The Last Chinese Chef

8

The major cuisines of China were brought into being for different purposes, and for different kinds of diners. Beijing food was the cuisine of officials and rulers, up to the Emperor. Shanghai food was created for the wealthy traders and merchants. From Sichuan came the food of the common people, for, as we all know, some of the best-known Sichuan dishes originated in street stalls. Then there is Hangzhou, whence came the cuisine of the literati. This is food that takes poetry as its principal inspiration. From commemorating great poems of the past to dining on candlelit barges afloat upon West Lake where wine is drunk and new poems are created, Hangzhou cuisine strives always to delight men of letters. The aesthetic symmetry between food and literature is a pattern without end.

– LIAN G WEI, The Last Chinese Chef

Sam had told her Hangzhou centered on a magnificent man-made lake, and that if she wanted to spend the night downtown while he stayed at his uncle’s, he could book her at a hotel with a room facing the water. It sounded nice, but so far nothing Maggie had seen of the crowded gray city into which their bus disgorged them even hinted at such a fairyland. The streets, crawling with cars, were narrow canyons of glass-and-steel buildings. Sam waved over a taxi, explaining that the DHL office was outside town. She climbed in beside him, grateful. The rain had stopped, and everything was wet and washed clean.

They soared on a half-empty freeway along a river, past farm fields and intermittent housing developments, to an enormous and newly built business park. In this labyrinth the driver somehow found his way to the DHL office with its fleet of red-and-yellow trucks, and with Sam translating she signed forms and paid and dispatched the package. Done. She walked out feeling oddly numb. Her steps seemed heavy, the building and the parking lot unreal. It was finished. It was sent. She climbed back into the car, not quite believing it.

She stole a glance and saw him giving her a hopeful look. “Are you hungry?” he asked. “Because I have to eat immediately.”

“Starved.” She had already decided she would eat as soon as he dropped her off, but it would be so much better to eat with him; he knew where to go, what to have, and how to tell her about it. Every meal here had been a breakthrough into the unexpected, but the food she had eaten in his company had been something more. With him, this world of cuisine seemed not only intricate but coherently beautiful. It did what art did, refracted civilization. “I’d love to have lunch with you,” she said. “But I absolutely don’t want to keep you. You need to get to your uncle’s.”

“It’s past one o’clock, I have to eat. I’m Chinese that way. Or I’ve gotten that way.”

“Meaning?”

“Nobody delays meals here. Everybody eats by the clock. Meetings in offices stop at twelve sharp even if they’re only ten minutes from concluding. By now, too, lunch will be over at my uncle’s house, and I don’t want to arrive hungry. It’s part of my job as a family member to think ahead and avoid inconveniencing the people I care about.”

“Kind of like Southerners in America.”

“Yes,” he said, brows lifting in surprise at her, “you’re right. As opposed to say, New Yorkers, who just throw out their requests and expect you to be the one to say no, sorry, it’s an inconvenience.”

“Exactly.”

“So you do want to eat,” he said.

“I do.”

“Good.” He laid a hand over his midsection, as if to reassure himself food was coming. He had a long waist anyway, the Chinese part of his body. Her eye followed his hand to that part of him.

He gave instructions to the driver. “Where are you taking me?” she said.

“Lou Wai Lou. Might as well go to the quintessential Hangzhou restaurant. It’s been around forever, and they’re still bragging about the Qianlong Emperor coming down to eat in Hangzhou in the eighteenth century. Through its history it’s had a close connection with the Seal Engraving Society, which was a gathering place for the scholar crowd. Classic Hangzhou cuisine. If a person like you eats in only one place, it should be this.”

“I was just thinking about this world of food you’ve been showing me,” she said, “and why I never knew about it before. Why do you think haute Chinese hasn’t made it in the West? Haute Japanese has. Haute Italian has.”

“You’re right. Every year the lists of the world’s fifty greatest restaurants come out, and not one of them mentions a single Chinese place. I think it’s because people don’t know it. Chinese-American food is so different.”

“But that was true once of Italian,” she protested. “Spaghetti, pizza? We got past that. Why not Chinese?”

He considered. “Could it be the money?” he said. “People value what’s expensive. It’s instinctive. They see Chinese as a low-cost food, so they think it can’t be high-end. It can be totally high-end, and it can also be expensive, which they’re not used to. Of course, no more expensive than any other high-end cuisine, but still. It’s Chinese. The funny thing is, actually, that what drives up the price of high-end Chinese cuisine is often the rarity of the ingredients. If you order high-end but forgo those dishes, it’s not always that pricey.”

“So what are the ingredients that are so expensive?”

“Exotic parts of exotic creatures. Chinese love them. It is a constant push against the envelope to wring delicious taste and texture out of the unexpected. These are the dishes, along with ones that are ridiculously labor-intensive, that make the high-end cuisine stand out. But let’s say you go to one of the world’s greatest Chinese restaurants – ”

“One of the ones the list makers never heard of.”

