The Last Chinese Chef

2

Three qualities of China made it a place where there grew a great cuisine. First, its land has everything under heaven: mountains, deserts, plains, and fertile crescents; great oceans, mighty rivers. Second, the mass of Chinese are numerous but poor. They have always had to extract every possible bit of goodness and nutrition from every scrap of land and fuel, economizing everywhere except with human labor and ingenuity, of which there is a surfeit. Third, there is China’s elite. From this world of discriminating taste the gourmet was born. Food became not only a complex tool for ritual and the attainment of prestige, but an art form, pursued by men of passion.

– LIANG WEI, The Last Chinese Chef

Sam Liang turned the phone off and replaced it in his pocket before he turned to face his First and Second Uncles, Jiang Wanli and Tan Jingfu, who stood glaring at him. They were older by thirty-five years, friends of his father and, with Xie Er in Hangzhou, the nearest thing he had in China to clan relatives. They’d also been his guides in the kitchen and his ties to the past. From every conceivable angle, they had unlimited rights to harangue him.

“Was that a female person?” demanded Jiang in the Chinese they always spoke.

Sam sighed. “Yes.”

“I trust you invited her to meet you?”

“No, First Uncle.”

“The times I’ve told you to try harder are more than a few! Have we not talked of this? Yet whenever an opportunity crosses your path with a female person, you show your white feather!”

“Uncle. That was a business call. Anything else would have been inappropriate.”

“Huh!” Tan raised a finger. “My English is not so poor! She was from the American magazine. A writer. Probably a food specialist!”

“Exactly right,” said Sam. “And the restaurant is off for now. There is no story.”

“You are not trying very hard,” said Jiang. “You should do an article with her. It would bring you attention.”

Tan leapt in. “You could have at least suggested the two of you drink tea! You could have discussed the matter as a civilized person.”

Sam understood. A civilized person meant a Chinese person. After the first few years of instructing him in the kitchen – the two of them barking directions, shouting at his mistakes, harrumphing their approval when he cooked well – the two old men had turned to teaching him etiquette. They showed him the web of manners and considerations that held together the Chinese world. Unfortunately, he had been raised in America; he was possessed of willful foreign ways. And he was only half Chinese. Luck was with him that the other half was Jewish, as Jews were admired for their intelligence, but still, here in China, it was bad to be only part Chinese. This was always the first thought of Sam’s detractors.

Those critics called him an outsider even though he was old-school. They didn’t seem to care that he was one of the few still cooking in the traditional way, that all the other top cooks in China were showcasing some modern edge. But he had determined to do what his grandfather had written and his uncles had taught him. He knew cooking well was the best revenge.

“I wish you had invited the female person to meet you,” Tan said.

“Yes, Uncle.” Sam did not argue. In their minds, being single at his age was almost an affront to nature. It was something they felt a duty to correct. He had long ago understood that the best way to love them was to let them interfere. Let them scold him and insist upon meetings with the female relations of their acquaintances. These meetings were at best a waste of time and at worst painful – and not only for him. What he’d quickly realized was that the women didn’t want the introduction any more than he did. They too were there only to appease elder relatives.

Certainly there were beautiful, intelligent Chinese women to be met in the internationalized top layer of Beijing society, but so far Sam had not found the connection he wanted. Part of it was them. For Chinese women who liked foreigners, he was not foreign enough. For those seeking a man who was Chinese, he was too foreign. His status placed him somewhere below all of the above on the instant-desirability scale.

It had not been like that at home in Ohio. There, his dark, high-cheeked face had seemed exotic to women, especially corn-fed girls with athletic strides and sweet smiles. The women here were lovely too, but different, sinuous, cerebral, fine-skinned. They were cultured. He found them fascinating. It was never hard to begin affairs with them. What was hard was to connect.

That, he sensed, was his fault; he wanted a connection that was complete. Here, he could never get over feeling that he was using only half of himself, the Chinese half. Everything from before, from America, now hid unseen. And he wanted to be seen. At home in the West he’d had a similar feeling, only it was the Chinese part of him that lay dormant. He’d had the idea that coming here would change things. No. He was still half.

“You could have talked to the American about the book,” Tan said.

Sam shook his head. “Respectfully, Second Uncle, I don’t see them doing an article about a book that came out in 1925 – oh, and in Chinese.”

“You are translating it.”

“It’s not done.”

“You’re no further?” said Jiang.

