The Last Chinese Chef

3

Yuan Mei, one of China’s great gourmets, once asked his cook why, since he was so gifted and could produce great delicacies from even the most common ingredients, he chose to stay in their relatively modest household. The cook said, “To find an employer who appreciates one is not easy. But to find one who understands anything about cookery is harder still. So much imagination and hard thinking go into the making of every dish that one may well say I serve up along with it my whole mind and heart.”

– LIANG WEI, The Last Chinese Chef

The chef lived in a low, ancient-looking building facing a narrow, tree-lined finger of lake called Houhai. The street that ran along the lake was lined with gray, age-polished buildings. Some were houses, with laundry spilling from their windows and women out front, on stools. Others had been converted to cafés and bars, the latter marked by the buckets of empty beer bottles that had been set out from the night before. The chef ’s place faced the street with nothing but a stone wall and a massive red wooden gate, unmarked except for a small house number on the side. Maggie knocked.

From the other side of the wall she heard steps on gravel, and then a man almost precisely her size, with sharp cheekbones and black hair pulled back to a smooth ponytail, swung the gate open. He could have been foreign – South American, Mediterranean – yet in his way of standing, of relaxing against his joints, she saw instantly that he was American.

“Sam,” he said, and put out his hand.

“Maggie.”

“I’m in the kitchen.” He waited while she stepped over the raised lintel, then re-latched the gate.

In front of them was a green-and-yellow ceramic spirit screen. She paused, unable to stop herself from touching its raised-porcelain design of rolling dragons. “Doesn’t this have something to do with evil spirits?”

“Yes. Supposedly they can travel only in straight lines. This has been here a long time. When I remodeled for the restaurant I left it, thinking I needed all the help I could get with spirits. Bad ones out, good ones in.”

“I don’t know if it works,” she said, “but it’s beautiful.” On the other side of the screen lay an open courtyard with potted trees and mosaic-paved paths. Four rooms with ornate covered verandahs faced inward.

“This is the old layout of a Beijing-style house. There aren’t many left. Up here,” he said, and took her three steps up to the covered porch of the room facing the gate.

“Did you rent it, or buy it? Can you buy property here now?”

“Yes, though you don’t have the same long-term security as in the West – things can change. But this house has been in my family since 1925. It was much bigger then – eight courts, not one. By the time we got it back, a few years ago, it had been whittled down to this.”

“I didn’t know people got property back.”

“Some did – if the government had no use for it. And I know there’s a chance I might not have it forever, either. But for now it’s mine, so I’m going to use it.”

“Great room,” she said, following him through a dark, highceilinged dining room, empty but for one table and a gleaming expanse of black tile floor.

“You see the floor? They soak the tiles in oil for a year. They did that in the Forbidden City. Yesterday I took the tables out. I put them in storage. Couldn’t stand to look at them after my investor backed out. Here’s the kitchen.”

He held open the metal swing door for her to walk in ahead of him. She caught her breath. She had been in a lot of kitchens, but this one was stunningly organized. Every inch of wall was lined with shelves that held bowls and containers and bottles and jars filled with pastes, sauces, and spices. Down one side ran two Western-style restaurant stoves and a formidable line of wok rings. Behind were the large refrigerators and prep sinks. An island formed a raised counter down the center, with three cutting boards that were polished, circular slabs of tree trunk. “You have really thought things out.”

“I had great teachers.”

“Who were?”

“My uncles. Two here, one in Hangzhou.”

“It’s a beautiful kitchen.” She eased toward a stool that was tucked under one end of the island. “And I meant what I said, I don’t want to hold you up. Go to work. Shall I just sit over here?”

“You can sit there. That’s fine. How long have you been in Beijing?”

“This is my second day.”

“What do you think of the food?”

She looked up, face brightening. “Amazing! I’ve had only a few meals so far, mind you, but it hasn’t been like any Chinese food I ever tasted. Not that I’m an expert.”