“Right, and you refrain from ordering the exotica. You will still have unbelievable food, and yet some of it at least will not be priced in the stratosphere.”

“I don’t know,” she demurred. “Those animal parts might be hard to pass up.”

“I could put you to the test on that,” he said.

She smiled. She knew that if he cooked it, and if he said it was good – bear paws, camel humps, dried sea slug, whatever – she would eat it.

Traffic slowed as they reentered the city, and soon they were in the urban knot again, crawling through dense fumes of exhaust between buildings that towered on each side. Once again she wondered when she was going to see this lake.

Then their street ended at a T intersection, beyond which stretched a dreamy blue mirror of water dotted by islands and double-reflected pagodas. Hills covered with timeless green forest ringed the opposite shore. Small, one-man passenger boats sculled the surface, their black canopies making them seem from a distance to be random, slow-moving water bugs. As far as she could see around the lake, between the boulevard and the shore, there stretched a shady park filled with promenading people. The noises of the city swallowed themselves somehow into silence behind her. She felt a sense of calm spreading inside, blue, like the water. She glanced at him. He was smiling with the same kind of pleasure. “What’s on those islands?” she asked.

“Pavilions. Zigzag bridges. Paths.”

“You know what? Maybe you should just stop and let me out. I’ll stay right here. Get old here. Never leave.”

“And you will stay here tonight – lucky you. If you want me to get you a room on the lake. Don’t you? Yes. That’s what I would do in your position. But first, lunch.”

Lou Wai Lou was a stately old building on a broad, crescent-shaped peninsula hugging the shore of the lake. They got off at the main road and walked down the causeway to the restaurant. The water’s edge was clotted with luxuriant patches of floating, round-leafed lotus. Sheltering trees rustled in the wind.

The restaurant was a stone building with huge windows and grand dining rooms. Sam showed her the building for the Seal Engraving Society next door. “The society members, the calligraphers who created the chops and seals used by educated men, were Lou Wai Lou’s original meishijia, their gourmets. Some say that’s how it got started that Hangzhou cuisine was about literature.”

“Literature?” she repeated, not sure she was hearing right.

“This is the literary cuisine.”

They sat down. “You mean what, writers eating together?”

“No, the opposite – eaters writing together. Poetry would be written in groups. People would get together and dine and play drinking games and write poetry – like a slam. So here, food and poetry developed side by side. Always modifying each other.”

“You mean this is the food of the literati.”

“Yes. Even today, dishes quote from the poets. You’ll see! We’ll order dongpo rou.” And he called for a waiter. “It was named for Su Dongpo. Famous poet who wrote some of his gems here. Oh,” he said to the waiter, “and another dish,” and he asked for sliced sautéed lotus root with sharp-scented yellow celery, garlic shoots, and Chinese sausage. Finally he ordered beggar’s chicken, because it was a famous local dish and he said she must have it at the source.

Sam Liang sat back after that, and stopped himself. Three dishes were enough. Uncle Xie would have him cooking the moment he arrived at the house, driving him, insisting he do better, teaching him something he needed for the banquet, which was now in five days. He would work hard, prepare a huge meal for everyone tonight. Better to eat lightly. Qi fen bao. Seven parts of ten. He knew that. And nice to have one more hour in this woman’s company.

Admit it, he thought, you like being with her. Hour after hour it was the same, and this was the second day – unusual for him. He usually didn’t do well when he took trips with women. Of course, that was usually because they were lovers and not friends, and it had always been hard for him to be with his lovers around the clock. This woman was not his lover; maybe that was why he got along with her so well. An acquaintance. Maybe a friend. Sometimes – the evening before, for instance, when they had said good night in the hallway – he thought he saw a sexual woman in there, waiting for someone to come in and find her. Other times he wasn’t sure. That’s a question for some other man to answer. Not you.

Yet he had been impressed with her today. She had handled herself perfectly in the meeting, waiting to speak until all the pleasantries had been exchanged, then offering herself as exactly what they might hope for, the widow wanting nothing but to support her husband’s child – if she was her husband’s child. That was her only sine qua non and she held fast to it, at the same time making it seem utterly reasonable. He himself had spoken in support of her, in English, only once, and it had been enough. She had taken a message that was essentially metaphor, the Sword-Grinding Rain story, internalized it, and played it back as strategy. He hadn’t expected that.

“I really don’t know much about you,” he said now. “I know about your husband and this claim and the things that brought you here. But not about your life.”

She thought. “One of the things about writing a column for twelve years is that you have to build a sort of persona. I’ve done that. I have a public self. That person would answer, I have no home. My home is the road, the passageway between the tents at the state fair, the alley where the oyster place is, you get the idea. And I do live like that, about ten days a month.”

“And the rest?”

“I spend the rest of the time at home. Writing, mostly.”