“I ought to be more hardworking,” Sam said, which was the evasive and Chinese thing to say. Actually it was his father who held up the translation. Now retired from the post office, Liang Yeh spent most of his time in a dark room with books and the things he remembered. Sam couldn’t get him to do his part, which was rendering his own father’s formal, premodern Mandarin into a rough English-and-Chinese mix Sam could understand.

He had not told Tan and Jiang this, preferring to let them admire the old man. To them, Liang Yeh had triumphed. He had made his way to America. He had established a family. They didn’t know that Sam had been largely raised by his mother, the no-nonsense and tireless Judy Liang, née Blumenfeld, while his father was mentally remote. Exile was in the heart, and Liang Yeh carried it with him everywhere. He seemed determined to never let it go. In time exile became his most important aspect, his shadow, closer to him in a way even than his family.

Therefore, when complaints were raised about the slow translation, Sam took the blame. It eased a needy and chronically sad part of him to hear his father praised, and he did whatever he could to leave his uncles’ good opinion intact.

“You will finish it when you can,” said Second Uncle, for though they were hard on him they always forgave him. Tan was walking out of the kitchen now, where he had been fussing with the tea things.

“Uncle, you shouldn’t,” Sam said. “I’ll make tea.”

“No!” Jiang raised a hand. “You sit. We have a special matter.”

“You want to introduce me to another of your relatives,” said Sam.

“Very good!” said Jiang. “My grandniece is coming from Jilin. But that is next month. Younger Born! You tell him.”

“Very well,” Tan said. He set the tray down with ceremony. His grandfather had been the great chef Tan Zhuanqing, who had been one of the top cooks in the palace, and whose apprentice had been the young Liang Wei – Sam’s grandfather. Great was the Tan name even now. Tan leaned over his cup and paddled the steam toward him with swollen hands. “Very secret!” he said importantly. “Only a few know! The Chinese Committee for the 2008 Games is going to run its own Games here, an Olympics of culture. They are going to have competitions in Beijing and Kunqu opera, in dance, which is to include martial arts, and in cuisine! Competitions on TV! All China will watch!”

“You see?” said Jiang. “The Liang name will fly to the four directions!”

“You’re getting ahead, Uncle.”

“You are on the audition list!” Tan cried. “We can confirm it!”

Sam felt a twist in his stomach. A great opportunity, but the timing was terrible. His restaurant wasn’t even opening. “Why me?”

“Fool!” Tan raised a hand as if to cuff him. “If we’ve told you one time it’s a hundred! You are in a direct line from Tan Zhuanqing. Your grandfather was trained by him. People eat your dishes and they talk about them all across the city. You have not even opened a restaurant yet, and you are known.”

Sam swallowed. “How many will audition?”

“Ten, for two spots. Two spots for northern cooks on the national team. The rest of the team will be Cantonese, Sichuan, Hunanese, and Shanghainese.”

“What’s the audition?” He felt as if he were clinging to a rope high above the rapids.

“Each candidate will prepare a banquet for the committee. Nephew! You must make a celestial meal for them!”

“Sure,” said Sam. With a lurch he saw the complexity of it. This was not the four or five dishes chefs prepared on those TV contests – this was a banquet. It was the complete symphony, the holy grail of Chinese food art. It required not only great dishes but also concept, shape, subtlety, and narrative force. “Who are the others?”

“Wang Zijian,” said Tan. “Pan Jun. Also Lu Fudong.”

“Right,” said Sam. He knew them. Good chefs.

“Zhan Ming,” said Jiang.

“Yes,” said Sam. “He’s good too.”

“And Yao Weiguo,” said Tan.

“Ah.” Here was his real rival. Yao was exceptionally good. And he did the very thing Sam did not: he came up with something new each time. He improvised. Yao’s way of working was like that of a European or an American. He riffed, cooking in the style of jazz, while Sam remained the old-fashioned formalist. “I’m worried,” he said. “Yao can cook.”

“So can you,” said Jiang, touching his arm. “It does not have to be complicated. The perfect meal is balanced, not ornate. Remember the words of Yuan Mei. ‘Don’t eat with your eyes. Don’t cover the table with dishes, or multiply the courses too much. Bean curd is actually better than bird’s nest.’”

“Those are nice, naturalistic sentiments, Uncle, but don’t you think the people on this panel are going to eat with their eyes?”

“Yes! You are right! And you must impress them. But that is secondary. The true perfection of food is a surprisingly modest thing. It is what is right. There you will find what you seek.”

Sam sighed. “Zhen bang.” Great.

