The Last Chinese Chef

7

There is always a tension between imagination and reality, between what we wish for and what it is the Gods have granted us. Civilized man finds appeasement through the system of gestures and symbols used to mediate between the two – the careful grooming of appearances, the maintenance of face, the funeral feasts and wedding banquets we put on even as we know they will ruin us. Rich or poor, people feel the same. During my childhood in the alleys of Peking, we were always hungry. If we ate at all it was cu cha dan fan, crude tea and bland rice. Yet on this we never failed to congratulate ourselves, as if this were our choice, our philosophy. We would proclaim simple but nutritious fare the best, and our lives, for a moment, would satisfy us.

– LIAN G WEI, The Last Chinese Chef

In 1966, the year Nainai died, I was seventeen. I was born in the same year as our nation, a fact that gave me pride and also my name, Guolin, the country’s Welcome Rain. This was my generation. Later we were termed the Lost Ones because we had lost our educations, but I always bristled at that. Being lost was a state of mind. On the contrary, we showed we had the fierceness for anything. When we were sent to the countryside in 1970 we endured privations such as even our mothers and fathers never did. I went two years without oil and salt. That is something most people today cannot imagine. Yet those ten years of chaos did not break us. The one thing that did break us had already happened, might in fact have made the Cultural Revolution possible, and that was the famine. Looking back, I have thought that only people who were starved as children could do the things we young people did.

We were town people. We did not suffer like those in the countryside, but still, of 1961 I remember mainly hunger. We hoarded every grain, every stalk of wilted vegetable. An egg was a miracle.

We sold everything possible to get more food. Nainai, my grand-mother, wanted to sell her coffin. At this my father put his foot down. “Impossible,” he said. “You have had it for years. Leave it.” And indeed the coffin was one thing they never sold off, and she was to use it to be put in the earth as she planned, five years later.

But what I remember, back further, is the day in May 1956 that Nainai went to buy the coffin. She journeyed to a dark little shop in a small village outside the city, on a day deemed auspicious by her almanac.

At seven, I was too young to accompany her, but I did go with her in the years that followed. We would travel to the village together to visit the shop, where she would look at her coffin and reassure herself that no one had made off with it and that it was indeed as fine as she remembered.

It was. The renowned local wood was oiled to a dull gleam, and there was a strong iron latch to seal it tightly within the earth. To see it comforted her. She knew that safe within, she would never have to wander in some murky, in-between world. She would remind me of this as the old man hunted through the stacks of coffins in his little warehouse to find the one that belonged to her.

When he located it in the pile he would light a little bean-oil lamp for us in the darkened storeroom, so we could sit there for a while. “A good coffin is important,” she would say. “How else are the Gods to know I led a supremely good life and am to be treated well in the next world?”

“They will know,” I used to tell her. She was to be buried in her ancestral village, after all, which lay in the hills a little farther to the south and from which one saw a long way, across a green valley. The beauty of the place alone would bring her to the Gods’ attention, I felt – if there even were Gods. At that time we were taught that there were not. In fact at certain times it was dangerous to even say such things aloud, but we were in a warehouse at that moment, out in the countryside. No one was near. So I let her talk.

After the famine passed her health declined. She had grown very thin, like all of us, but when we rebounded, she did not. It was another five years or so until she went away. In those last years she was small, sharp-edged, but still clear. Mother dressed her bound feet every day, and her long linen dressings hung in looped rows at the end of her bed, their peculiar fragrance dusting the air around them even when they’d just been washed. She did not so much walk as plant one foot in front of the other, and when she went outdoors she usually had one of us at each elbow. In her walk there was a delicate pathos, graceful even in her advanced age. I can say that now. Back then, when I was young and saw her as a feudal old lady with little more left in her than a whiff of dry breath, she infuriated me. She was the past. She was everything we hated. I thanked the heavens I was born in my own time, so I could serve my country in free, natural health.

Up to the end, though, once or twice a week, she cooked. She made the dishes she loved from her childhood, fried tomatoes and tofu, hot and sour cabbage, soup noodles with pickles. Once she made a rich soup of tilapia with matchsticks of daikon. To buy a live tilapia at that time was sufficiently extravagant to attract attention. Once was all right; it could be explained as a family celebration. But she could not cook it again.