“And you live in L.A.”

“In Marina del Rey. Actually on a boat. I live on a boat.”

“Seriously?” His awareness went up.

“It sounds cool and minimalistic, but it’s not. It’s kind of screwed up, to tell you the truth.”

“You moved there after your husband died?”

She nodded.

“You can’t cook on a boat,” he said.

“Sure you can. But I don’t. I never cook.”

“Never? And you’re a food writer?”

“Not if I can help it. On this, I can tell you, my husband and I were in perfect accord. Neither of us knew how to cook. My mother was a wonderful woman but terrible in the kitchen; his mother could cook but refused to show anybody how. So we kept a refrigerator that looked like a forest of takeout containers, his and hers. Matt loved to eat, but he had no interest in cooking.”

“Opposite man from me,” said Sam.

“What about you? I know you studied with your uncles, but where’d you learn before that?”

“My mom. Not Chinese, of course. Jewish food. The basics. Comfort food. Here.” He flipped up his phone and touched the buttons and flipped it around to show her the corded grin of a pleasant-looking gray-haired woman. “Judy Liang,” he said, his love evident. “My childhood home cook.”

“She looks nice,” Maggie said, which was the truth.

“She is.” He put the phone away. The food came. Dongpo rou was a geometrically precise square of fat-topped pork braised for hours in a dark sauce. Maggie lifted the fat layer delicately away with her chopsticks and plucked the lean, tender meat from underneath.

“Ah, you’re so American,” he said. “The Chinese diner is in it for the fat.”

“Let me see you eat it.”

He scooped up a piece and popped it in his mouth. Then he said, “Truth is, I don’t like the fat much either.”

She laughed. She couldn’t stop eating the pork, which was succulent and delicious. “Would you say this is high food or low food?”

“Both. That’s like so many things here. It’s low in that it’s one of the most common dishes in this city. They cook it everywhere. It’s high in the sense that to make it right – with tender, succulent meat and fat like light, fragrant custard – is a rare feat.”

“Will you put it in your banquet?”

“I will,” he said, surprising her. “But I think in a different form.”

“Good,” she said, “because I love it.” She turned to the second platter, which held lotus root and crisp, strong-tasting yellow celery and sausage. Also delicious. Then the beggar’s chicken. It looked at first like a foil-wrapped whole bird, but he undid it, folded back layers of crinkly baking bags, and broke the seal on a tight molded wrap of lotus leaves. A magnificently herbed chicken aroma rushed into the air.

Maggie couldn’t wait. She picked up a mouthful of chicken that fell away from the carcass and into her chopsticks at a touch. It was moist and dense with profound flavor, the good nourishment of chicken, first marinated, then spiked with the bits of aromatic vegetable and salt-cured ham which had been stuffed in the cavity and were now all over the bird. Shot through everything was the pungent musk of the lotus leaf.

At once she knew she should write about this place. She should give the recipe for this dish, catch the glorious bustle of this restaurant, describe these tall windows looking over the majesty of the lake and the virgin green hills beyond. Her one column was inadequate – inadequate even to tell the story of Sam Liang, which was so much richer than anything she could contain in a brief piece. And in addition to him she had so many moments, like this one, this lunch at Lou Wai Lou.

After they ate they walked outside and stood on the steps to look out at the lake. “The thing I can’t believe is that behind me” – she waved back over her left shoulder – “is that gray, honking city. While over there” – she pointed across the water – “I see nothing but trees and hills. No development. In this day and age that’s amazing! What’s over there?”

“Monasteries and stuff,” he said. “Temples.” Then she looked around and saw that his attention was focused away from her and the lake, trained on the bottom of the steps, where an older man used a bucket of water and a brush as long as a mop, which he dipped in the water and swirled on the wide smooth pavement.

“What’s he writing?” she whispered.

“A poem. Unless it’s a short one, the beginning will be gone by the time he gets to the end. It will evaporate away. That’s the idea. It’s like a recitation.”

“But who is he?”

“Just a guy out enjoying the day.”

“Can you read the poem?”

“Me? No! Impossible.” He looked at Maggie. If she stayed here, in time she would understand more. Only half the beauty of what the man was doing was the poem, beyond doubt some beloved classic. The other half was his calligraphy, which rendered each character into something like an abstract painting, beautiful, but all the more indecipherable to Sam. “Elder Born,” he said in polite Mandarin, “may I trouble you as to the author of this poem?”

“Su Dongpo!” the man cried up the steps, delighted.

“It’s the guy the pork dish was named after,” Sam said to her.