The next morning Maggie awoke to a tugging fear about whether the clipping she had brought was still in her computer case. She padded out of bed and to the small living room, where she unzipped the case’s side pocket. There it was. A square of newspaper, with a picture of her husband, knocked down, probably dead already, at the scene of the accident. It had been snapped moments after a car driven by an elderly man plowed up onto a sidewalk in San Francisco and killed Matt and two others. There he was. People around him, bending over him. A woman kneeling.

She couldn’t bear to look at it. She just had to make sure that she still had it. She did, so she zipped it away and turned to the day, just beginning. The morning outside was gray-shrouded. The buildings were spires of lead.

She took a taxi to the New World Building, where she rode to the seventeenth floor.

Then she pushed open the door to Calder Hayes and felt herself stepping back into America. Magazines on the reception room table – it looked like an office at home. It had been the same way when she’d come here before with Matt.

“May I help you?” said the receptionist, young, Chinese, smart-looking.

“I’m Maggie McElroy,” she said, and when this drew a blank, she added, “Mrs. Mason.”

“Oh! Hello. Welcome you.”

“Thank you. Is Carey here?”

“Mr. James is in Bangkok today. Please wait a minute.” She pressed a number code into her handset and spoke in a brief, rapid flow of Chinese. She looked up to see Maggie still in front of her and smiled brightly, pointing to the chairs. “Please.”

Maggie sat, pacing her breathing, gathering calm. Soon a small, sturdy woman came pumping out, pushing black glasses up her nose. “Pleased to meet you,” she said. “I am Miss Chu.” Her accent was clipped, precise, faintly British.

“Maggie McElroy. The same. Your English is perfect.”

“So-so,” the woman qualified. “I’m very sorry about your husband.” With a frank, sympathetic squeeze she took Maggie’s arm to walk her back down the hall.

In the conference room, Miss Chu handed her a file folder that opened to reveal the claim. Maggie scanned the lines of English and Chinese, which repeated the information Carey had given her. “I think,” Maggie said, “that first we should go see the mother. Immediately. I need her permission to take a sample from the child.”

“You see, though,” said Miss Chu, “right now we do not know where the mother is.”

Maggie felt her eyebrows squeeze together. “Isn’t her address in here?” She pointed to the file.

“That is the grandparents. They are the ones who filed the claim. The child lives with them.”

“Not the mother?”

“No.”

Maggie sat back. “And the mother…”

“It is just that right now we do not know where she is,” said Miss Chu.

“Okay.” Back up, Maggie thought. “The main thing is the child, the permission, the sample.” Though I want to see this woman. I need to see this woman. “So if the grandparents are the guardians, let’s go to them.”

“But this address is not in Beijing. It is in a town called Shaoxing. It’s in the south.”

Maggie closed her eyes. “Then let’s go there.”

“It’s far.”

“How far?”

“Near Shanghai. The problem is tickets,” said Miss Chu. Her British accent was softened by Mandarin consonants. “One of our biggest holidays is coming, National Day. Everyone will be off work. Everything was sold out long ago.”

“Like Christmas?” said Maggie.

“Yes,” Miss Chu said. “Like that.”

“What about a train?”

“Same problem.”

“Can we drive?”

“Possible. We can hire a car. But it will take too many days.”

“So what do you suggest?”

“I think it is faster to wait. Let me try to get the tickets.” Miss Chu saw that the American had large, thickly lashed eyes and would have been pretty if not for the freckles spattered across her nose and cheekbones, and the excessive, almost masculine point of her chin. She did have unusual hair, though, even for a laowai, a dark mass of coiling curls that bounced around her face and softened her angles. Hair and eyes like these were assets, but this foreigner seemed not to care. She wore plain clothes, no jewelry, little makeup. Her hands were knotty. She looked anxious, too. She had reason, thought Miss Chu. “Try to wait a bit,” she said. “I have a lunch later today that might help.”

Lunch? Maggie thought. “All right. I’ll wait.” She didn’t want to wait, she wanted to move. Her Table assignment had already bombed. She couldn’t let the DNA test go down the drain too.

“Let us talk after the lunch. Oh – call me Zinnia. That’s my English name.”

“Zinnia,” Maggie repeated. “And your real name is?”

“Chu Zuomin.”

“That’s nice,” said Maggie, “but I’d mangle it. Okay. Zinnia.” She rose. “Here.” She passed across her business card with her cell number circled. “That phone’s on all the time. I’ll be waiting.” She paused on a breath. “By the way, besides Carey, is there anyone else still here, now, who knew my husband?”

“I think no,” said Miss Chu. “Only Carey. He will be back late tomorrow.”

“Tell him I came in,” said Maggie.