“You don’t write about Asian food?”

“No.” Maggie dug her little book out of her bag along with her pen. “I do American food, and not the haute stuff, either – everyday food, regional food, the human story – you know, cook-offs, fairs. Festivals.”

“What a lot of people really eat,” he said.

“Exactly.”

“To the Chinese way of thinking that can be very profound. We have a long tradition of valuing the rustic. Of all food we find it the closest to nature, the most human. How long have you been doing it?”

“Twelve years.”

He studied her. “So why’d they choose you for this?”

“Because I had to come anyway.”

“Right. You said something about other business.”

“I did,” she said, and moved on. The less he knew about that, the better. With him she had a job to do. Besides, nothing made her appear old and pitiful faster than saying she was a widow; she had seen this fact clearly since Matt’s death. “To your question, though. To me the Chinese food here is completely different. I may not be a specialist, but, I mean – I work for a food magazine, for God’s sake. I have eaten in my share of Chinese restaurants. And what I’ve had all my life does not taste like what I’ve had here. Not even remotely.”

“But anybody who knows the food here could have told you that.”

“Really?” She folded back the book to a clean page.

“Chinese-American is a different cuisine. It’s really nothing like Chinese-Chinese. It has its charms, no question. But it’s not the same.”

“How?”

“Chinese-American evolved for a different reason – to get Americans to accept a fundamentally different way of cooking and eating. They did this by aiming at familiarity, which was kind of weirdly brilliant. From the time the first chop suey houses opened, that’s what they were selling, the thing that seems exotic but is actually familiar. Reliable. Not fast food, but reliable in the same way as fast food. Here it’s different. It’s the opposite. Every dish has to be unique, different from every other. Yet all follow rigid principles, and all aim to accomplish things Western cuisine doesn’t even shoot for, much less attain.”

She was scribbling as fast as she could.

“I’d better get to work,” he said. He lifted an apron from a hook on the wall, looped it over his head, and tied it. He turned his back to her and stood still for a second, head bent, silent.

She stared at his ponytailed black hair for a second, and went on writing. Casts his eyes down while he ties his apron. Looking for something, like an anchor falling, seeking the depths. She watched, saying nothing.

First he piled plump shrimp in a colander and tumbled them under cold water, then worked a towel through them until they were dry. In went egg white, salt, and something squeaky-powdery that looked like cornstarch. She watched his brown knuckles, lean and knobby, flash in the mixture. He slid it into the refrigerator and washed his hands. “Now,” he said.

She liked that he had turned his back to her to work. It was good that he was comfortable with her here. That made her feel at ease too. He seemed to be finished with the shrimp, at least for the moment, so she ventured another question. “You said Chinese cuisine in China tries to accomplish certain things.”

“Yes.”

“Things that set it apart from the cuisines of the West?”

“Yes.” He thought. “For one thing, we have formal ideals of flavor and texture. Those are the rigid principles I mentioned. Each one is like a goal that every chef tries to reach – either purely, by itself, or in combination with the others. Then there’s artifice. Western food doesn’t try to do much with artifice at all.”

“Artifice.” She wanted to make sure she heard him right.

“Artifice. Illusion. Food should be more than food; it should tease and provoke the mind. We have a lot of dishes that come to the table looking like one thing and turn out to be something else. The most obvious example would be a duck or fish that is actually vegetarian, created entirely from soy and gluten, but there are many other types of illusion dishes. We strive to fool the diner for a moment. It adds a layer of intellectual play to the meal. When it works, the gourmet is delighted.”

“Okay,” she said, “artifice.”

“Call it theater. Chinese society’s all about theater. Not just in food. Then there’s healing. We use food to promote health. I’m not talking about balanced nutrition – every cuisine does that, to some degree. I’m talking about each food having a specific medicinal purpose. We see every ingredient as having certain properties – hot, cold, dry, wet, sour, spicy, bitter, sweet, and so on. And we think many imbalances are caused by these properties being out of whack. So a cook who is adept can create dishes that will heal the diner.”