My mother sat down with Nainai and explained why. “The idea now is that everybody eats simply. You know, cu cha dan fan.” Crude tea and bland rice. “We should eat only the most basic foods. To cook anything else is not wise, even if we had the money, which we do not.” She was gentle and clear. Nainai may have nodded submissively, but she was already deciding not to listen. She may not have called for tilapia again, but within her constraints she cooked what she wanted.

In August of that year the railways and hostels were thrown open to youth, free of charge. We could ride anywhere we wanted in China, mix with laobaixing, or old hundred names – the masses. Our job was to talk with people and in this way advance revolution.

I had to go. I was compelled by my age, by the times, by the depth of my beliefs. People don’t like to say it now, but those times, though they were bad, also had some good. We were living for something. Between people there was a kind of ren qing, human kindness, which I don’t feel anymore.

It was a flame I was, at that age, unable to resist. My little bag was packed in minutes. My mother begged me not to leave. She said it was dangerous. She wrapped her arms around me as if she could keep me. I lifted her hands off. “Do you think this is something for me and my friends? We are supposed to exchange revolutionary ideas. Besides, I am seventeen. I’m a grown woman.”

I could see how this drained both my mother’s and my father’s faces. They were children of the modern era; they had gone against their own parents, insisting, for example, on choosing their own marriage partners and careers. Of this they’d always been proud. That it was my turn made them less happy. They were silent.

Nainai did not say anything either. Most likely she did not hear anything. She was cooking with her back to us. A friend of hers had visited her earlier with some foodstuffs from the south, and with this she was preparing a meal. I shouldered my little pack and went to say goodbye to her. Despite how old she was I never thought this was the last time I’d see her.

“Deng yixia,” she said when she saw I was leaving, Wait a moment. “Let Nainai prepare you a box to take.” Before I could even answer she had taken a tin box and begun to arrange food in it.

“I don’t need dinner,” I told her. We needed food to sustain our lives, of course, but according to new thinking, it was a necessary inconvenience. “I don’t want it.”

She was calm. “Who’s going to feed you where you are going?”

I had no answer for this, and the truth was I did want dinner, badly, and so after I had gone one more time to trade stiff, anguished goodbyes with my father and share an embrace with my mother I returned to Nainai, and embraced her too, and took her box.

When I reached the station I was grateful they had not come with me, for the huge hall was an ocean of parents, terrified, tearful. I don’t know if I could have endured their being part of it. As I made my way through the crowd I felt the strangeness of being alone. Which train would I take? To what place? Beijing. That was the heart of the country, and I was the Welcome Rain. I hurried toward the track with hundreds of others like me, part of a moving current. When we got close I saw a stocky comrade up ahead raise his hands and roar, “Beijing che lai!” Beijing train’s here! We surged together, one undulating form, toward the great staircase that led upward. There was chattering and laughing around me. I was pushed and buffeted. I shoved and shouldered back.

When I reached the upper concourse I could see, through the windows that gave out onto the tracks, that the train was already full and then some. Young people were climbing on through windows, pushing one another into doors, even staking out spots on the roof.

I stopped. People behind me jostled past and kept trying to get on. I saw it was useless. Older men, tired-looking men in work-stained clothes, got off the engine in front and shouted at people to get off. Youths only stuck their heads and arms out of windows and shouted back at them. Finally some Hong Weibing, Red Guards, jumped off from the front of the train and went up and down the track pulling people off. “The people’s train has to run,” I heard one of them admonish a boy as he pulled him off and dumped him on the platform. The workmen climbed back on and the great chuffs swelled to life and the Hong Weibing leapt aboard, one by one, as it started to roll. Finally with a scream it pulled out.

“You might as well try to fish the moon out of the ocean,” someone said at my elbow. I turned, and there was a girl my age watching the scene beside me. She had long hair in braids and a white blouse, as I did, but otherwise we looked nothing like each other. She was small, with a face the shape of a teardrop, while I had a more angular face and a longer build. “You have to be waiting up here when they arrive,” she said, “and be the first one on.”

“What we really need is a southbound train that ends here, so it will empty out. I’m Zhang Guolin.” I touched a finger to my nose.

