumbled them under cold water, then worked a towel through them until they were dry. In went egg white, salt, and something squeaky-powdery that looked like cornstarch. She watched his brown knuckles, lean and knobby, flash in the mixture. He slid it into the refrigerator and washed his hands. “Now,” he said.

She liked that he had turned his back to her to work. It was good that he was comfortable with her here. That made her feel at ease too. He seemed to be finished with the shrimp, at least for the moment, so she ventured another question. “You said Chinese cuisine in China tries to accomplish certain things.”

“Yes.”

“Things that set it apart from the cuisines of the West?”

“Yes.” He thought. “For one thing, we have formal ideals of flavor and texture. Those are the rigid principles I mentioned. Each one is like a goal that every chef tries to reach — either purely, by itself, or in combination with the others. Then there’s artifice. Western food doesn’t try to do much with artifice at all.”

“Artifice.” She wanted to make sure she heard him right.

“Artifice. Illusion. Food should be more than food; it should tease and provoke the mind. We have a lot of dishes that come to the table looking like one thing and turn out to be something else. The most obvious example would be a duck or fish that is actually vegetarian, created entirely from soy and gluten, but there are many other types of illusion dishes. We strive to fool the diner for a moment. It adds a layer of intellectual play to the meal. When it works, the gourmet is delighted.”

“Okay,” she said, “artifice.”

“Call it theater. Chinese society’s all about theater. Not just in food. Then there’s healing. We use food to promote health. I’m not talking about balanced nutrition — every cuisine does that, to some degree. I’m talking about each food having a specific medicinal purpose. We see every ingredient as having certain properties — hot, cold, dry, wet, sour, spicy, bitter, sweet, and so on. And we think many imbalances are caused by these properties being out of whack. So a cook who is adept can create dishes that will heal the diner.”

“You mean cure illness?”

“Yes, but it’s more than that. People have mental and emotional layers to their problems, too. The right foods can ease the mind and heart. It’s all one system.”

“You cook like that?” she said. “You yourself?”

“Not really. It’s a specialty.”

“Okay,” she said, writing it down. “Healing.”
As if food can heal the human heart.
“Is that it?”

“One more. The most important one of all. It’s community. Every meal eaten in China, whether the grandest banquet or the poorest lunch eaten by workers in an alley — all eating is shared by the group.”

“That’s true all over the world,” she protested.

“No.” He looked at her, and for the first time she saw a coolness in his face. He didn’t like her disagreeing. “We don’t plate. Almost all other cuisines do. Universally in the West, they plate. Think about it.”

“Well . . .” That was true. Every Chinese restaurant she’d ever been to had put food in the middle of the table. “I concede,” she said. She was going to write
Does not like to be crossed
but instead wrote
All food is shared,
because it was true. He was right.

Now he had taken a rack of pork ribs out of a plastic bag of marinade and was cleaving them off one after another. His tree trunk barely shuddered. She watched him swing his arm and his shoulder. He was wiry but strong. “Your grandfather was a chef,” she said.

“Right.”

“And your father too?”

She saw him hesitate just a moment before resuming.
So — some problem there.
“Yes.”

“Then he was the one who taught you to cook?”

“No. My father stopped cooking when he went to America. I learned here.”

“How?”

“Well, first of all, I had always cooked. I learned the basics from my mother — brisket, chicken soup, challah. But four years ago I decided to change my life, and really learn to cook. I came here. I told you, my uncles. They’re incredible chefs, they’re older, retired — they taught me. Full-time. I spent the first few years basically cowering beneath them. They were rough. What you might call old-school.”

“Are those the guys I heard on the phone?”

“Two of them. That was Jiang and Tan, whom I call First and Second Uncle. Jiang Wanli and Tan Jingfu. There’s a third one, Uncle Xie, who lives in Hangzhou. Xie Er.”

“Are they your father’s brothers?”

“No. Xie is the son of a man who worked with my grandfather in the Forbidden City. Tan is the grandson of my grandfather’s teacher, Tan Zhuanqing, who was a very famous chef. Jiang grew up in Hangzhou with Xie; they were best friends. So we aren’t blood relations, but our ties go back for generations. Those kinds of connections are very strong here. Stronger than in the West.”

“And all three were chefs?”

“Tan and Xie were chefs. Jiang is a food scholar, a retired professor.”

“I knew I saw that name somewhere. I read a little introduction by him on a restaurant menu.”

“That’s him. He cooks, too; he says he doesn’t, but he does.”

“And they were hard on you?”

“Terrible! They called me names. They’d hound me, shout at me, slam utensils to the floor when I didn’t move fast enough — and then if I made something that wasn’t perfect, they dumped it in the garbage.”

“Ah!” She was writing, enjoying his words and the scratch of her pen on the paper. “And then your father. You say he just stopped cooking? Why?” She looked up.