“You mean cure illness?”

“Yes, but it’s more than that. People have mental and emotional layers to their problems, too. The right foods can ease the mind and heart. It’s all one system.”

“You cook like that?” she said. “You yourself?”

“Not really. It’s a specialty.”

“Okay,” she said, writing it down. “Healing.” As if food can heal the human heart. “Is that it?”

“One more. The most important one of all. It’s community. Every meal eaten in China, whether the grandest banquet or the poorest lunch eaten by workers in an alley – all eating is shared by the group.”

“That’s true all over the world,” she protested.

“No.” He looked at her, and for the first time she saw a coolness in his face. He didn’t like her disagreeing. “We don’t plate. Almost all other cuisines do. Universally in the West, they plate. Think about it.”

“Well…” That was true. Every Chinese restaurant she’d ever been to had put food in the middle of the table. “I concede,” she said. She was going to write Does not like to be crossed but instead wrote All food is shared, because it was true. He was right.

Now he had taken a rack of pork ribs out of a plastic bag of marinade and was cleaving them off one after another. His tree trunk barely shuddered. She watched him swing his arm and his shoulder. He was wiry but strong. “Your grandfather was a chef,” she said.

“Right.”

“And your father too?”

She saw him hesitate just a moment before resuming. So – some problem there. “Yes.”

“Then he was the one who taught you to cook?”

“No. My father stopped cooking when he went to America. I learned here.”

“How?”

“Well, first of all, I had always cooked. I learned the basics from my mother – brisket, chicken soup, challah. But four years ago I decided to change my life, and really learn to cook. I came here. I told you, my uncles. They’re incredible chefs, they’re older, retired – they taught me. Full-time. I spent the first few years basically cowering beneath them. They were rough. What you might call old-school.”

“Are those the guys I heard on the phone?”

“Two of them. That was Jiang and Tan, whom I call First and Second Uncle. Jiang Wanli and Tan Jingfu. There’s a third one, Uncle Xie, who lives in Hangzhou. Xie Er.”

“Are they your father’s brothers?”

“No. Xie is the son of a man who worked with my grandfather in the Forbidden City. Tan is the grandson of my grandfather’s teacher, Tan Zhuanqing, who was a very famous chef. Jiang grew up in Hangzhou with Xie; they were best friends. So we aren’t blood relations, but our ties go back for generations. Those kinds of connections are very strong here. Stronger than in the West.”

“And all three were chefs?”

“Tan and Xie were chefs. Jiang is a food scholar, a retired professor.”

“I knew I saw that name somewhere. I read a little introduction by him on a restaurant menu.”

“That’s him. He cooks, too; he says he doesn’t, but he does.”

“And they were hard on you?”

“Terrible! They called me names. They’d hound me, shout at me, slam utensils to the floor when I didn’t move fast enough – and then if I made something that wasn’t perfect, they dumped it in the garbage.”

“Ah!” She was writing, enjoying his words and the scratch of her pen on the paper. “And then your father. You say he just stopped cooking? Why?” She looked up.

Again he hesitated, his hand in midair with the cleaver. Then back to chopping. “It was too hard for him in America.”

“Still, I wonder why he didn’t teach you.”

For Sam Liang, answering this question was always hard. Everyone in China remembered his grandfather as a chef, fewer his father; still, everyone assumed his father would have been the one to teach him. In truth, Sam would have given anything for his father to have taught him, to have cared – even if he’d yelled at him, insulted him, and cuffed him the way his uncles did. But his father refused. He said no Liang was ever to cook again, certainly not his son. Chinese cuisine was finished. It was dead. Great food needed more than chefs; it needed gourmet diners. These people were as important as the cooks. But the Communists had made it illegal to appreciate fine food or even remember that it had once existed. They had the masses eating slop and gristle and thinking it perfectly fine. In America and Europe, too, Chinese gourmets were all but nonexistent. There were some left in Hong Kong or Taiwan, but that was it. So said Liang Yeh.

