The Last Chinese Chef

10

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

They 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?”

“You already wrote it? You finished it?”

“Yes,” said the old man, and a minute later it appeared in Sam’s in-box. He could hardly believe it. He had pushed his father for years to write down what had happened. Sam noticed the size of the file. A long document.

He saved it and backed it up, and then put it aside to read later. He had to focus on his menu right now.

It was not just the perfect dishes – and getting those right alone would take all of the next few days – it was the play of the menu itself, its rhythm and its meaning and its layers of reference. On the surface it was a banquet of at least twelve courses, to be staged for the panel on a specific night. It sounded simple, for those were the rules in their entirety. Sam knew, though, that the meal would be judged on so many other levels.

He needed help. He needed sustenance. So he opened The Last Chinese Chef, to the section on menu.

The menu provides the structure and carries the theme and atmosphere of the dinner. The theme can be witty or nostalgic, literary or rustic. It is developed in the meal like a line of music.

Before beginning, give consideration to opulence. Too much of it is perverse. Yuan Mei said, don’t eat with your eyes. But extravagance of some kind or another, whether in ingredients, effort, or talent, belongs in any great meal.

There is no one structure to a feast. Many forms can be used. Yet there is a classical structure, and this can serve as the chef ’s foundation: four hors d’oeuvres, and four main courses plus soups; or for larger and more extravagant circumstances, eight and eight.

The hors d’oeuvres should amuse while they set the theme of the meal and fix its style. Then the main courses. Start with something fried, light, gossamer thin; something to dazzle. Then a soup, rich and thick with seafood. After that an unexpected poultry. Then a light, healthful vegetable, to clarify, then a second soup, different from the first.

After this you reach the place where the menu goes beyond food to become a dance of the mind. This is where you play with the diner. Here we have dishes of artifice, dishes that come to the table as one thing and turn out to be something else. We might have dishes that flatter the diner’s knowledge of painting, poetry, or opera. Or dishes that prompt the creation of poetry at the table. Many things can provoke the intellect, but only if they are fully imagined and boldly carried out.

To begin the final stage the chef serves a roast duck. Then a third soup, again different. The last course is usually a whole fish. The fish must be so good that even though the diners are sated they fall upon it with delight. And then, almost with an air of modest apology because the dishes have been so many, a dessert course is served, something contrived of fruits or beans or pureed chestnuts or even rice, which would only now be making its first appearance at the table as a pudding or a mold, or as a thickener in a sweet bean soup. If the chef ’s skill is great, no matter how grand the meal has been, this too will quickly be eaten. & &

Sam put down the book. Clearly, he was going to need an underlayer. There had to be a unifying principle. The more he thought, the more he wanted it to be something literary.

What better place to start than with Su Dongpo, the poet? That was what Third Uncle would recommend. He could almost hear the old voice saying it. The pork dish that still carried his name was probably the dish Sam found himself most frequently served when in Hangzhou. When it was right it was perfect in its way, the pork flavor deep and mellow, the fat sweet and soufflé-soft. Simple. The recipe left behind by the poet himself could not have been plainer: a clean pan, the pork, a little water, a low fire, and the willingness to wait. Patience above all. Chefs over the centuries had added the enhancements of soy sauce, wine, spring onions, and ginger in the initial two hours of simmering, then removed the aromatics and bathed the pork in only its juices for four hours of steaming. Correctly prepared, the dish was a triumph of you er bu ni, to taste of fat without being oily, paired with nong, the dense, meaty, concentrated flavor.

Sam had been thinking of a variation. Why not make the dish in eight-treasure style, steaming it in a mold the same way one made the sweet rice pudding ba bao fan? He could pack the pork in with rice, lily buds, ginkgo nuts, dates, cloud ear, dried tofu… He could put the braised pork on the bottom, upside down. Keep the fat there. Steam it for four hours. So rich, though, as the rice soaked up the fat; too rich. Maybe he should dislodge the mold slightly, tip it an angle to drain the rendered fat before flipping it over onto a plate.

This notion came from Sam’s American half; no Chinese chef would get rid of the fat. But couldn’t he achieve you er bu ni with a lower proportion of fat? He would have to try it, test it, taste it. That meant making the dish at least five or six times before Saturday. He reached for the paper that held his list and added this new task: figure out how to reduce the fat.