He knew how strange the connection between food and poetry seemed at first; he remembered his Uncle Xie explaining it to him. “The number-one relationship is between the chef and the gourmet, my son. The chef must give the meishijia what he wants. Here in Hangzhou, for a thousand years, the meishijia have been the literati, so we give them dishes named for poets. We create carvings and presentations to evoke famous poetry and calligraphy parties throughout history. We strive for dishes of artifice which inspire poetic musings. The highest reward for any Hangzhou chef is to hear poetry being created and applauded by his diners out in the dining room – oh! Nothing else in my life has given me such a good feeling, except my wife and my son and my daughters – and you, my son, of course. This is what you must understand if you are to be a true Chinese chef. Eating is only the beginning of cuisine! Only the start! Listen. Flavor and texture and aroma and all the pleasure – this is no more than the portal. Really great cooking goes beyond this to engage the mind and the spirit – to reflect on art, on nature, on philosophy. To sustain the mind and elevate the spirit of the meishijia. Never cook food just to be eaten, Nephew!”

Sam had tried, but here he truly was held back by being a foreigner. He had been born, raised, and educated in America. He lacked the dizzying welter of references and touchpoints that would have been his if he had grown up here. He had only his uncles. They had done their best to fill him in on five thousand years of culture, starting the moment he arrived. For this he not only accepted their abuse, he was grateful for it.

In another taxi they sailed back up the road toward the lake and the hotels. It was time now. He needed to get on to his uncle’s.

He had called. He was told Xie had been carried down to the kitchen and was waiting for him. His wife, Wang Ling, was there beside him, and since yesterday all four children had been home – three daughters and a son. Only one of the daughters, Songling, still lived in Hangzhou; she managed another venerable restaurant called Shan Wai Shan. She was the only one of the Xie children who had followed her father into the world of cuisine. The other two daughters, Songan and Songzhe, and the son, Songzhao, all had professional careers and families in Shanghai. They were Sam’s generation, and he thought of them as one thinks of far-off cousins, rarely seen but always spoken of with fondness. When they were born, their father had insisted upon using the traditional generation name, so that their given names all shared the same first syllable. By then, in the 1950s, this was hardly ever done – but that was Third Uncle, a stubborn reprobate, still using the generation name even after his own father had died in prison for being an imperial cook.

The old man had used the same iron will on Sam. No one was harder on Sam than Xie. None had used harsher names. Xie had called him a worthless lump of mud and a motherless turtle. He told him he didn’t deserve to be a Liang. More times than Sam could bear to remember he had taken away what Sam was in the middle of cooking and dumped it out. “Zai kaishi yixia,” Uncle would order, slamming the clean wok back down in front of him, Start again. And Sam would swallow back the humiliation and know that Uncle would not be teaching him if he didn’t believe he could learn it, could do it. Each time Sam would resolve to keep trying.

And now Uncle was slipping away from the earth, and all Sam wanted was to get to him, quickly, and be with him once again, while he lived.

She turned to him in the back seat. “If you can just tell me a good place to eat tonight. Near my hotel.”

“By yourself?”

“Of course by myself.”

“You can’t eat alone,” he said, and even as he spoke he asked himself what he was doing. Why not just say goodbye? It was time for him to go to Uncle’s. “I told you, that’s one of the important things about Chinese food. Maybe the most important thing. It’s about community.”

“I’m okay eating by myself. I always eat alone on the road, and always always since Matt died.”

“That’s bad luck. I might have to try and change you.”

“You can’t change me,” she informed him.

“But to eat alone is anti-Chinese.”

“I’m not Chinese. Look, Sam, you’re being so nice and you really don’t have to be. It’s just, I’m here. I don’t want to waste a meal. Tonight I want to go someplace good. Just tell me. That’s all.”

“I could easily give you a place. But the thing you should really do is come with me. Eat with the Xie family. Then I will bring you back here.”

“I don’t want to get in between you and your family.”

“You won’t. You’ll be watching a lot. I’ll be the only person you can talk to, and I might be occupied. You okay with that?”

“Yes,” she said. “I’m a writer. I love to observe. But this is your family. It’s a sensitive time.”

“But I would like you to come.”

“Okay,” she said after a minute.

He felt himself smile. He was relaxed with her, which he hadn’t felt in so long. She was a friend. Nothing wrong with it.

They had reached her hotel parking lot. She slid out the door and pulled her bag behind her. “Will you wait for me a moment? Just let me put this stuff in the room. I’ll be right back.”

“Okay,” he said.

Maggie closed the door and trotted away from him to the entrance. She was aware that he was watching her from behind. When she was younger she would have worried about whether her shape was pleasing or not, but not now. She was old, forty, and besides, he was not interested. Still, she was glad she was going along. She felt a pull to him. Maybe they’d be friends after all.

She ran upstairs and put her things in the room and then came back down. Another thing: it would be a blessing to have company tonight, not to be alone. She had done it, got the sample, sent it off, and there was always that sense of letdown when a difficult task was finished. There was also the sadness, the finality; if Shuying wasn’t Matt’s, then she, Maggie, would never see his face in any living form, ever again. In time she might even forget his face. She would remember it only the way it had been captured in pictures. She was going to see herself get old in the mirror, and never remember him any other way but young.