When Sam had tried to suggest to his father that things had changed, that a world of art and discernment and taste was being reborn in China and that going back might be worthwhile, the old man erupted. “Never return to China! Never set foot there! It is a dangerous place, run by thugs!”

In fact, even though Liang Yeh was pleased that Sam had graduated from Northwestern and become a schoolteacher, he really had asked only two things of Sam in life. One, never go back to China. Two, marry and have a son. On neither front had Sam delivered. He brought the cleaver back down again between the ribs.

The American woman seemed to read his silence. “So okay, your father didn’t teach you, your uncles did. But am I correct in saying you’re still cooking in the style of your grandfather?”

“Definitely.”

“And like him, do you feel you’re the last Chinese chef?”

“Not the last,” he said. “Maybe one of the last. I think I’m more optimistic than my grandfather. He thought it was all over. He was convinced imperial style would die with his generation. My father’s generation thought the same. Yet there always seemed to be a few who kept it alive.”

“Why?”

“Because it was the highest thing. Not only did it incorporate all China’s regions, all its schools of cooking, it was a chef ’s dream like no other. In the Forbidden City’s kitchens you could create anything. They had the finest ingredients from all over the world. Hundreds of people cooked for one family.”

“So who became a cook?”

“Ah,” he said. “Not what you think. Not only certain people. Any person could do it. It was one of the weird democratic aspects of feudal China. Some chefs were rich and educated, some poor. Cooking was one of those jobs that relied purely on talent. Any man who excelled at it could get to the top. People respected great cooks. In fact, one chef in the eighteenth century B.C. was made a prime minister, his food was so good. His name, Yi Yin, is still spoken with awe thousands of years later. To this day, when people talk about negotiating matters of state, they say ‘adjusting the tripods,’ in honor of him and the bronze vessels of his time. You’ll see for yourself, the longer you stay here: we are ultra-serious about food.”

He talks of the Chinese and says “we,” she wrote. He has a dark face, indeterminate. If I had not known he was Jewish-Chinese I would never have guessed. He could be Greek, Afghan, Egyptian. He could be from anywhere. “So what kind of person was your grandfather before he became a chef?”

“A slave.”

“There was slavery that late?”

“China was feudal until 1911.”

“So he was owned by someone.” She wrote, Descendant of slaves.

“But he wasn’t born that way. He sold himself. It was either that or starve with his family.”

“Where was he from?”

“Here. Beijing. The back alleys. You should read the story.” He pointed his knife at the far end of the counter. “I set it out. It’s the prologue to the book. It was the first thing I put in English. You can take it with you if you like. Or read it here.”

“Really?”

He turned back to his ribs. “Either way. Right now I have to cook.”

“Should I go in the next room?” she said, even though she hadn’t seen any place to sit in there. Just the one table. No chairs.

“As you like.” He was gathering minced green onions in a mound.

Maggie watched him for a second. She liked the rhythms of the sounds he made, and the raw, unblended smells. Everything he thought and felt and said was condensed into the food under his hands. And it was comfortable here – which was odd to her, because she felt in most people’s kitchens the way she felt about homes in general: wanting to leave as soon as possible. Do her interview, get her notes down, and leave. “I guess I’ll stay,” she said.

He was focused now on cooking and gave only a distracted nod. So she leaned on her elbows and turned past the title page, The Last Chinese Chef, and started to read.

& & & My name is Liang Wei. I was born in the nineteenth year of the reign of Guangxu, the year they in the West call 1894, into the lowest rung of society. My family were alley dwellers. Five of us lived in one room, but we had city pride. We were folk of the capital. At least we knew we were better than millions of others.