Life in Beijing had changed, after all. Fat had once been a critical part of the local diet, and for good reason. Never in Ohio had he felt anything so bone-cracking cold as the frigid Beijing winter. In earlier times the open-air style of the capital’s traditional courtyard homes provided little protection. Heating systems had been localized – the kang, or family bed, built over fire-fed flues, the braziers that defended only parts of rooms against the icy wind from the north. Many people back then had simply worn heavily padded clothing during all their waking hours, inside and out. They loved and needed the fat in their food. Then there were the poor people, who ate mostly cu cha dan fan, crude tea and bland rice. Meat was too expensive to serve as a major source of calories, so they ate fat to fill out their diet. As these shadows of the past had come clear to Sam through his years in the city, he understood more and more why heart-clobberingly fatty dishes like mi fen rou, a lusciously savory steamed mold of rice, lard, and minced pork, had been long-time favorites. But people had central heat now. Even the lowest laborers ate animal protein. It was high time, Sam decided, to drain some of the fat.

Learning about the food of Beijing had been one of the side pleasures of his four years here. Historically, the capital seemed to have drawn its main culinary influence from the Shandong style. With an emphasis on light, clear flavor and subtle accents such as scallion, this cuisine gave birth to at least one somewhat distant descendant that became well known in the West, wonton soup. When done right, this soup was typical of Shandong style in its clarity and its fresh, natural flavor.

Yet the cuisine of Beijing was also the cuisine of the imperial court. From the Mongols to the Manchus, successive dynasties brought the flavors of their homelands. Certain rulers, such as the Qianlong Emperor in the eighteenth century, expended considerable energy seeking out great dishes from all corners of the nation, going so far as to travel incognito in order to sample these dishes at their original restaurants and street stalls. Qianlong was even said to have boarded a lake boat poled by a simple woman, and to have paid her to cook for him. Any dish that interested the Emperor was immediately tackled by a team of chefs. In this way the food of every province became part of the palace kitchen. These things Sam had learned from reading The Last Chinese Chef.

What had happened to food in the decades since his grandfather’s book was published also interested him. As Beijing had grown and molted, especially during the building frenzy that began in the early 1990s, the city was awash in migrant labor. Construction could not proceed without it; in this respect China was much like America. But in China the migrants didn’t come from other countries; they came from rural areas and remote provinces. As workers from Sichuan flooded in, restaurants, cafés, and stalls opened, and soon Beijingers developed a taste for hua jiao, prickly ash, Sichuan peppercorn. It became a hot condiment; everyone had it in their kitchens. Workers from Henan brought their hong men yang rou, stewed lamb; those who came from Gansu brought Lanzhou la mian, Lanzhou-style beef noodles; and from Shaanxi came yang rou pao mo, a soup of lamb and unleavened bread. From the northeast came zhu rou dun fen tiao, stewed pork with pea or potato starch noodles, and suan cai fen si, sour cabbage with vermicelli.

Then there was the food of the far northwest, which was Islamic. In the 1980s, along with the first inroads of privatization, illegal money-changing bloomed. Waves of Uighur migrants from Xinjiang were drawn to Beijing, where they helped revive street-food culture with their signature kebabs and dominated the black market in currency. They also left a lasting stamp on the food of the capital, with their great round wheels of sesame flatbread, their grilled and stir-fried lamb, and their incredibly fragrant Hami melons.

Sam brought his attention back to the steamed dongpo pork and rice dish he had in mind; yes, he would drain the fat. He knew enough about food now. He had the confidence. When he steamed it and turned it over he’d have a rich, deep brown dome of treasure-studded rice with the pork now on top, cut into the exact squares so important to the dish, the precision of the shape setting off the softness of the flavor.

Of course he would have to leave at least a thin layer of fat. For the Chinese gourmet, it was everything. It should be light and fragrant, with a xian taste like fresh butter. It should melt on the tongue like a cloud, smooth, ruan, completely tender. Sam knew he would have to make the fat perfect. Before beginning the simmer he would salt-rub the meat to draw out the flavors that were too heavy, and then he’d blanch it several times for clarity.