“Huang Meiying,” she answered, of herself. It is a strange thing, because this was a girl I knew for only fifteen or twenty hours of my life, more than forty years ago, and yet I remember her name with utmost clarity. I remember what I thought when she told me, too: Meiying, pretty and brave. It was a common name. A bit old-fashioned, maybe, but because of the “brave” part, most girls felt no need to change it.

We worked together. One held the place in front while the other scouted for rumors of arrivals. Finally there was a southbound train that ended here and would turn around for Beijing, and we were in front. We held our prearranged stations at the platform’s edge. No one would move us. The shout went up and people poured up the staircase, onto the concourse, to the cement expanse where we stood, unyielding.

“Tongzhimen!” came the howl from the front, Comrades! The engineer, distinguished by his age and the filth on his clothes, leaned from his car. “You will board the cars in an orderly manner!”

People laughed at this as the passengers streamed from the train, a river of blue cloth and young black heads which had to part and flow around us because of the way we stood our ground. The instant the cars were empty we pushed and shoved our way on, and found ourselves running, laughing, down the empty aisle of a hard-bed car, rows of plain wooden berths, six in each open cubicle, with one common aisle. It was littered, and it still smelled of close-packed youth, but what was that to us? It was our car. It would take us to Beijing.

Not that we were to lie down; there would be far too many people for that. But we had a place to sit, pressed side by side on a lower berth, she by the window and I next. That was more than most had. Many stood in the aisle, or leaned nodding in half-sleep between the cars through the journey. The luckier ones managed to find space to slump to the floor. But we were comfortable. And because we had each other we could get hot water while it lasted, or relieve ourselves after it was gone. One could get up while the other defended our place.

In our little bay, designed for six passengers, at least twenty had pressed in. Everyone was hungry.

After some hours and the exchange of many revolutionary ideas, it was agreed that anyone who had any food would bring it out for all in our knot to share.

As I dug in my bag I glimpsed the kinds of foods others were drawing forth: peanuts in a twist of newspaper, dried fruit, small packages of crackers. And then I put out my tin box.

All eyes flew to it. It had the weight and size of real food; when I cracked the lid, the aroma rushed out, unstoppable. “What is it?”

“I don’t know,” I answered, for I had taken the box from Nainai without looking inside.

Now I lifted off the lid, and drew in my breath. It was Guangzhou wenchang ji, a Cantonese dish Nainai loved. Velvet-braised chicken breast, thin-sliced Yunnan salt-cured ham, and tiny tender bok choy were layered in an alternating pattern. All three were meant to be taken together, in one bite. The arrangement glistened under a clear sauce. As soon as I saw it my mouth longed for it. That must have been what Nainai’s friend brought her from the south, Yunnan ham. So special. It had been meant for me, and now everyone was staring at it. With a plunging heart I realized how opulent and bourgeois it appeared.

“What’s that?” someone said.

“She said she didn’t know,” said another.

“How could you not know?” said a third, this time to me.

I held the tin box, terrified.

Then Huang Meiying, next to me, spoke up with a boldness I had not expected. “She doesn’t know because an old lady handed it to her on the way into the station. I saw it. I was right behind her.”

“What old lady?”

“I never saw her before,” said Huang.

“Did she say anything?”

Silence. It was my turn. Little Huang was looking at me. I cleared my throat. “She said, Long live Chairman Mao.”

“Maybe it’s poisoned,” someone said.

“It’s not poisoned,” scoffed another. “I’ll show you. I’ll eat some.” He tasted it, lifting one set of the three slices in the incandescently simple sauce and dropping it in his mouth. I wanted to scream at him. I was about to collapse from hunger. And this was ham, from Yunnan, made for me by my Nainai. I wanted it.

I still remember the feeling of tears burning behind my eyes when he swallowed and his face registered such pleasure that everyone else had to have it too, and I saw it handed around. Quickly it was gone. Everyone had something to say. It was rich, it was ostentatious, it was not the plain food we were supposed to eat, yet they ate it in a blink. Huang Meiying saw my tears. She pressed my arm. Then someone in the cubicle said he wished he could find the old lady and teach her a thing or two, and after that both of us sat quiet for a long time, afraid to say anything at all.