On the street she saw herself in a glass window, face shadowed, her steps moving through the Chinese crowd. She heard a beeping from her phone. She took it out. When she got back to the U.S. she would turn it off for a week at least. Zinnia, already? No, a text message from Table. She opened it.

How’s everything going? Thinking of you, sending hugs. Sarah.

Guilt tightened around Maggie’s neck. She should answer. She should tell Sarah that the Sam Liang story was off, that his restaurant was not opening and he had canceled. She would send an e-mail or a text message. She stared at her phone screen. She really shouldn’t wait any longer.

First, though, she had to eat. It had been a long time since she left L.A., time in which she’d eaten very little besides the candy corn.

She had brought the apartment’s guidebook. In it she scanned her sector of city restaurants until she found a courtyard house, close by, that served nineteen kinds of dumplings. This sounded good to her, and healthy. She needed to eat. She waved her hand for a taxi.

At the restaurant she was given a table in a lantern-strung court and a menu in English, with pictures. Many of the small creations looked like the Chinese dumplings she’d had at home, though with exotic fillings. Others were fantastical, sculpted creations made to look like miniature durian fruits and white-tipped peonies and plump, fantailed fish with red dots for eyes. Each was a marvel. But she was too hungry for the exotic ones and so she chose a plain dumpling, something substantial, filled with eggplant, cilantro, and dill.

The shape was familiar, yet the dumpling sounded different from anything she’d ever had before, and it sounded good. The truth was, she had never really liked Chinese food. Of course, she’d had Chinese food only in America, which was clearly part of the story. She’d always heard people say it was different in China. Yet even three years before, when she had visited with Matt, they had eaten at more Italian and Thai places than Chinese.

The trouble with Chinese food in America, to her, was that it seemed all the same. Even when a restaurant had a hundred and fifty items on the menu, she could order them all and still get only the same few flavors over and over again. There was the tangy brown sauce, the salted black bean; the ginger-garlic-green onion, the syrupy lemon. Then there was the pale opal sauce that was usually called lobster whether or not lobster had ever been anywhere near it.

The menu in her hands held a square of text, framed by an ornate border in the style of scroll-carved wood. At the top it said A BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO CHINESE FOOD. For tourists, she thought, and started to read.

No matter which way you look at history, the Chinese people have been more preoccupied with food than any other group in the world. Compare our ancient texts to the classical works of the West: ours are the ones dwelling endlessly on the utensils and methods and rituals of food, especially the rituals. Food was always surrounded by coded behaviors that themselves carried great meaning. Consider, too, the economics of dining. Take any dynasty; the Chinese were spending more of what they had on food than any of their contemporaries around the world. China has always revered good cooks, and paid them well. Even the most archaic descriptions of early towns tell of restaurants and wine houses jammed along the earthen streets or riverfronts, doors open to the smells of food and sounds of laughter, banners flapping to announce the delights within. Wu Ching-Tzu, in his eighteenth-century novel The Scholars, described these places as “hung with fat mutton, while the plates on the counters were heaped with steaming trotters, sea slugs, duck preserved in wine, and freshwater fish. Meat dumplings boiled in the cauldrons and enormous rolls of bread filled the steamers.” Still today, few things to us are more important.

It was signed by a Professor Jiang Wanli, Beijing University. What he was describing certainly didn’t sound like the food she knew from home. Moreover, the air around her was undeniably bright with good smells and the sounds of chattering pleasure. Each table was filled. Waiters strode past, steamer baskets held high. Bubbles of laughter floated up. Slowly she took in the shrubs, the tasseled lanterns, the cranked-open latticework windows that revealed other dining rooms filled, like this courtyard, with loud, happy, mostly young Chinese.

Could the food in China be truly exceptional? It was possible, she thought now. Well then, she would eat; she would keep an open mind. Of course, writing the article about the chef would have been the perfect way to find out more. Again she felt the stab of regret that he had canceled, so sharply this time that her hand crept into her pocket and lingered on her cell phone. Should she really let it go? No. She should call him again. One more time.

She scrolled through the recently called numbers to his, took a breath, and hit SEND.

It rang, and she heard fumbling. “Wei,” he said when he got the phone to his mouth.

“Mr. Liang? It’s Maggie McElroy again.”

“Hi.” Pause. He was surprised. “How are you?” he said.

“Fine. Thanks.”

She could hear a scramble of voices behind him. He half covered the phone, hissing, and then came back. “Sorry. My uncles are here.”

“I’m interrupting.”

“No. They want me to talk to you.”

“Why?”