“You okay?” said Sam when she got in the car.

“I am,” she said, and she closed the door behind her.

Xie must have fallen asleep because he awoke to the sound of the car door. Then a second door. Voices. A woman. His shaggy brows lifted. Finally, after all this time, the boy had brought a woman here! An instant web of thoughts bloomed and branched out in his mind as he heard their steps coming up to the door.

“Men kai-de!” he called. Door’s open!

The door pushed open and in came Nephew, smiling, wet-eyed, and behind him an outside woman with large, dark eyes and unruly hair.

Nephew dropped beside him and held him in the Western way as he murmured to him in Chinese. Then he said, “Uncle, this is Maggie McElroy,” and raised a hand to the girl. Xie did his best to give her a smile. She was pleasing in spite of her face, which was too sharp. Of course she could have looked like a dog and he would have been happy, considering that she was a woman and Nephew was bringing her. “Huanying, huanying,” Xie said.

“He says welcome.”

“My pleasure to meet you,” said Maggie.

“Ta hen gaoxing renshi ni,” said Sam.

Xie had been watching her eyes. He could always tell when someone understood. “She can’t talk?” he said abruptly in Chinese.

“No, Uncle, not a word.”

“Too bad.”

“No! No, Uncle, it’s not like that. She’s not my girlfriend. She’s a writer, she’s doing an article about the competition. It’s no more than that.”

“Did I say something?” Xie demanded. “Did this worthless old lump say anything to her but welcome?”

“No. Sorry. Anyway, I’ll run her back to her hotel after dinner.”

“She is your good friend, she is welcome.”

“She’s not – oh, never mind.” Besides, she was his friend, in a way.

Uncle Xie was looking sternly at him. “Enough.” The old voice was imperious. “Show me your wrists!”

Sam unbuttoned his cuffs and rolled them back. He knew he wasn’t going to have enough new scars to please Uncle. Serious Chinese cooks always had a signature pattern of mottle-burns. These burns could extend past the wrists all the way up the forearms. Just reaching across the stove, a chef could be burned by spattering oil, and the burns left their own special marks. Even American immigration officers checking incoming Chinese chefs with work visas knew to check the wrists and forearms for the spatter-pattern of scars.

Xie craned his neck. “Closer!” he rasped, and then when he got a look he let out a weak snort. “What do you do all day, lie about? Do you ignore your prayers to your calling? When are you going to rush to clasp the Buddha’s foot – the day of the banquet? Don’t you know by then it will be too late?”

“Uncle, I have been thinking, and trying dishes – ”

“Flush your thinking! It is the American in you that thinks somehow everything you need will arise by magic inside you! Wrong! You have to learn! To learn you have to work!”

“But Uncle – ”

“If you were working you would be burned!”

Behind them Maggie stared. Though she didn’t understand their Chinese, it was obvious that, as sick and weak as the old man was, he was hitting hard. Yet Sam didn’t seem to mind. He could feel her watching and turned around. “Don’t worry. It’s his way of saying I matter to him.”

“It’s fine,” she said.

Then Uncle Xie cut back in with his rasping Mandarin. “I’m waiting! And since you did not bring this foreign female here to tell me you had a special feeling for her, why are you talking to her? Lump! Dogmeat! Do you think I have so much time left? Wash your hands! Tie back your hair! You should cut it. It looks terrible. Prepare!”

“We’re going to be cooking now,” Sam told Maggie. “You’ll have to forgive me.”

“Nothing to forgive. I’ll watch. That’s why I’m here.” She crept to the side and sat down. “You’re fun to watch.”

“See, that’s why I wanted you here. You’re nice to me. I get nothing but tough love from my relatives. Ah, here’s Wang Ling, Uncle Xie’s wife.” And he bent to hug a small, white-haired bird of a woman.

He spoke in Chinese to the old lady, introducing Maggie, after which she took Maggie’s elbow with a surprisingly strong little hand. She sat beside Xie and soothed him while Maggie settled on her small worn stool against the wall.

First there was soaking of lotus leaves, which Maggie gradually saw were meant to wrap short ribs. She watched as Sam followed instructions from Uncle Xie and mixed a marinade of soy sauce, scallions, ginger, sugar, peanut oil, and sesame oil, plus a spoonful of something. “Bean paste,” he shot back at her over his shoulder. Her notebook crept out of her purse practically of its own accord, and she started writing things down.

The ribs and the marinade went back in the refrigerator. “They have to steep,” said Sam. Then he lifted the lotus leaves out, wet and limp like elephant ears. He stared at them for a second. “I see my mistake,” he said to Maggie in English. “I should have cut them with scissors when they were dry.”

“Worthless,” sniffed Xie.

“Completely,” Sam agreed, and started sawing on them with a serrated knife.

