The Last Chinese Chef (8 page)

“I earned it.” I was as tall as the sky then, a man. I bent over it with her. “Is it enough for the winter?”

“Yes. More than.”

“Then I will return with this much every year.”

Her eyes filled and spilled over with gratitude as she slipped it into a secret pocket she always kept within her clothes. Then she let out a small cry and dropped to grasp me by my knees.

“Ma, stop,” I said. I pulled her up, but my heart swelled with gladness. “I must go,” I said. “Take care of the young ones.”

I ran back through knotted lanes and beaten-dirt intersections where as a child I had played and hidden and stolen crisp autumn pears and seed-studded wheat buns from the carts of vendors. It was the world to me then — neither good nor bad, rich nor poor. Old men lounged on marble steps as they always had, bulky wadding inside their socks for warmth. Small children wore clothes handed down, much mended. Old ladies walked in gray cotton with their hands behind their backs. And here I passed in bright silks, leather on my feet, gold coins gripped tight in my fist.

At the Forbidden City I was well known by the guards and passed quickly through the gate. Avoiding the grottoes and gardens around which were arranged the private halls and apartments of the royal family, I took one of the outer passages back to the kitchen complex. These minor avenues connected an outer web of halls and courtyards, where lived relations and forgotten concubines. They did not matter in the palace, yet they could never leave.

Finally I came to the kitchen. I passed the snack section, the pastry section, the meat section. Usually it was in this section that Master Tan worked. Today, though, my instructions were to meet him in another part of the kitchen. He was to give me a different lesson in
nong,
by making fermented mung bean curd. It was a difficult dish. Reach the rich, heady top point, and it was a dish so delicious one could not stop eating it. Ferment it too far — even a little — and it was repulsive. This was
chao ma doufu,
and we were going to make it in the vegetarian section, a place where they generally specialized in brightly nuanced, mock meat and fish dishes of bean curd and gluten.

I was late, but not by much. If Lord Tan said anything I would throw myself on the ground. “Master,” I would say, “I know. I beg you. Forgive this miserable child who is unworthy — ”

I stopped short in the door to the vegetarian section. No one was there. The counters were cleared and the ranges still cooling. Where was my master? He never came late.

I walked back the way I had come. I passed the rice, bun, and noodle section, where many boys were at work. Some were making thick hand-cut noodles and others a fragrant porridge of lotus root and lotus seed. “Have you seen Lord Tan?” I called, for they were apprentices like me, and between us there were no formalities. No, they had not, and where had I been? “Nowhere,” I said, and silently touched my finger to the four coins in my pocket. I would tell no one until I saw Peng and Xie.

I returned to the meat section. It too was quiet. The great black ranges stood in a row, the glow in their fireboxes snuffed down to red embers. The woks were clean and back on their rack. “Master?” I said, and my voice sounded small and childish in the air.

No one. But I felt something. I felt him. I continued walking toward the back room where the meats were hung and where long banks of prep counters were lined with endless bowls in blue and white filled with all manner of sauces and condiments and accent vegetables, all fresh minced to perfect uniformity.

Then I noticed something.

There were shards scattered on the floor, blue and white; someone had broken a bowl. I froze.

There were his feet. He lay curled around himself as if still in agony, both hands pressed to his chest. I didn’t need to touch him. I didn’t need to feel for his pulse. I knew he was dead; I could tell. The light of knowledge had gone out of him. All he knew had escaped into the air. I glanced around frantically, as if somehow I could find it and gather it back.
It’s in books,
he would say to me if he were here,
go find it.
But he was gone. He was empty and inert.

I dropped and kowtowed to him three times. After the third time of pressing my forehead to the cold tile floor, I rose and began a long and agonized wail for help, not stopping until I heard the jumbled footsteps, the eunuchs and the kitchen workers, the scuffing and clattering. Their faces, their eyes when they stumbled in and saw him, were pale and sick and horror-struck. It was as if civilization itself had died. It was the beginning of the end. All of us knew it somehow, and all together we lowered ourselves to the floor before him. Men and eunuchs crowded into the doorway, ten deep, twenty, and when they saw, they too fell to the ground.

The call was going out. I heard a bell clanging. Suddenly I knew, from deep inside me, that he was going to have one of the greatest funerals the capital had seen in decades, with a banquet lasting three days for his family, his friends and admirers, the princes and the great scholars and the high officials. And I would prepare his glazed duck.

When Maggie finished she sat for a moment in silence. This man in front of her was part of a pattern that went back in time, across generations; he was connected. Not merely to a single person, such as a spouse — she knew how quickly that could be torn away — but to a whole line. No, she thought, a civilization. She watched him move around the kitchen as if from a distance, from a boat offshore, from a life that would never be like his. Not that she felt envy. She had made it one of Maggie’s Laws this past year not to covet the lives of others. She had learned to guard against such feelings in order to continue to have friends, to have a life; almost everyone she knew still possessed what she had lost, which was normalcy and love. She didn’t know yet about this man’s private life, but now that she’d read the prologue, she did see he had something else, something that clung to him like a light. It was a connection over time, insoluble.

As a state of mind, a multigenerational sense was new to Maggie, or at least foreign; she was from L.A., where many people, including her own responsible but solitary single mother, had come from someplace else. People made their own lives; that was what Matt had always said. He’d done it. He placed himself in the world. He spent lots of time on jets and married a woman who did the same. And in his mid-thirties, after years of loving her
because
she was the peripatetic observer and writer he had come to know, he began vexingly to still love her but to wish that she were different. Then the moment he felt it, he had to tell her; that was the way he was. He started waking her early in the morning with his hand on her abdomen, on the warm spot in her center.
Think about it,
he would say in her ear.

