The Last Chinese Chef

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The Last Chinese Chef is a work of fiction, yet the Chinese culinary world that comes to life in its pages is real. I could never have captured it without the help of many Chinese who shared their knowledge, analyses, reminiscences, and recipes, nor could I have written it without the published works of literary gourmets, culinary thinkers, and food-obsessed poets dating back through the centuries.

In a deeper sense my research began thirty years ago when I started doing business in China. Arriving there to buy woolen textiles in 1977, just six weeks after the Cultural Revolution had formally ended, I sat down to my first government-arranged banquet and found my mind and senses exploded by a cuisine more exciting, diverse, and subtle than any Chinese food I had encountered in America. Real cuisine was available to only a handful of people in China then, for the country’s population was not only poor but traumatized by a long era of successive terrors that had turned many of life’s pleasures, including food, into ideological evils. At a time when most people around me had limited choices and rationed food, I, as the guest of one of China’s large state-owned enterprises, was given many opportunities in those first few years to experience a cuisine that was as fantastic as it was – to me, an inexperienced young woman trying desperately to figure out how to do business in a socialist country – incomprehensible.

Over the next eighteen years, as I ran my textile business in China, I came to know this remarkable cuisine better. Working with provincial state-owned textile mills in different parts of the country and returning to school at night to learn Chinese, I slowly saw how guanxi – the net of relationship and mutual responsibility – grew from a succession of special meals. Each meal celebrated our guanxi and improved it. These meals, over almost two decades, formed my first education into the hidden language of Chinese cuisine – the codes of seating and serving, the messages conveyed by a menu, and the social signals that substitute for the concrete business conversations we Westerners are used to having at table.

In 1999, a few years after I closed my textile business and saw the publication of my first novel, I began writing about Chinese food for Gourmet magazine. Here was the start of my second education in Chinese cuisine. Covering the food scene in major Chinese cities gave me the chance to interview chefs, restaurant owners, restaurant managers, sociologists, home cooks, and diners.

Still, to write The Last Chinese Chef, I needed to know a lot more. Almost all of the characters in the book are food experts, and the eponymous book-within-a-book is a faux food classic. To create this world of erudite cooks and diners, and to create an excerpted food classic they would all admire, I had to learn what they knew. Fortunately, much has been written over the centuries on Chinese gastronomy. I digested a good deal of it in translation (my Chinese literacy is nonexistent) and also returned to China to interview more chefs and restaurateurs.

While I could never list every person in China who has taught me something about cuisine over the last thirty years, certain people gave so generously of their time as to deserve special note. Vivian Bao shared her knowledge of Shanghainese cuisine, helped me connect with chefs in various places, and related her personal memories of China in 1958, the year Liang Yeh made his way from Gou Bu Li in Tianjin to the coast of Fujian Province. Yu Changjiang, a sociology professor at Beijing University with a special interest in restaurant and food culture, opened my eyes to the deeper meaning of food in China, helping me connect cuisine to patterns of ideology, history, and the contemporary Chinese economy. Anthony Kuhn, then of the Los Angeles Times, took me to meet Yu Changjiang and translated some of his academic papers so I could study them.

Many restaurant owners and managers took time from their busy lives to help me understand their world. In Beijing, Yu Jingmin (of Fang Shan), Li Shanlin (of Li Jia Cai), Li Jun (of Mao Jia Cai), and David Tang (of the China Club) each gave me an education. In Shanghai, Walter Wang, manager of Xian Yue Hien, and Dr. Wang, a home cook who demonstrated Chinese concepts of healing through food, were both helpful, and I thank Willie Brent and Jocelyn Norskog Brent for taking me to meet them.

In the San Gabriel Valley east of Los Angeles, Henry Chang (formerly of Dong Lai Shun and Juon Yuan, San Gabriel; now owner and chef of Chang’s Garden, Arcadia) worked hard to give me a complete view of his career and has always been generous with recipes. The pork ribs steamed in lotus leaves – the ones Sam’s Uncle Xie has him make over and over until they are right – are his creation. Wang Haibo, from Shanghai (chef and owner of Green Village, San Gabriel), and Chen Qingping, from Chongqing (chef of Chung King, Monterey Park), taught me much. Linda Huang (owner of Chung King) joined Henry Chang and Wang Haibo in helping me understand the difference between Chinese cuisine and Chinese-American cuisine, and between the Chinese and the American diner.