After half an hour his uncle said, “All right. Take the ribs out. First, take all the pieces out of the marinade, the scallions and ginger – throw them away. Leave some of the marinade on the meat. You’re going to put two bite-sized ribs in each lotus leaf. First roll them in the five-spice rice powder – get a lot, now, make a paste. Get some larger rice crumbles. Large enough for the mouth to feel. That’s it, now roll them. You have the plate ready? Line them up. No! Turtle! Smooth side down! You’re going to turn them over to serve, remember? Just witness your stupidity!”

“He doesn’t seem happy,” said Maggie.

“It’s not as bad as it sounds,” Sam said.

Now Wang Ling was bending over the old man, telling him it was time to go up and nap. “Yes, Auntie,” Sam agreed. “You are right. Uncle, I’ll carry you up. We’ll awaken you in two hours when the ribs are finished steaming. Would you like that?”

“Like it!” said Xie. “I’ll swat your worthless head if you don’t!” Then he broke apart, coughing.

“Come, Uncle,” Sam said, and he lifted the thin old figure in his arms like a child and bore him gently toward the stairs. Wang Ling bent to take the empty rattan chair.

“Oh, no,” Maggie said quickly, “let me.” And she scooped up the chair, which was light, and followed Sam into a central hallway and then up a straight single flight of stairs between whitewashed walls. At the top they turned into the second bedroom.

It was warm with the sweet vinegar of old people, the books, the glasses, the cups of tea, the medicines. Sam laid Xie on the flowered bed. Curtains lifted in the breeze. “Thank you, my son,” Xie said to him, voice flickering, exhausted.

Now, Maggie thought, he did look sick. His skin was yellow parchment, his hands weak and palsied. His chest rose and fell with effort. He was trying to talk to Sam.

“Guolai,” he whispered, Come here.

Sam bent close.

“I don’t suppose you have any miserable idea for a menu, do you?”

“Not yet, Uncle.”

“I have written one out for you, my son. Songling helped me. Songzhe, Songan, and Songzhao are bringing back all the food you will need for it. You are to prepare it for tonight. When you are done, even if you do not use any of the dishes from it, you will understand the classical progression.”

“Yes, Uncle. I’ll start when they get here.”

“Awaken me the moment the ribs are ready.” He lifted his head off the pillow, the only thing left he could move. “Don’t make me come after you!”

“No, Uncle,” Nephew said, tenderly tucking the cover. Xie watched as he and the curly-headed foreign woman slipped out. He himself could feel the soft bath of sleep coming on. Sleep was his comfort now, sleep and memories, along with the kind gaze and gentle hands of his old wife. And his children. And Nephew, now that he was here.

The injections his wife gave him took away the pain, even as they made his mind as clear as glass. Everything around him was like a dream. What had been far away was near. The days of his youth, particularly, seemed as pure and immediate as if they had just occurred.

Hangzhou was a food lover’s dream then, and had been for a thousand years. Even the most ancient texts recorded its “abundance of rice and fish.” By the time of the Southern Song in the twelfth century, restaurants and teahouses were two-thirds of the city’s establishments. In order to outdo one another, Hangzhou chefs turned to the lavish use of ingredients, even rare ones, not even to eat, but simply to flavor the others – prawns used as a seasoning, crab roe as fat. And then there was decorative cooking. He must remember to bring this up with Nephew. At certain points in Hangzhou’s history, presentation had reached virtuosic, garish heights, with elaborate mosaics of brightly hued hors d’oeuvres and the cutting of main-dish ingredients into floral and animal shapes. Oh, and there were the local delicacies: the Zhenjiang black vinegar and the Shaoxing wine.

It was right that Nephew should have his final lesson here in Hangzhou. Nowhere else in China were the people so occupied with gastronomy. Oh, he thought, shivering with delight, for so many centuries cultivated men had thought nothing of spending long hours over wine and poetry, debating which was better: the fresh pink shrimp flavored with imperial-grade green tea leaves, or the skinned shad wrapped in caul fat and steamed with wine.

Diners such as these deserved flattery, and so in Hangzhou a new element of Chinese cuisine was born – the pleasure of the compliment, made by the chef, delivered to the diner. This in turn gave rise to a whole sub-school of dishes characterized by surpassing subtlety, dishes that would be apprehended only by those with genuine taste.

Into this food fairyland had been born the young Xie, with his best friend and sworn brother, Jiang Wanli. The two families lived in adjacent compounds, and the little boys seemed joined to each other in all things.

They waited on private banquets together at the restaurant, not serving, just watching from the side in their gray silk gowns and black overtunics, ready to refill wine cups or change plates. Here they learned the esoteric lessons of cuisine. Food was not just to eat. It was a language. It was a regulator. It set the ladder of power. Each time the boys served, they observed this. Each meal was art, was a delight, but also a revelation of hierarchy.