He put a stack of CDs on shuffle-play and set to work. He felt happy for the first time since he left Uncle Xie, since he held the papery body to him and felt the stale breath of the dying on his cheek. His uncle was going to go soon, but he would want Sam to cook, to make a great dish like this one. They had said the last goodbye. He put the square of pork on the board and rubbed it with coarse salt.

Carey was in his office worrying when Maggie called. His mother was in the hospital again back in Connecticut, and she was failing. He had to weigh whether to fly back. It was not the first time. He had flown back several times before. Each time, they had said goodbye, and he had told himself that the next time, even if it looked like the end, he would not return. Still.

In so many ways Beijing was starting to feel too far away from his old life, from the person he used to be. It was not just his mother, now dying, and his sister and her sons, now in elementary school – it was his friends, too. He was gregarious. People were an asset he had always known how to accumulate. He had made enemies as well – a few – but these were not so much kept as discarded along the way. He had little trouble blocking them from his mind and heart. Carey went out of his way to maintain a positive picture of himself, and accordingly it was not his practice to look at his dark spots. He covered them with many, many friends. Quite a few lived in America. As he grew older and lived farther away, he should have missed them less, but the opposite happened. He thought of them more. Perhaps it was because his links with his old friends still felt untarnished. He had been a younger man when he knew them, more generous, more true.

He should move back. This thought came to him often lately, but he never did much. What he had here was far too pleasing. At first Carey had seen only the obvious freedoms, the ones that had made Matt so wild so quickly. In time Carey understood that China would allow a man to re-create himself, from the inside out, as someone new. A foreigner could make of this world what he wanted. For some it was the unimaginable wealth one had in the local economy, for others the success with women. He’d even seen some who came to China as modern ascetics; those were the respectful ones who donned the shabby clothes of the scholar and disappeared into rented rooms in the hutongs, the back lanes, to learn Chinese. Whatever one’s dream picture, China, incessantly indulging Westerners even as it did not fundamentally welcome them, provided the frame.

The trouble was, eventually the dream was over. One woke up. Morosely he fiddled with his phone.

The receptionist called through to him to say Maggie was here. “Send her back,” he said.

As soon as she walked in, he saw that she looked different. Her eyes had been circled by care and sadness. Now she looked almost glad. “Congratulations,” he said. She had every reason to feel good.

“Thank you. Here are the permissions, signed.” She passed the pages across the desk. “I’ve kept copies. In six more days I’ll hear from the lab.”

“That’s quick!”

“I paid for rush service. And I shipped it from Hangzhou instead of bringing it back here.”

“Smart,” he said. “So.” He folded his hands. “Did you see her?”

“Yes.”

“Did she look like Matt?”

“That was a strange thing,” she said. “No. At least at first I didn’t think so. She’s a big-eyed, pretty little thing. She looks like an elf. None of the gravity Matt’s face had. But then – I couldn’t understand anything she said, of course – there’d be a certain light in her eyes, a way of turning her head and looking, and I’d be stabbed by this feeling, Carey, I mean stabbed. Really. Like it was him.”

He felt a bolt of sadness, listening to her. She could so easily have been imagining things. “Lucky you’re getting the results so fast.”

“Yes,” she said. “But talking about that – seeing Shuying did make me wonder. What did she look like, Gao Lan? Do you remember?”

“I think so,” he said. She may have sounded casual, but he was not fooled. Any wife would bide her time, pretend not to care, and then pounce when the moment was right to ask. “She had an old-fashioned kind of Chinese look, an oval face, like a woman in a painting.”

“What did she do?”

“If I remember correctly, she was a midlevel office worker. There are so many young women with modest English skills like her in Beijing. I didn’t know much about her.”

“How old?” said Maggie.

“Let me think. By now I suppose thirty, or thirty-two.”

He watched Maggie absorb this. Surely she must have guessed that Gao Lan was not as old as she.

“So,” said Maggie, “explain this to me. Why, all this time, has Shuying been raised by the grandparents?”

“Oh. That’s very common here. A lot of people do this. Historically all the generations lived together, in one compound – not now, now they live apart, but many grandparents still take care of the children. They say, if you need an ayi, why give away money to a stranger? Give to your own parents.”

“But Gao Lan works so far away.”