Hunger kept me from falling asleep that night. It was not the first time or the last. How many young people today could do what I did? Could my own daughter do it, Gao Lan? No. Yet that was when my character was forged, especially when I was sent to the northeast in 1970. And it began four years earlier, that night when I fell asleep hungry, wedged up with my back straight on the train to my adulthood. In my memory hunger is mixed up with those times the train stopped and sat on the tracks, far from anywhere, the window open, the night air cool, the countryside black and formless. I made a promise to myself that night. No matter how much work it took, I would not be hungry, and neither would my children.

It was for this reason I told Gao Lan we must file the claim against Shuying’s father, so the two of them would never, ever be hungry.

As for Gao Lan’s secrets, I decided to let them rest. I had told her long ago that Old Gao, her father, did not have to know the whole truth. We would file the claim. That would be all. It was a necessity. She and the child needed support.

To this she agreed, for it was the undeniable truth that no matter how much Old Gao and I loved the little girl, we were growing old. “All life’s uncertain,” I said to Gao Lan. “Should we just wait for our death with folded arms? Or provide for her?”

“I don’t think you will go to see Marx anytime soon,” she had answered, invoking the old joke that had been popular under communism when referring to death, jian Makesi qu. Going to see Marx.

I understood that my daughter would only speak lightly about these things. Yet it was important to be pragmatic. In time she understood, and we filed, and my old husband and I agreed to receive the American widow and her escort.

And then it was the day of their visit. They were coming to meet Shuying. I awoke filled with anticipation. I believed I would know at a glance whether or not the American saw her husband in our little girl.

Teacher Sheng arrived first. His black hair was brushed back with an unexpected pomade, and his narrow shoulders twitched beneath a dark suit. He proclaimed himself delighted to be here and assured me that he, the middle school English teacher, would take care of everything. We talked together about the weather. A storm was coming.

Then they were at the door. Sheng and I went together to open it. The woman was not what I’d imagined, though when I saw her I also found that what I had imagined was something I could no longer quite remember. She was small for a foreigner, only an inch or two taller than I, and dark, though her halo of curly hair immediately made her different. The man with her, Teacher Sheng explained, was her lawyer.

“Lawyer?” I said. “He’s no lawyer. Look at that hair.” To me he appeared more like a mathematician, or an artist.

“He’s a lawyer,” said Teacher Sheng.

I went into the kitchen to prepare tea. While I was there Shuying poked her head in at the door. “Naughty little treasure!” I hissed, seeing the small curly head, loving her. “I told you to stay in your room until we call.”

“I want to see them.”

“Not until I call you.” I was firm. She ran back to her room. We had spoken in the local version of the Wu dialect, which was the language of Shaoxing and the only tongue we used with Shuying. When my old man and I didn’t want her to understand us, we spoke Mandarin. Our privacy in that language would be finished the following year, when she went to school and learned it.

I carried the tray out front and set a teapot in the center of the low table, surrounded by cups. I did not serve. It was not ready. In deference to foreign ways I also set out cold cans of Coca-Cola, one for each person. No one opened them or touched them or even looked at them. This was proper, of course, though I was surprised, for they were Americans.

Teacher Sheng leaned toward me. “She says her hope was to meet Shuying.”

Of course it was her hope, I thought, why else had she come here? And yet even I had not expected her to care so much about seeing the child. Gao Lan had told me a little bit about this woman’s husband. He had loved her, his wife, but he was not happy. He wanted a child. She was not ready. These things he had confided in Gao Lan, and she in me, and I held them carefully in my mind now as I looked at the woman. “A step at a time,” I told Sheng. “I’ll call Shuying out in a minute. Here. Drink tea.” Now it had steeped, so I poured. My husband came out, Gao Fei, and introductions were exchanged between him, the widow, and her lawyer. I poured another cup.

Finally the widow spoke. Teacher Sheng translated. “She says if this child really is her husband’s daughter, she wants to take care of her. No question. But she says to do that, to make everything work with his estate, she needs a lab test. She hopes you agree.”

Gao Fei and I looked at each other.

“The outcome will be positive, right?” my husband said in Mandarin, just in case Shuying was listening. “It cannot be otherwise. So we should do it.”

“No test,” I said. I heard the stubbornness in my voice.

He looked at me. His gray brows rose toward his hair.

“No need to do more,” I said. “We filed the claim already.”

“But you heard what the widow said. And it’s clear, isn’t it? Anyone can see Shuying’s father was a foreigner. It is not as if we are trying to pass off fish eyes as pearls.”