Before a banquet they would wait for their guests at the entry, its pond and arched bridge and feathery trees laid out in the style of ornate containment which had long been the region’s signature. As they led the arrivals back to their private dining room, ready-set with cold dishes, they were already trading calculations silently, through no more than glances. Who would sit in the shangzuo, the seat of honor facing the door? Who would sit in the lowest seat, with his back to the door? What dishes were selected? Who served food to whom? What toasts were proposed, in what order? Which prestige foods would be served? These were the parts of the banquet language which had meaning. The conversation, the words that were said at table, meant next to nothing. It was through etiquette that the verdict was passed. The boys saw subordinates demoted, successors selected, the revelation of a traitor in the group. Sometimes they saw the bland manners that meant the banquet with its formal mix of supplication and magnanimity was just a show, the successful candidate having already been secretly agreed upon via the age-old back door.

Ah, Xie thought in an agony of hope, the boy’s meal had to be brilliant – in every way, on every level. All the right messages had to be sent out through the dishes, all the right resonances struck. He watched the long-pointed fronds of the bamboo outside the window and wondered once again what it was that made their movement so odd now, so brittle in the breeze. This was the last thought he had before he slept.

Down in the kitchen Maggie and Sam found the four Xie children, all in their forties, all with the crosscut Xie cheekbones of the patriarch. None of them looked like the delicate, narrow-faced mother, not even the son. Sam introduced them: Songling, the oldest, Songan and Songzhe, the other two girls, and Songzhao, the son.

Sam had told her they spoke a bit of English, but she didn’t hear any. All were talking in Chinese at once. Cornucopia-stuffed string bags of food spilled onto the counters. Gourds and herbs and cabbages and all manner of flowering chives were spread out, tubs of rosy-fresh roe, a great live fish slapping in a plastic bucket, and two live chickens, caged.

“These you’re going to kill?” said Maggie.

“Not in here,” he said. “There’s a place outside the kitchen door for that. Don’t worry. It won’t be when you’re around.”

“Give me some warning. I’ll take a walk.”

“Come to think of it, maybe you should watch.” The thought made him smile. “You’re in China. Actually, Maggie, the sisters have a plan for you, if you like. They’re all going to get a massage. They want you to go with them.”

“A massage?” she said.

“They always do this together when they come home.” He was making separate piles of the vegetables, the sliced-in-place pads of fresh pasta, the eggs.

“Women shunbian qu,” one of the sisters offered.

“They’re going anyway,” he translated.

“To a massage parlor?” she said.

He laughed. “It’s not that kind. Oh, there are those here too, believe me – just not this place.”

“I wondered,” she said. “I saw girls in Beijing.”

“Wonder no longer,” Sam told her. “It’s everywhere.” Indeed, prostitution had sprung back to life alongside the restaurant business in the 1990s. It took all forms and went through every kind of channel, one of them being massage establishments whose true purpose was immediately made obvious by low lights, bed-furnished cubicles, and so-called masseuses clad in skintight gowns slit to their pale hipbones.

In the dim lights, the girls who worked there were usually pretty. By Western standards they were inexpensive, too. Added to that was the fact that prostitution here was not hidden away in secret, seedy places the way it was in the West. It was forthright, visible. Sexual services in token guises were openly offered in the best hotels and business centers. Outcall services supplied whatever was desired in more private settings. At the highest caste level were all the women who were kept in apartments and on retainers for their sexual services: contract mistresses. If what you wanted was paid sex – and Sam didn’t, personally, not because he was ashamed but because for him paying seemed to knock the whole point out of it – then China was a great place to be. Plenty of Chinese men were into it. Some laowai men too, though they mostly stuck to the bar-girls and masseuses.

“I won’t lie to you,” he said to Maggie now. “Massage parlors of that kind are everywhere. Very big here, with Chinese and with foreigners too. But so is the other kind, the legitimate kind, where the workers are trained and it’s totally therapeutic and they just do massage, on men and women alike. It feels great. You should go. The sisters want you to.”

They spoke up now, chorusing in Chinese, obviously saying yes, yes, she should go.

“We can’t really talk to each other,” said Maggie.

“That doesn’t matter. You’re getting a massage.”

“I think I could use that,” Maggie admitted. Except for hugs and handshakes, she hadn’t really been touched by anyone this past year. Everyone was kind to her, but their kindness was in the heart. She had not felt anyone’s hands on her. No one held her. So often she had lain on the boat and wrapped her arms around herself, even in the daytime, the curtains tight against the bright light and the faint slap of the lines in the wind.

Sam said something in Chinese, and Songling linked her arm through Maggie’s. “Come,” she said, and led her outside.

“Bye,” Maggie called back to Sam, and he just looked at her with a smile, one that seemed to penetrate through her shell to the inside of her, one that said, You’re about to feel good.