“Perhaps she can’t make a living in Shaoxing.”

“Her living – that’s another thing we learned. She’s working at a logistics company. We didn’t get the name. Just, logistics.”

He made a note. “That’s pretty broad. Find out anything else?”

“Yes. You sitting down? You ready?” She leaned forward. “Matt wasn’t the only man. Gao Lan was seeing another foreigner at the same time. The grandparents believe the chances of Shuying being Matt’s are only fifty-fifty.”

“How could you know that?”

“The grandparents said so.”

“I can’t believe they’d tell you that.”

“They didn’t know they were telling us. My friend pretended not to speak Chinese. They provided a translator – and then they spoke with complete freedom in front of us.”

“Oh.” He smiled at her, admiring. She had guts. “Your friend is Chinese? Or Western?”

“Half,” she said.

“Ah. A woman?”

“A man.”

“I see.” He looked Maggie over again. Maybe this was the reason for the lift of spirit he had noticed when she walked in. Good. He would like to see her get her soul back. Why? he wondered. Maggie was not really his friend. He had liked her when he met her three years before, but that was because she came with Matt, and Matt had become his friend in the course of the all-night rambles that had taken them to the very edges of what the Chinese called the guiding, the fixed rules. Don’t worry, I’ll keep your secrets, Carey had said to him. Naturally this meant he might someday have to lie to Matt’s wife, but since he didn’t know her back then, it was easy to promise. Now Matt was gone, and he was helping the wife – of course. It was his job. Shi wo yinggai-de, he thought, one of the first simple Chinese expressions he had learned, It’s what I should do.

He opened the file in front of him, slid the permissions into it. In the beginning and the end, he was a lawyer. He was always grateful for the way structure held things together. He drew out a sheet he’d prepared.

“I think you’ll feel better once you see this,” he said. “Maybe you’re right and there’s only a half-half chance the girl is his, but let’s just say she is. I figured out that your exposure isn’t as high as you think. Matt left you the house, right?”

“Yes – ”

“I hope you don’t mind that I looked all this up. It wasn’t hard. The firm handled the will, after all. So – the life insurance was enough to pay off the house. And you did that. Right? That’s what it says here. Paid off the house.”

“Yes – ”

“That means you’re in good shape. If you hadn’t paid off the house, I’d be worried. Where you’re exposed is in what’s liquid. See? Your primary residence is off-limits. So if everything he left you is invested there, you don’t have to worry, no matter what happens. They can’t touch it.”

“The house,” she said.

“Right.”

“I sold the house.”

A silence. “But you bought another,” he answered. It was one of those hopeful statements that stops just short of being a question.

“No.”

“Then where do you live?”

“A little place I rented.” How little, she knew he couldn’t imagine, so she left it at that.

“Where’s the money?” he said.

“In cash.”

His voice tightened up. “Then you can lose half of everything.”

“Clearly,” she said. “But first of all, that’s only if she’s his daughter. And if she’s his daughter, why is that losing? She should have it.”

“Half of everything? In cash?” He withdrew the spreadsheet and put it away, realizing she wasn’t even going to look at it. “I can’t believe you’re saying that.”

“Well, I am.”

“Am I wrong? Or do you sound like you actually wouldn’t mind a match from the lab too much?”

“It’s not like that. Some things you don’t get to mind or not mind. They just are. Maybe that’s what’s changed – I met Shuying. She’s not theoretical anymore. She’s a kid. If she’s Matt’s, I’ll take care of her. I can’t believe you’d even suggest I do anything else.”

He bristled faintly in response. “There are degrees, you know. Anyway. Maybe she’s his. And maybe she’s not. If she’s not, that’s it. We get rid of the claim and we’re done.”

“And Shuying?”

“Then Shuying is not our problem. They file against the other guy. At that point it’s none of your business.”

“What if they need help doing that?”

“Maggie,” he reproved her.

“I don’t want the kid left out in the cold.”

“Stop. Get the test back. Then we’ll talk.”

“All right,” she said, “but only for now. Until I hear.” She rummaged in her purse and came up with the newspaper clipping. “I brought this to show you. Did you ever see it? It was in the news after Matt died.”