“They’ve figured out you’re a female person.”

“Ah.” Funny, she thought. She had somehow forgotten how to even look at it in that way. “Actually I’m calling one last time about the article. I don’t want to overstep, but – I had to ask you again, since I’m here. Won’t you give it some thought?”

“Look – ”

“I don’t have to write about the restaurant. There are so many things. The book. Aren’t you doing a book?”

“Translating, with my father. We’re doing it together. It’s a book my grandfather wrote.”

“The Last Chinese Chef,” she supplied.

“You know,” he said.

Naturally. You’re my assignment. “We could write about that.”

“I’m sorry, but it’s the wrong time. I should do that when the book comes out.”

“True,” she admitted.

“Also,” he said, “I’m swamped.”

She was getting the signals, but she never heard No. Not the first time, anyway. “Swamped by what?”

“By an audition to get on the Chinese national cooking team. The 2008 Games in Beijing are going to have their own Olympic competition of culture – things like opera, martial arts. It’s an adjunct to the opening ceremonies. Food is one of the categories.”

“An audition for the national team?” She digested this. “What do you have to do?”

“Cook a banquet for the committee. There are ten chefs competing for the two northern-style spots on the team. The rest of the team has six spots – two for southern style like Cantonese; two for western, which includes Hunan and Sichuan; and the eastern school, which is Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang, basically the Yangtze delta.”

“So ten of you are competing for two northern spots.”

“Right. Each night for the next ten nights, one of us puts on a banquet for the committee. They’ll choose two. Seems I drew the last slot – mine is a week from Saturday. The tenth night.”

“The last one. The best. So two win out of ten. What sets you apart from the others?”

“I’m the only one rooted in imperial – it’s very rarefied. The emperors had dishes brought in from all provinces, so in some ways I have more flexibility, but also a more rigid artistic standard.”

“And you have ten days to prepare.”

“Yes. Well, nine. The first banquet is tonight.”

“But as a story for the magazine, this is wonderful! Forget the restaurant. Really, Mr. Liang. This would be great.”

“Sam.”

“Sam. I could follow you through the process. I would not get in your way. You could tell me things – just a little, just what’s comfortable. I’d do a good piece. Contests are one of my specialties.” Why was she having to work so hard to sell this? Most chefs paid PR companies to get them features in places like Table.

But he said, “I don’t know. I might not even have a chance. I’m kind of an outsider – the only one doing true traditional, on top of everything else.”

“Whether you win or not, it’s a great story. I can almost guarantee you’d be happy with it,” she said. In fact, with just this one glimpse she could see it take shape. Beijing was a gleaming new city, all that steel and glass forming only a partial façade over its celebrated past. The old and the new were locked in a dance. The winner would be the last one standing. Would it be the old or the new? Some jazzy avant-garde local or this guy, who came back to take up where his grandfather had left off? Whatever happened, it was alive. She hadn’t had this kind of feeling about an article in a while. Please, she begged him silently.

“Let me think.”

“I’ll come to where you’re working – only when you say.” She stopped. This was as far as she could go.

Again she heard the little bubble of whispered Chinese behind him. “Shh!” he said, and came back. “Okay. They’ll kill me if I say no. And you’re right. It would be good for me.”

She waited on the edge.

“But you have to forgive me. I can’t dress nicely and meet you in restaurants and hold forth. Not now.”

“Why would I want to do that? I’ll just come and watch you work. You talk when you can. I’ll listen.”

“All right. Let me think – I’m basically going to be slaving every minute in order to get this together. Tomorrow? You want to come tomorrow?”

“Okay.” A smile rose around the corners of her mouth. Again the same strange feeling, of something good.

“Afternoon? Two?”

“Fine,” she said.

“Call me when you’re getting the cab. I’ll tell the driver where to go.”

“Okay,” she said, and just before he disconnected she heard him talking to his uncles, switching back to Chinese with them in mid-thought, without a breath, the melodic pitch, the soft rolling sounds of the words, and then click, he was gone. She grinned at her phone for a second, giddy with relief, and then tapped in a text message to Sarah: Thanks for your message. I’m getting by. Meeting the chef tomorrow. Love, M.

She looked up. A waiter was moving toward her through the pools of electric light and the clanging dishes and the voices – was his steam basket for her? Yes. She leaned toward it – delicate, translucent wrappers and a savory mince of vegetables within. The aroma encircled her. She felt she could eat everything in the room. She tried the dipping sauce with a finger: soy, vinegar, little circles of scallion. “Thank you,” she said in English, looking up. But he was already gone in the crowd.