My father was a vendor who went every day to the great open squares inside the Fucheng Gate, to sell glasses of tea to the men who streamed in alongside lines of camels and mule-driven carts. In the heat of the summer and the numbing ice of winter, he went. The caravans bought, or they did not. Too often not. As the years went on, his face became set with the etchings of his fate.

By my seventh year we were starving. The decision was made to sell one of the children. Usually a family would sell a girl, but the girl in our family was the youngest. Too young to sell. I said I would go. It was time for me to be a man.

At least with this move I knew I would eat. There was a reason why families as poor as mine sold their children into the restaurant trade. It was slavery, but it came with hot meals, three times a day. And if the young one proved gifted, there was nothing really to stop him from reaching the top. With food a man could advance on merit alone, without money, lineage, or education.

And thus it was for me. Being sold was my life’s beginning. A broker resold me into the employ of the palace. Never before was there such a place; never will there be again. In those years, the last of Ci Xi’s reign, there were five divisions: meat, vegetarian, cereals – which meant rice, buns, and noodles – snacks, and pastries. An incredible variety of food was brought to the palace, not only game and birds and seafood of all description but also the fruits and vegetables specially chosen at the dedicated farms, each piece plucked from the bottom of the plant, the place closest to the root and thus to life. Tribute came from local officials all over the empire. From the northwest came redolent Hami melons and sweet grapes; from the south, oranges, tangerines, longan, crystal sugar, and litchis. The governor of Shandong sent lotus seeds, dates, dried persimmons, and peanuts. From Liaoning and Manchuria came hawthorn berries and pears. The repertoire of the palace kitchen covered four thousand dishes. The most important creations – those most favored by the imperial family – sometimes became the lifelong concentration of one celebrated cook.

I lived with two other kitchen boys, Peng Changhai and Xie Huangshi, in a small rented room in the Tartar City, a half-hour’s walk from the palace. In this walled enclave that encased the Forbidden City like a larger square lived the Manchus. Relatives of the Emperor and the lords of the Eight Banners, they in turn supported a whole second world of servants, craftspeople, laborers. We, kitchen assistants in our little brick room with its few small windows, were on the bottom of this generally privileged sector of the city.

But at least we were slaves and not eunuchs. Eunuchs could live in the palace. They held unimaginable power. But any man who still had his three precious, his private parts, had to be out by sunset. And so we came here, to the Tartar City, to our small room.

Xie Huangshi was the much younger brother of Eunuch Xie, who directed the Empress Dowager’s exclusive kitchen, which was called the Western Kitchen. Their family had also been poor – once. Then the eldest Xie brother had sat for the knife, and passed into the brilliant, painted world of the Forbidden City. He took control of the kitchens and quickly rose in power. Finally he brought in his baby brother, Xie Huangshi – but as a slave, not a gelding. Eunuch Xie remained outwardly aloof, but everyone knew he favored the boy. He put him under one of the greatest cooks of the palace, Zhang Yongxiang. Zhang knew no limits. His most famous dish involved hollowing out fat mung bean sprouts with wire, then stuffing them with minced seasoned pork and steaming them to delicate perfection. Xie Huangshi trailed him like a shadow, never so much as lifting his arm without trying to do it like the master.

Peng and I went under Tan Zhuanqing. There has been no accident in my life luckier than this. It was not only that Lord Tan was the greatest chef of his generation, as he was; it was that he was a man of great accomplishment. All Manchus were pensioned at birth – Lord Tan used to say that this had been the downfall of the tribe – but even among them Tan Zhuanqing came from an especially wealthy and powerful family. From a young age he was famous for his intellectual attainments. By twenty-six he was a member of the Hanlin Academy. It was said he had written the best eight-legged essay in memory. He knew everything about antiquities and was a sought-after expert on cultural relics. He was an aristocrat. He had money, position. He could have spent his life doing whatever pleased him. And what pleased him was to cook in the palace.

“Why?” I would say. “The Old Buddha takes only a few bites.”