Carey looked at it and felt his heart contract. There was Matt, the man by whose side he had prowled the magical night and returned, again and again, to the rigor of day. There was Matt on the ground, stilled, splayed. Purses and briefcases were scattered around. Carey had imagined Matt’s death so many times, seen it, thought of it. Now here it was, the street corner, the crowd. Pain crept up and stung at him. People clustered around Matt in the picture. A woman bent over him, caught by the camera looking up, eyes frightened wide.

The woman. He stopped. His skin felt like it was going to lift right off his body.

“What is it?” Maggie asked.

He pointed to the grainy, shaded picture. “That woman there? See?”

“I see,” said Maggie. The woman bending over Matt, yes, she had seen her a thousand times. Studied her face. “Nobody ever got her name. I’d have given anything to talk to her. Maybe he said something, at the end. If he did I’d like to know. But nobody knew who she was.”

“I may.”

His voice was a thin, hesitant thread, but it made her head snap up.

“It’s just possible – ”

“What?” Maggie felt all the air go out of her, leaving nothing.

“This is not a good picture. It’s not clear. Maybe I shouldn’t say anything. But.” He brought the tip of his finger to the grainy uplift of the woman’s face. “I think you should prepare yourself for the possibility that this could very well be…” He swallowed. “It looks like Gao Lan.”

Maggie burst out the front door of the building like somebody swimming up from the deep, holding it in, lungs screaming for air, her heart refusing, denying. On the sidewalk she could not get her breath. Everyone passing her was safe in a group, twos and threes and fours. She jostled and bumped among them, the only one alone. She’d had a pattern in her life once, a pattern of two. Her and Matt. No more.

If Gao Lan was with him the day he died, everything shifted. The wheel turned again. That meant they had a relationship. Then there was a much better chance Shuying was his, or at least that he believed she was his. If he even knew. Did he know? Maggie followed this scenario several moves down her mental game board. Matt may have known nothing of the other guy. He may have known only that his own timing had been right. That would have been enough. His generous nature, his goodness, would have done the rest. That and how much he was starting to want a child of his own. So maybe he knew, after all. Maybe he lied to Maggie more than she wanted to believe.

She felt she was falling down a dark hole. The man she’d always thought she’d known, who had lived in her memory all this past year, was ebbing. In his place there had materialized another, darker one, a shadow of her husband, a man who kept secrets and was divided. Ask me, he seemed to be saying to her. Ask me what really happened.

And yet she had known him, had she not? Was he not real then? He had been good. Remember that too.

She remembered the day she started bleeding mid-month, two years ago, a year before he died; she knew instantly something was not right. She called the doctor and they said to come in. She called Matt, just to let him know. He insisted that he would take her and she should wait there until he arrived.

He came in thirty minutes, calming her, encircling her, bundling her into the car. In the doctor’s office he stood next to her with his large-knuckled hand cupping her shoulder. She had fibroids, the doctor said. Bed rest until the heavy bleeding stopped. No getting up except to go to the bathroom.

“I’ll take care of her,” said Matt.

“It should stop within twelve hours, or call me. By the way, these don’t tend to get better. And they can complicate pregnancy. So if you’re going to have kids you might want to do it soon.” He glanced at the chart. “You’re thirty-eight,” he said to Maggie, and to Matt he said, “You’re…?”

“Forty-two.”

“I see,” said the doctor. “Well.”

Maggie felt she might cry.

Matt saw. “Thank you,” he said, his voice firm. “We appreciate what you said.” He talked the doctor out of the room, steered Maggie out the door and to the car, took her home, and put her to bed. For a long time, even though it was the middle of the afternoon, he lay on the bed beside her. “Don’t feel bad,” he said. “He doesn’t know us. Nothing matters but the two of us, what we think.”

“Everyone in the world is in league against me. They all think I should have your child.”

“None of that,” he said. He was serious. No more silly jokes. When they first started to wrestle with this she had often taken refuge behind amusing, deflective ironies – Children? But I can barely stand to have wineglasses! How could I have children? – but that time was past. “Listen to me,” he said that day on the bed. He laid his hand on her midsection. “You’re the one I want. That hasn’t changed. Yes, it’s true, I want a child too. But not as much as I want you. Even if you say no, never, out of the question – I might not like that too much, but I’m still not going anywhere. You’re my wife.”