What?
she’d ask, sleepy, but then she’d open her eyes and see his gaze and know. She loved this about him. Even when they didn’t agree — as happened, halfway through their marriage, with children — he was a natural river of honesty. She had learned with him to be honest in return, and so she told him the truth, which at first was some version of “I don’t know.”
Let me work a little more,
she would say.
Let me think about it.
They both knew it was not what they’d agreed. Still, she’d consider it.
Give me a year.
In this way they bumped along.

She watched the chef drop the shrimp into a sizzling wok and swoop them around with his arms. She took up her pen and wrote,
He has a shape like a marmot.
It felt good to write, not to think about Matt. Now he was adding something to the wok — what? — which made the shrimp fragrance climb. She didn’t want to break the spell by asking. He turned the shrimp onto a plate and cranked off the hissing ring of flame.

Only then did he turn and see that she’d finished. “Hi,” he said.

“I love this.” She touched the pages. “Can you tell me what happened to them?”

He wiped his hands on his apron. “First the dynasty fell. That was 1911. They had to leave the palace. They all opened restaurants, Peng and my grandfather Liang Wei here in the capital and Xie in Hangzhou. They did well. My grandfather wrote
The Last Chinese Chef
and it was a sensation. Everyone prospered, for a while.”

“Until?”

“Communism. The new government closed the restaurants down. They kept a few places open for state purposes. My grandfather’s was one of those liquidated. That turned out to be lucky, because a few years later they were jailing people who ran imperial-style restaurants.

“That was what happened to Xie. His place in Hangzhou was one of the ones they left open. But later, having his restaurant was what got him sent to prison. He died there. But he’d had a son in the thirties, who grew to be a great chef too. This is my Uncle Xie in Hangzhou — the one I call Third Uncle.”

She looked at her notebook, checking the names. “What happened to Peng?” she asked.

“Peng’s fortune was not shabby.” He pronounced the name back to her the proper way,
pung.
“He was admired by the Communist leadership, especially Zhou Enlai. No matter that he cooked imperial — he was that good. They wanted to keep him. They gave him a restaurant in the Beijing Hotel, Peng Jia Cai. He became
their
imperial cook. In the 1950s that place was the be-all and end-all. He was amazing. Even my father said that of the three of them, he was the best.”

He put down a plate of pink shrimp under a clear glaze. No additions or ingredients could be seen, though she had watched him add many things. The aroma seemed to be sweet shrimp, nothing more.

He took one and held it in his mouth, dark eyes flying through calculations.

Her turn. She put one in her mouth and bit; it burst with a big, popping crunch. Inside there was the soft, yielding essence of shrimp. “How do you make it pop like that?”

“Soak it in cold salt water first. That’s what I was doing when you first came in.”

“It’s great,” she said.

“Good,” he corrected. “Not great. I can still detect the presence of sugar.”

“I can’t.”

He smiled. “Remember I told you we strove for formal ideals of flavor and texture? This dish is a perfect example. One of the most important peaks of flavor is
xian. Xian
means the sweet, natural flavor — like butter, fresh fish, luscious clear chicken broth. Then we have
xiang,
the fragrant flavor — think frying onions, roasted meat.
Nong
is the concentrated flavor, the deep, complex taste you get from meat stews or dark sauces or fermented things. Then there is the rich flavor, the flavor of fat. This is called
you er bu ni,
which means to taste of fat without being oily. We love this one. Fat is very important to us. Fat is not something undesirable to be removed and thrown away, not in China. We have a lot of dishes that actually focus on fat and make it delectable. Bring pork belly to the table, when it’s done right, and Chinese diners will groan with happiness.”

“
That’s
different,” she said, scribbling. “What else?”

“That’s just flavor. We have texture. There are ideals of texture, too — three main ones.
Cui
is dry and crispy,
nen
is when you take something fibrous like shark’s fin and make it smooth and yielding, and
ruan
is perfect softness — velveted chicken, a soft-boiled egg. I think it’s fair to say we control texture more than any other cuisine does. In fact some dishes we cook have nothing at all to do with flavor. Only texture; that is all they attempt. Think of bêche-demer. Or wood ear.”

Maggie considered this. As a concept, texture was not new to her. Many of the greatest dishes she had experienced on the road delivered their pleasure through texture: fried oysters, with their dazzling contrast of inside and out; the silk of corn chowder; the crunch of the perfect beach fry. But all of these relied on flavor too. “You must do something to give them a taste, surely?”

“Yes — we dress them with sauces. But plain sauces, way in the background. Anything more would distract. The gourmet is eating for texture.

“Once you understand the ideal flavors and textures, the idea is to mix and match them. That’s an art in itself, called
tiaowei.
Then we match the dishes in their cycles. Then there is the meal as a whole — the menu — which is a sort of narrative of rhythms and meanings and moods.”

“My God,” she said, writing rapidly.

“Everything plays in. The room. The plates. The poetry.” He plucked up another shrimp with his chopsticks and chewed it thoughtfully. “The problem is, this shrimp falls short of true
xian. Xian
is the natural flavor. If it doesn’t taste natural, the chef has failed to create it.”

“So you’re saying, it’s the natural flavor, but it’s concocted.”

“And there’s the paradox,” he said.

She smiled and wrote it down. “You concoct it how?”

“By adding supporting flavors, mostly. Every flavor has a specific effect on every other flavor. But all this must be invisible. Believe me, a Chinese panel will know this. And this shrimp — right now — is not quite there.”