Again he hesitated, his hand in midair with the cleaver. Then back to chopping. “It was too hard for him in America.”

“Still, I wonder why he didn’t teach you.”

For Sam Liang, answering this question was always hard. Everyone in China remembered his grandfather as a chef, fewer his father; still, everyone assumed his father would have been the one to teach him. In truth, Sam would have given anything for his father to have taught him, to have cared — even if he’d yelled at him, insulted him, and cuffed him the way his uncles did. But his father refused. He said no Liang was ever to cook again, certainly not his son. Chinese cuisine was finished. It was dead. Great food needed more than chefs; it needed gourmet diners. These people were as important as the cooks. But the Communists had made it illegal to appreciate fine food or even remember that it had once existed. They had the masses eating slop and gristle and thinking it perfectly fine. In America and Europe, too, Chinese gourmets were all but nonexistent. There were some left in Hong Kong or Taiwan, but that was it. So said Liang Yeh.

When Sam had tried to suggest to his father that things had changed, that a world of art and discernment and taste was being reborn in China and that going back might be worthwhile, the old man erupted. “Never return to China! Never set foot there! It is a dangerous place, run by thugs!”

In fact, even though Liang Yeh was pleased that Sam had graduated from Northwestern and become a schoolteacher, he really had asked only two things of Sam in life. One, never go back to China. Two, marry and have a son. On neither front had Sam delivered. He brought the cleaver back down again between the ribs.

The American woman seemed to read his silence. “So okay, your father didn’t teach you, your uncles did. But am I correct in saying you’re still cooking in the style of your grandfather?”

“Definitely.”

“And like him, do you feel you’re the last Chinese chef ?”

“Not the last,” he said. “Maybe one of the last. I think I’m more optimistic than my grandfather. He thought it was all over. He was convinced imperial style would die with his generation. My father’s generation thought the same. Yet there always seemed to be a few who kept it alive.”

“Why?”

“Because it was the highest thing. Not only did it incorporate all China’s regions, all its schools of cooking, it was a chef ’s dream like no other. In the Forbidden City’s kitchens you could create anything. They had the finest ingredients from all over the world. Hundreds of people cooked for one family.”

“So who became a cook?”

“Ah,” he said. “Not what you think. Not only certain people.
Any
person could do it. It was one of the weird democratic aspects of feudal China. Some chefs were rich and educated, some poor. Cooking was one of those jobs that relied purely on talent. Any man who excelled at it could get to the top. People respected great cooks. In fact, one chef in the eighteenth century B.C. was made a prime minister, his food was so good. His name, Yi Yin, is still spoken with awe thousands of years later. To this day, when people talk about negotiating matters of state, they say ‘adjusting the tripods,’ in honor of him and the bronze vessels of his time. You’ll see for yourself, the longer you stay here: we are ultra-serious about food.”

He talks of the Chinese and says “we,”
she wrote.
He has a dark face, indeterminate. If I had not known he was Jewish-Chinese I would never have guessed. He could be Greek, Afghan, Egyptian. He could be from anywhere.
“So what kind of person was your grandfather before he became a chef ?”

“A slave.”

“There was slavery that late?”

“China was feudal until 1911.”

“So he was owned by someone.” She wrote,
Descendant of slaves.

“But he wasn’t born that way. He sold himself. It was either that or starve with his family.”

“Where was he from?”

“Here. Beijing. The back alleys. You should read the story.” He pointed his knife at the far end of the counter. “I set it out. It’s the prologue to the book. It was the first thing I put in English. You can take it with you if you like. Or read it here.”

“Really?”

He turned back to his ribs. “Either way. Right now I have to cook.”

“Should I go in the next room?” she said, even though she hadn’t seen any place to sit in there. Just the one table. No chairs.

“As you like.” He was gathering minced green onions in a mound.

Maggie watched him for a second. She liked the rhythms of the sounds he made, and the raw, unblended smells. Everything he thought and felt and said was condensed into the food under his hands. And it was comfortable here — which was odd to her, because she felt in most people’s kitchens the way she felt about homes in general: wanting to leave as soon as possible. Do her interview, get her notes down, and leave. “I guess I’ll stay,” she said.

He was focused now on cooking and gave only a distracted nod. So she leaned on her elbows and turned past the title page,
The Last Chinese Chef,
and started to read.

 

& & & My name is Liang Wei. I was born in the nineteenth year of the reign of Guangxu, the year they in the West call 1894, into the lowest rung of society. My family were alley dwellers. Five of us lived in one room, but we had city pride. We were folk of the capital. At least we knew we were better than millions of others.

My father was a vendor who went every day to the great open squares inside the Fucheng Gate, to sell glasses of tea to the men who streamed in alongside lines of camels and mule-driven carts. In the heat of the summer and the numbing ice of winter, he went. The caravans bought, or they did not. Too often not. As the years went on, his face became set with the etchings of his fate.