She had cried then, letting out everything she’d held in before, seeing love, feeling it. And now she had Carey telling her Gao Lan might have been with Matt when he died. Maybe.

Anger rose in her, hissing through her brain. She snapped open her phone and dialed Zinnia. “We have to find Gao Lan,” she said.

“Something happen?” Zinnia was on the floor of her apartment, playing with her two-year-old son. At the sound of Maggie’s voice she sat straighter and pushed her hip black glasses higher up on the small, prim bridge of her nose. She held the boy loosely while she listened. When Maggie had finished she said, “Do you think it can be her?”

“How can I know? He thinks so – maybe – and he’s the only person I happen to know who’s ever seen her. We have to find someone else who knew her. We have to find her.”

“You’re right,” said Zinnia. “I will try even harder. Already I have been to many offices in the Sun Building, where Carey said she used to work.” Inside, Zinnia thought of Carey. He was going to have to help now. She had asked him to call one or two of his former female friends. Some were likely to know Gao Lan, and those who didn’t knew others, and somewhere on that chain was a Beijinger who knew where Gao Lan was right now. And knew why no one in her old work circle had seen her in the last three years. Logistics, was what Carey had passed on from Maggie. That could mean many things. It was not enough. They needed someone who knew.

Yet when she had pressed Carey about these women, he evaded her. “I’ve fallen out of touch with her,” he said of one, and “It was not good the last time we spoke; I can’t call her,” of another.

Zinnia was a composed professional who always observed propriety, and there were certain questions she would never ask of a man at work. His private life was not her business. Still, it was obvious something was wrong, for he was well past forty and not yet married. This was an aberration. She didn’t know why he remained this way. He was not an invert; he liked women. Maybe too much. Maybe that was the problem.

The direction of life was important. She believed all men and women should marry and make families. That Carey did not do this, that he grew older and continued prowling the world of love, had at first seemed to Zinnia merely American. In time, though, after meeting a number of others from his country, she realized it was not a national trait but individual to him. She watched him with fascination, wondering always which girl would fall for him next. He was appealing, in a rangy yellow-haired kind of way, but he was old. The skin on his face was loosening. Still he drew women, though he always seemed to break with them before they knew him well enough to really see him. Perhaps, Zinnia had concluded, it was that he did not want to be seen.

The door jingled and her husband came in, flush from the climb up three flights, string bags of vegetables and a fish for their dinner bouncing against his legs. He put the food down and beamed as the little boy toddled to him. She watched them with love. “We’ll find her,” she said to Maggie on the phone, her eyes on her two men. “We’ll make sense of everything. There is a pattern. Always. We just have to see it.”

When Sam had finished reading the long document in his father’s jumpy, idiosyncratic English, he went back to the start and began to smooth it out. It went quickly, since this time there was no need to compare the approximated English with an original text in characters. He liked doing it, just as he liked working with his father on the translations; it was the only way they had ever really collaborated. When he was done, he felt close to the old man, sure they’d be able to talk. He called him again.

“Ba,” he said when Liang Yeh picked up, “I love what you sent me. Can we make it the epilogue of the book?”

“Maybe.”

“Think about it. But Baba. What happened to you is not unique. Everybody had a bad time – but it’s the past. I can’t say it’s not cynical here, and internally bankrupt in a certain way; it is. Maybe that’s what’s left, now, of everything that’s happened: nobody believes anymore. But as far as life goes, and whether it’s safe or not – believe me, they have left all that behind.” “Do you think I have no heart?” Liang Yeh shot back. “I do what I can. Do you know how often I call Little Xie now? Every day! That’s right! Do you know how much that costs?”

Sam heard fumbling, and then his mother came on the line. “Sammy,” she said, “I know it’s hard. But let him be.”

He hung up, disappointed. He read his father’s story through again. It wasn’t enough just to read it. He wanted to show it to someone.

Various friends went through his mind. The one he kept coming back to was Maggie. She had been to Hangzhou. She had met the Xie family. She would know.

He rooted in his pocket for her card with her e-mail address. No. He didn’t know where he had put it. He took out his phone to call her.