My research trip to Hangzhou, home of China’s literature-based cuisine, would never have succeeded without the help of Dai Xiongping, who introduced me to chefs and restaurant owners. Restaurant tycoon Wang Zhiyuan explained his formula for success in the new China and led a tour through the cavernous kitchens of Xin Kai Yuan. Wu Xunqu, a chef at Lou Wai Lou for forty-six years, explained the history of the city’s literary cuisine and then parted with his famed recipe for beggar’s chicken – though not, he cautioned, the complete recipe, for certain secret ingredients had to stay secret. Retired chef Xu Zichuan opened the door to his home and his memories. His daughter Xu Lihua, manager of Shan Wai Shan, introduced me to her restaurant’s famous fish-head soup, which is prepared and served by Sam in the pages of this novel.

Outside the realm of food, I owe special thanks to two friends. Zhan Zhao candidly shared his knowledge of the subworld of modern China in which love in many forms, and at many levels, is for sale, even helping me pinpoint where Gao Lan would live. Tom Garnier’s knowledge of seamanship made it possible for me to frame Liang Yeh’s coastal voyage from Tianjin to Fujian Province more accurately.

Published works were critical to me, especially in understanding Chinese cuisine over time. Among classical written sources, I relied most heavily on the works of Yuan Mei (1715-1797), often considered the greatest of all Chinese food writers; Li Liweng or Li Yu (1610-1680), an erotic novelist, opera producer, and epicure who explored the value of the rustic in haute cuisine; and Yi Yin (at the dawn of the Shang dynasty, dated at 1766 B.C. by a Han chronology but now thought by many to have been about 1554 B.C.), the first great Chinese gastronome. Reading excerpts from The Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine (third century B.C.) helped me see the philosophical framework behind early theories of curative foods. The lines recited in the novel’s last scene are taken from two poems of the Zhou Dynasty period (twelfth century B.C.-221 B.C.), “The Summons of the Soul” and “The Great Summons,” translated by David Hawkes. Food passages from the novel The Scholars by Wu Ching-Tzu (1701-1754) gave me insight. Even Confucius wrote about food, and some material from the Analects was helpful to me. I also learned much from the poet Po Chu-I (772-846) and from the poet, calligrapher, and rhymed-prose food essayist Su Dongpo or Su Shi (1037-1101), who connected cuisine to the aesthetics of classical literature and was an important influence in the growth of Hangzhou’s literary cuisine. The famous pork dish dongpo rou, named for him and based on his recipe, appears on Chinese menus all over the world.

Modern sources on Chinese cuisine were also important. Chief among these was the remarkable Chinese Gastronomy by Hsiangju Lin and Tsuifeng Lin. This exceptional book helped me grasp the formal goals of taste and texture as well as principles of menu development. I am indebted as well to the scholarly essays on cuisine through Chinese history by K. C. Chang, Michael Freeman, Frederick W. Mote, and Jonathan Spence, collected in Food and Chinese Culture, edited by K. C. Chang. An academic paper titled “Tasting the Good and the Beautiful: The Aestheticization of Eating and Drinking in Traditional Chinese Culture” by Da’an Pan was also helpful, as was the book Chinese System of Food Cures by Henry C. Lu.

Though this is a novel, and almost all of the characters are imagined, some actual historical events and personages make appearances within its pages. Tan Zhuanqing, Liang Wei’s master in the Forbidden City, was a very famous chef in his time as well as an admired scholar; his name is still frequently invoked in Chinese cooking circles. Peng Changhai, Liang Wei’s youthful compadre in the palace along with Xie Huangshi, was a real-life apprentice in the palace; the restaurant he went on to found, based on the cuisine teachings of Tan Zhuanqing, was considered one of Beijing’s greatest restaurants in the 1950s. The Empress Dowager really did have a late-life lust for the little broom-corn cakes (xiao wo tou) she ate on the road during the royal family’s flight from the Boxer Rebellion. She also, according to culinary legend, did commission her chefs to create the flat sesame cakes stuffed with minced meat (shao bing jia rou mo) after she saw them in a dream. I am grateful to the kitchen staff at Fang Shan, the imperial-style restaurant in Beihai Park in Beijing, for showing me how to make them.

The eponymous book excerpted throughout this novel – the 1925 food classic written by Sam’s grandfather – is a fiction: it does not exist. The ideas it expresses are based on the classical sources noted above. The Children’s Rights Treaty is also an invention; there is no such treaty. Several restaurants mentioned in the book are real, though: Fang Shan, Gou Bu Li, Lou Wai Lou, and Shan Wai Shan.

Readers who would like to taste the food in this book (almost every dish described is in the repertoire of a contemporary Chinese chef), who wish to cook the food themselves (some of these chefs gave their recipes), or who simply want to know where to find great food as they travel to China, are invited to visit my Web site, www.nicolemones.com.