Songzhe sat beside her in the back of the car, and Songan rode up in front with Songling. They curved down through a green pelt of trees rich with bamboo. When they passed an entrance gate with a sign in English and Chinese she saw they had been driving through the Hangzhou Botanical Garden. The sisters batted back and forth like birds, happy to see each other, and Songzhe kept leaning over to squeeze Maggie’s arm. Everyone was so physical here, Maggie thought. That was one reason she liked it. That and the fact that people went around in groups. Sam, for example; even though she had mostly been with Sam alone, he seemed to have a herd of family members supporting him in the background. They were quarrelsome, but they were there. It was a form of sustenance. It was not Maggie’s life, never had been, but she liked it.

When they drove up in front of the massage place, she saw that it did indeed look like a clinic. Chinese women in white coats and flat shoes checked them in and led them to a room with eight leather recliners separated by side tables for drinks and reading matter. A wall-mounted TV was blaring a Chinese travelogue. The Xie sisters chattered and laughed. They soaked their feet in plastic-lined wooden tubs of hot water with herbs. She could feel how happy they were to be together, even if it was for their father’s final illness, even if their eyes were brimming at the same time they talked and laughed. Each had gossip and revelations and new digital photos on their cell phones, which they made Maggie look at and admire. Maggie knew how they felt. She understood happiness, and she understood grief. Many times during the last year she had been pulled between the two, the way they were now.

“He shenmo?” said one of the white-coated women, standing next to her, and Songzhe translated, “Something to drink?”

“Water,” said Maggie. “Please. And could we turn that off?” She indicated the TV, now showing footage of mountain peaks set to tinny music.

At once all three sisters waved dismissively at it, chattering; they didn’t like it, they hadn’t been watching it, they didn’t care. Maggie received a water bottle, took a drink from it, lay back, and submitted to the hands of the girl who took her feet out, dried them, balanced them on the stool, and began to massage them. The woman was confident and strong-fingered. Maggie felt her anchor lift, her beleaguered self finally rise and float and start to spin downstream. The world fell away. In time she saw only disconnected images and scattered, luminous thoughts.

Likewise the conversation between the sisters gave way to the silence of pleasure as the masseuses released the legs and feet and then moved around to each woman’s head, neck, shoulders, and arms. Maggie drifted. In a half-dream she saw Matt’s face. How far did you go with her? What did you do? Were there others? But he didn’t answer. A glass wall seemed to separate them. She could see the humorous light in his eyes and the stubble on his chin. See his Welsh face, sheepish and brave.

Is she your daughter or not?

She floated with the woman’s strong fingers kneading up her shoulders and her neck to her scalp, then dropping to her upper spine and starting again. Maggie’s muscles were hard and tense. As their outer layers relaxed and released, images of Matt rose like bubbles, burst, and vanished. Maggie felt the Chinese woman’s hands now on her neck. She remembered Matt two years ago, taking her to a birthday party for his friend Kenny’s little son. She remembered complaining on the way over that people shouldn’t invite grown-up friends to a party for a three-year-old, but Matt broke through her crust, as he usually did. He was the gracious one. He was the reason their relationship had manners. “You know what?” he said. “Kenny’s more proud of this little guy than of anything else he’s ever done. So it’s fine.”

At the party she knew hardly anyone, except Kenny’s wife, so she stood with her in the kitchen to help. They chatted and cut melons and pineapples, bananas and grapes, for fruit salad. On the other side of the pass-through, guests buzzed at the food table and formed a laughing circle around Kenny and Matt as they played with little William on the floor. Both men lay on their backs on the floor with their knees up, whooping and hollering, riding the boy on their knees and passing him aloft from one to the other while he shrieked with joy.

“Look at Matt,” said Valerie, Kenny’s wife. “He loves it.”

It was true. Matt’s face was alight. His eyes were dizzy with pleasure. So tender, the way he held the boy. He wants one. Look at him. Look. It was so undeniable that Maggie thought her heart would crack. “You’re right,” she said softly. “He does.”

Valerie put the last fruit on the platter and wiped it once around the edges. “So when are you two going to have one?”

Now, years later, on her back with a Chinese woman’s fingers working their way down her arm, spreading her hand, massaging it, Maggie remembered the way she had fished for an answer, how Valerie had seen her discomfort and kindly retreated. She remembered the silent thud inside her that told her Matt would never rest, never be content, until he had one of his own. She knew this wish would now define their life together. As it did, in the short time left to them.

It’s no use thinking about him. He’s never coming back. She felt the old sadness. One of the sisters murmured softly in Chinese; the sister next to her released a little laugh. Maggie made an involuntary half-smile in response. She didn’t understand. It didn’t matter. They were happy here together, and they made her part of it. It was guanxi, the deep kind, family. She thought she was beginning to understand it. Make this the start, then. Go on from here. The thought was soft and clear in her mind. The room grew still, just the sound of their breathing, soft, like falling snow. She let go of the world and slept.