“It is not her. Ten thousand years to her, of course, but she cares only for little cakes that comfort her and carry her back to other times. It’s the princes! Gong, Chun, and Qing – General Director Li Lianying. It is they for whom I cook.”

No more than a small remark, but it was one that made me see how all things fit together. There was a shadow audience for the palace kitchens, a discriminating and highly appreciative one. What happened to the food every day, after every meal, was no accident.

Each time the Empress Dowager entered the hall and ate, she left many dozens of elaborate dishes untouched. We packed these into large lacquer boxes, divided into sections, each box containing a meal for a family of eight, and tied them with hemp. These were carried by eunuchs to the homes of princes and high officials. There they got tips and gifts beyond imagining.

When I went out into the city it was with Tan Zhuanqing. He liked to select his own provisions. Everyone knew him. He was famous. I heard people ask him: Why not leave the palace? Open your own restaurant. And he would always say there could be no higher calling than cooking for the Emperor. He was correct. But behind that truth was another one, which was that he also cooked for the cognoscenti. The gourmet was as important as the chef. Liang tiao tui zou: the art walks on two legs. To have one, you must have the other.

I learned from him. Sometimes I saw him come up to a stockpot when he believed no one was looking, and add a secret pinch of something from his pocket. We all saw, we all begged him to say what it was, but I was the only one he would tell. Then of course I told Peng and Xie. We were brothers.

Lord Tan arranged our education. He saw that Peng and Xie and I had gifts, and that meant we had to learn to read. “You must read the food classics,” he said. “No Chinese can call himself a chef without doing so.” We would have thrown ourselves off cliffs for him, done anything, so we worked hard for his tutor. We burned candles until day-break, and in this way the door of words opened. Lord Tan gave us passage to a higher world. There everything had been recorded, the accumulated truth of all things past. I felt myself leaving my old world, in a way, when I learned to read – certainly leaving the limited world of the immediate, which until then was the only world I had ever known. I found that everything I needed had been somewhere known, and somewhere written. Now that in this paradise of food the hunger of my early years had been satisfied, my appetite was for words. I wanted to know all that men had known before.

Yet what I read was not recipes; they were almost never written down. The way of cooking a dish was always secret, and exclusive, and the only way to learn it was by watching. So in my years of study, what I did was watch Lord Tan.

There was the day we prepared a midday meal for the Empress. He was creating his glazed duck. His secret for this dish was full concentration on the primary essence of the food itself. Thus he used duck fat, rendered from another duck, and duck broth, distilled from yet several others. Duck should taste entirely of duck; duck should be used in every way. This is what he taught me. It did not matter if four or five ducks were used to make one. This was the pursuit of perfection. And this was his secret: by doubling and tripling the essence of the duck he was able to reach nong, the rich, heady, concentrated flavor and one of the seven peaks of flavor and texture.

He was wiser than any alchemist. His dishes brought him all the glory under heaven. And he did it just as easily from coarse simple food as from rare delicacies. He often said that the best food was simple and homey; it reminded us of when we were young, or felt loved, or were lit up with believing in something. This was why the Empress Dowager always ordered xiao wo tou, crude little broom-corn cakes made with chestnut flour, osmanthus, and dates. They reminded her of when the imperial family had fled to the northwest during the Boxer Rebellion. Not that those who fled were heroic, he whispered to us, his young charges – they abandoned their capital. But it was over now, it was past, and she could remember what it had been like to be on the road, in the open air, eating rough corn cakes.

On that day Lord Tan paid close attention to the duck. Nong was a quality that could go too far. Timing was all.

But Tan was a master who effortlessly synthesized knowledge. He always knew to remove the duck at its most sublime. When it was time for the meal to be served I went outside and stood in a row with the other apprentices, all of us in our flapping blue robes with white oversleeves. The Empress ate in the Hall of Happiness and Longevity. I could barely see it down the long brick walk. They were setting tables up in there now.