I felt my heart trembling. “Teacher Sheng,” I said, “will you let us speak between ourselves?”

“Certainly! Yes!” He all but fell over himself trying to get out of the room to leave Old Gao and me alone. Of course the widow and her lawyer were there, but they were foreigners. They did not understand.

“The truth,” Gao Fei demanded. “What’s this about?”

“It’s something our daughter didn’t want to tell you.” I was trying to soften him by invoking her, but I knew I was equally culpable. I had agreed with her to keep this hidden.

“Well?” He was growing heated.

“She had another man at the same time. Another foreigner.”

He stared, his understanding slow in building.

“Another boyfriend,” I said.

He caved back from me slightly, ashamed, almost as if someone had punched him. “Does she know which is the father?”

“No,” I said sadly. “She has never known.” For Gao Lan had never been able to say clearly, not when Shuying was a baby, not when she became the precious child she was now. Just then I saw the American man watching us. He felt my gaze and looked away.

“Why her husband, then?” Gao Fei’s gaze traveled briefly to the wife, the widow, who sat across from us watching. She looked naïve. She looked kind.

“Because Gao Lan won’t go to the other one,” I said.

“Why?” His eyebrows looked stuck together.

“She’s afraid of him.”

“Afraid!”

“That’s what she says.”

He trembled, drew a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, shook one out, and lit it. He smoked silently, his eyes fixed on me. Blue smoke formed a cloud of displeasure around him. “You didn’t tell me this.”

“The Gods will strike me now that I have told!”

“The Gods striking you?” he said sourly. “That would be the dragon and the tiger matched in battle indeed! I have no doubt who would win. I see done is done. These things we cannot change now. Call Sheng back. Let’s hear what else they have to say.”

“Teacher Sheng!” I cried. The translator in his stiff suit hurried back from the kitchen.

When we were all seated again the widow’s lawyer took his turn to speak. Sheng listened and turned to us. “He says that for all the purposes of acting on the claim, speaking of the law firm that executes the man’s estate and also the bank that has his holdings, all of them will need to see proof of paternity.”

Gao Fei and I looked at each other. “You see why I don’t want to do it,” I said softly.

“Yes.”

“They both stress that she wants to take care of the child,” Sheng said. “As a matter of principle. She just has to know for sure that the girl is his.”

Those were good, upright words, but I was scared. Best just to let her see Shuying first, I decided. Start with that.

I sent the signal to Gao Fei. The lines on his walnut face creased deep into a smile. If anyone indulged her more than I, it was he. “Shuying!” he called out. “Come here!”

Tiny footsteps spattered down the hall and our little treasure with her sparrow’s body eased around the door frame. She darted over and wedged herself between my legs.

“Gao Shuying,” announced Teacher Sheng.

The widow’s eyes fastened on the child as I had known they would. Her gaze took in everything from her head to her little feet.

Did she see her husband in her?

Protectively I pulled the girl close. My little meat dumpling. Nothing would ever take her away from me. We were joined, like form and shadow, by blood, by affection.

“Does she say the child resembles her husband?” I put this to Teacher Sheng, and he asked her in English.

When he turned back to me he said, “She is not sure. She wants to believe. Her heart is unreliable. She says, if you will please give permission for the test, she will live by whatever it says. It’s a touch to the inside of the mouth, that is all. She has the kit and the forms in her bag.”

I listened. My heart was still pulled in two directions.

“Gao Lan’s working as hard as she can at the logistics start-up,” Gao Fei said, in Mandarin so Shuying wouldn’t understand. “I don’t think she can work any harder. This is her rice bowl. It’s important.”

“I know,” I said, and I did. I had promised myself I would never forget. Even now. “Tell her yes,” I said, turning to Sheng. “Tell her we give our permission.”

Sheng conveyed this, and the American woman drew a small box out of her shoulder bag.

“Little Dumpling,” my husband said to her in the local Shaoxing tongue, “I want you to let Auntie touch a stick inside your mouth.”

The widow got up, took a few steps, and knelt in front of the child. Her face was serious. Now it could not be stopped.

She unscrewed a vial and took out a swab.