At that time Maggie was scrolling down her computer screen through all the e-mail messages Matt had sent her, everything from the last two years of his life. For the first time she was thinking about blocking them and deleting them, all of them. There was no backup. She could erase him. Push all this out of her life once and for all.

She blocked them. They all turned blue.

Her phone rang.

She didn’t want to answer. She was busy. This was important. She was getting rid of Matt. But the small screen said it was Sam Liang.

“Hello,” she said, “can you wait a minute?”

“Sure.”

Carefully she clicked through the sequence until she had unblocked the messages and exited the program. If she deleted them, she wanted it to be when she was paying full attention. Not now, with someone on the phone. “Okay,” she said to Sam, “I’m back.” There was a vulnerability in her voice, but she covered it. “How are you?”

“Fine,” he said. And then: “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Maggie,” he said.

“You have so much to do. You don’t want to hear my problems.”

“I’m asking,” he said.

Still she hesitated. Infidelity and lies had a taint to them; she knew telling him could be a mistake. But he already knew half the story. “There is this picture from the news, of my husband’s accident. You can see Matt on the ground, part of Matt, dead, and a woman leaning over him.”

“What part of Matt?”

“His feet and legs.”

“Okay,” said Sam slowly, as if visualizing it.

“This woman. Nobody ever got her name. It was odd because usually people like that come forward. But then today I happened to show the picture to this guy in the law firm here. He thinks he recognizes her. He thinks it’s Gao Lan.”

“With your husband when he died? ”

“That’s what he says.”

“Is he sure?”

“No. The face is not distinct.”

He was silent with her for a minute, or at least his voice was silent. She could hear him chopping. She liked that they could be quiet together. It was like being in a room doing things, different things, two people in proximity but separately productive. It had been that way with Matt, even if they needed their time apart to keep it working.

“I feel like I can’t think about anything else but finding her. It’s like with Shuying, where I had to get the sample, I had to see her face, but even more powerful. I need to see for myself what kind of woman this is.”

He was silent for a minute. “I just hope when you do see her, it’s going to make you feel better.”

“It’s always better to know.” Maggie needed to place the woman in her ladder of esteem, drink in her aura of looks and personality, judge her. She needed to steady herself that even if this woman had attracted her husband’s attention she still was no match for Maggie. That she had never been. It was basic female power restoration.

“I can’t believe it when I hear myself,” she said to Sam Liang. “I tell you the most personal things.”

“I like that,” he protested.

“I think I’ve told you too much.”

“Why? I’ll tell you one about me. Will that make you feel better?”

“Yes.”

“All right. This happened right after we came back from Hangzhou. By the way, it was strange, wasn’t it? Coming back from Hangzhou. After being together for two days. Always the two of us, and then boom.”

“It was strange,” she agreed, glad he had said it.

“So we came back. I called my father. I told him this was it, Uncle Xie was dying, please come. Get over your fears. He needs you. And by way of explaining why he couldn’t, he sent me the story of his life, up to the time he escaped from China. As if I was going to read this and say, Oh, Dad, I see now, you’re right, this was so bad you should definitely never come back to China. But I didn’t feel that way. I called him and said, I understand, but really, you are safe, nothing will happen, and please please come see Xie before he dies. You must. Please. I begged him.”

She felt a pang for him. “Did it work?”

“No. He said no.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Even me, his son, asking like that, it wasn’t enough.”

“You can’t change him. I don’t know what his deal is, but most likely it’s beyond your reach.”

“You’re right.”

“At least now you have his story.”

“It was worth the wait.”

“Will you send it to me?” said Maggie.

“Yes! That’s why I called you, if you want to know the truth. I want you to read it. But I can’t find your e-mail.”

“Send it,” said Maggie, and dictated her address.

He moved over to his computer and clicked a button. “There. I just e-mailed it. Let me know what you think.”

“I will.” She felt a little better, talking to him. The way he was, the way he thought, left her feeling lifted. He reminded her of the world beyond herself. What was more, he had the makings of a great cook. She felt he deserved this prize with every inch of his soul. “Do you know what I want more than anything?” she said. “I want you to win. I want you to have this.”

She could hear a smile in his voice. “Then for you I will try to get it.”

“Not for me! For your family.”

“Okay,” he said. “For them.”