Then came the call. Each of us took a lacquer box on our shoulders and set off in a foot-whispering line. In the hall we laid out the dishes in places chosen by the geomancers and protocol officials of the Western Kitchen. Everything was according to pattern, order, harmony. There were hot and cold dishes, roast fowl, soups, fish fried and steamed and braised, and all manner of sweet and salty northern-style pastries. From the far south came crabs preserved in wine and fresh cold litchi jelly. There was shark’s fin sent by the king of the Philippines, and bird’s nest from the Strait of Malacca.

We set down the plates and withdrew as always. That day we did not return to the Western Kitchen but waited in another hall nearby, empty, wood-dusty, ringing with our footsteps and our chortling jokes. Then we trotted back and packed the food into the dragon-embossed lacquer boxes as usual. We tied them with green and red strings and fixed them to poles.

Yet Old Li, the eunuch who always took my pole, walked up to me and stood there. “Boy,” he said, “you know the Houhai District?”

“Of course, sir,” I said, for I had grown up there.

“Then take this to the Gong family palace. Do you know the road?”

“Like my hand. But honored sir, it is not my place to go there. It is yours.”

“Don’t you think I know that? Curse fate! But it’s urgent. I am being called back. You’ll take it?”

“Yes, honored sir.” Before I had even finished speaking he swung his robes and walked away. His pole was still in my hands.

I shrugged it on. It settled easily into the notch on my shoulder. Prince Gong’s mansion lay near the lake. I knew the spot. I walked toward the back of the palace, for it would be best to leave by the Shen Wu Gate.

Then it was out into the teeming city, my blue and white robes fluttering with importance, the imperial lacquerware bouncing with my steps. People moved out of my way. Crowds parted. I wore the colors of the palace.

At the front gate of the Gong mansion the pole and boxes were recognized at once, though I was not. “Honored lord,” I said to the gatekeeper, “Master Li could not carry these boxes today. I am an unworthy apprentice.”

The gatekeeper called to someone. A gate to the inner gardens opened and a beautiful girl came out with a servant. “Ah! Where’s Uncle Li?”

“He was detained.”

“You came instead?”

“Yes, miss.” I made a reverence.

She put on an amused look and reached into her purse for coins. “What’s inside?” she said.

“Lord Tan made his glazed duck.”

“Ah! Wonderful.” She handed me the coins.

“Pleasure belongs all to me, miss. Thank you.” I closed my fist around them. I bowed low and long, until she and the servant with the food had withdrawn.

Quickly I slipped out to the street. I walked down along the lake with its waving fronds until I was under a pool of yellow light, beneath the buzz and hiss of a gas lamp. Only then did I unfold my hand to look.

Five coins. They looked like -

I bit one. Gold. I had never seen it before, but I knew. I closed my hand tightly again and kept walking, south, away now from the lake.

When I reached Huang Cheng, to return to the palace, I should have turned east. Instead I turned west – toward my family. I would run like light itself. I would be no more than a moment late. Lord Tan would never know.

When I came to my old neighborhood and turned panting around the corner to my own lane, the first thing I saw was my mother sitting outside the doorway on a stool, scrubbing a cabbage. “Zhao Sun,” she said slowly, half stumbling with surprise and wonder. She used my milk name, the name they called me as a baby, which I had not heard for a long, long time. I made an obeisance, but it was stiff. “Liang Wei has returned,” I said, and then she leapt to throw her arms around me.

“Ma,” I said, the single syllable strangling out of my mouth. She was so small! I was tall and strong; I had not realized how much I had grown. My skin was scrubbed, my queue plaited. I stood holding her in what had for a long time seemed to be only my apprentice clothes, but which now shone in this dark alley as brilliant robes of imperial silk.

“Come,” she said, and pulled me quickly in through the low, stooping doorway. As my eyes adjusted to the dimness of the clay-walled room, my little brother and sister appeared from the shadows, eyes large, barely believing. It was as familiar as a dream: the cracked basin, the faded flowers on the bedding. My mother’s dented pans.