I was unable to look. I busied myself by pouring a cup of tea for the long-haired man, who still sat in a watchful silence across the table. Something about him needled me. Who was he, really? I filled the cup, set down the pot, and then reached forward with my two hands, offering it. This was an old-fashioned gesture. Any civilized person knew that the cup must be taken with two hands as well. Outsiders rarely knew. I think I wanted to see him falter, show his ignorance. Maybe I even wanted to feel the brief comfort of derision, at the very moment I felt frightened that I might have lost something. I extended the cup.

Without seeming even to think, he lifted two hands to take it. As was civilized. Proper. My eyes narrowed. Was it an accident? No. I felt something in the air of the room change. He was not an outsider.

Yet the thought barely had time to form in my mind. “Open your mouth for Auntie,” I heard my husband say.

Maggie and Sam stepped out the front gate of the complex, walked to the corner, and veered left onto busy Jiefang Lu before they turned to each other, ready to burst with all they had to say. “We did it,” she breathed first. She had the signed forms and the sample in her bag.

“You were wonderful,” he told her.

“You were.”

“We both were. And you haven’t heard anything yet.” He raised his hand for a taxi.

“Where are we going?”

“Hangzhou, are you kidding? As fast as possible, to mail your sample. Then get me to my uncle’s.” A car pulled over and they climbed in. “Next bus is on the half-hour.” They settled in the back. “Now. Are you ready for this? There were two men in Gao Lan’s life. Two foreigners – at the same time. The right time. Either one could be the father. They don’t know which.”

She stared. “Then why Matt?”

“For some reason Gao Lan’s afraid of the other guy. Wouldn’t approach him. Wouldn’t file against him. That’s why this came to you.”

Maggie swallowed down this new and slightly darker understanding. The taxi jolted to a stop outside the bus station. They paid, jumped out, and ran into a concrete palace of a depot far too large and full of useless echoes for its light trickle of passengers. After buying their tickets they went to stand in line at the gate. “You know what doesn’t quite make sense?” said Maggie. “That she doesn’t know who the father is. Shuying is not a baby. She’s a girl. She must look more like one than the other.”

“Well, you saw her too,” said Sam. “What do you say? Is she Matt’s?”

Maggie thought a long time. “I suppose I can’t be sure. Maybe. She could be.”

“If you had to guess?”

She hesitated. “I’d guess no.”

“Before you went in, did you want her to be his?”

“Not at first. Definitely not. Later – I have to say, I thought about it. He’s gone, is the thing. It would be like part of him came back. It would be like something happened that he wanted, too, wanted at least by the end of his life, and that was to have a kid.”

“He wanted a kid?”

“Not at first. By the end.”

“You never had one.”

“No. Neither did you,” she added, as if compelled.

“I was never married.”

“Well, I was, I had a family. Matt and I were a family, a family of two.” She paused. “Then he wanted three. I couldn’t go up to that number. At least not so fast.”

The bus pulled away and quickly climbed onto an open highway with little traffic, only a few whizzing cars and trucks. On both sides of the road were factories, extending for miles. “You okay?” said Sam.

“Yes. Fine.” She wiped at her eyes.

“You should be happy. You did great today. You got what you wanted.”

“It was luck,” she said.

“Maybe. But I told you the story and you applied it. And the heavens, in case you haven’t noticed, are about to salute you.” He aimed a triumphant look through the bus window to the world outside. They had left the line of factories behind and now were crossing the flat river country – low, green, featureless, brimming with insects and birds and unseen creatures. In front of the bus, the straight ribbon road narrowed to a point. Black clouds grumbled above it. “You know what that is?”

“A storm?”

He gave the wry smile that said no. The bus barreled into the dark bulkhead of sky. The pressure dropped. Daylight ebbed away as electricity rose. They could feel the dark charge in the air around them. Grass rippled across the marshes.

Lightning flashed up ahead; then thunder rumbled. She saw that he was smiling next to her. The first drops came down and the big wipers at the front of the bus started up. She watched, mesmerized. Big drops tapped on the roof and the windows, a few at first, and then more quickly until the rain poured on them, a furious volley, a fusillade of gunshots slamming the roof and spraying all over the windows. It was like going through a car wash.

“Do you know what it is yet?” Sam said.

She shook her head. Water was sheeting across the road. The wheels sent up fans of spray. The wetlands were cloaked with darkness.

He leaned close so she could hear him, and said, “It’s the Sword-Grinding Rain.”