I was glad my father was not there. I had another father now – Tan Zhuanqing. My life was his.

“I can’t stay.” I gave Erhui and Ermo a squeeze. They were thin and not much taller than I remembered them – not flush with good food as I was. “Go outside,” I told them. “Let me talk to Ma.”

When they had slipped out into the sunlight and dropped the quilted cold-weather robe back down behind them, I took her elbow, opened her hand, and dropped in one of the coins. “Do you know what this is?”

“By the Gods,” she said, “yes.” She looked up at me. “Where did you get it?”

“I earned it.” I was as tall as the sky then, a man. I bent over it with her. “Is it enough for the winter?”

“Yes. More than.”

“Then I will return with this much every year.”

Her eyes filled and spilled over with gratitude as she slipped it into a secret pocket she always kept within her clothes. Then she let out a small cry and dropped to grasp me by my knees.

“Ma, stop,” I said. I pulled her up, but my heart swelled with gladness. “I must go,” I said. “Take care of the young ones.”

I ran back through knotted lanes and beaten-dirt intersections where as a child I had played and hidden and stolen crisp autumn pears and seed-studded wheat buns from the carts of vendors. It was the world to me then – neither good nor bad, rich nor poor. Old men lounged on marble steps as they always had, bulky wadding inside their socks for warmth. Small children wore clothes handed down, much mended. Old ladies walked in gray cotton with their hands behind their backs. And here I passed in bright silks, leather on my feet, gold coins gripped tight in my fist.

At the Forbidden City I was well known by the guards and passed quickly through the gate. Avoiding the grottoes and gardens around which were arranged the private halls and apartments of the royal family, I took one of the outer passages back to the kitchen complex. These minor avenues connected an outer web of halls and courtyards, where lived relations and forgotten concubines. They did not matter in the palace, yet they could never leave.

Finally I came to the kitchen. I passed the snack section, the pastry section, the meat section. Usually it was in this section that Master Tan worked. Today, though, my instructions were to meet him in another part of the kitchen. He was to give me a different lesson in nong, by making fermented mung bean curd. It was a difficult dish. Reach the rich, heady top point, and it was a dish so delicious one could not stop eating it. Ferment it too far – even a little – and it was repulsive. This was chao ma doufu, and we were going to make it in the vegetarian section, a place where they generally specialized in brightly nuanced, mock meat and fish dishes of bean curd and gluten.

I was late, but not by much. If Lord Tan said anything I would throw myself on the ground. “Master,” I would say, “I know. I beg you. Forgive this miserable child who is unworthy – ”

I stopped short in the door to the vegetarian section. No one was there. The counters were cleared and the ranges still cooling. Where was my master? He never came late.

I walked back the way I had come. I passed the rice, bun, and noodle section, where many boys were at work. Some were making thick hand-cut noodles and others a fragrant porridge of lotus root and lotus seed. “Have you seen Lord Tan?” I called, for they were apprentices like me, and between us there were no formalities. No, they had not, and where had I been? “Nowhere,” I said, and silently touched my finger to the four coins in my pocket. I would tell no one until I saw Peng and Xie.

I returned to the meat section. It too was quiet. The great black ranges stood in a row, the glow in their fireboxes snuffed down to red embers. The woks were clean and back on their rack. “Master?” I said, and my voice sounded small and childish in the air.

No one. But I felt something. I felt him. I continued walking toward the back room where the meats were hung and where long banks of prep counters were lined with endless bowls in blue and white filled with all manner of sauces and condiments and accent vegetables, all fresh minced to perfect uniformity.

Then I noticed something.

There were shards scattered on the floor, blue and white; someone had broken a bowl. I froze.

There were his feet. He lay curled around himself as if still in agony, both hands pressed to his chest. I didn’t need to touch him. I didn’t need to feel for his pulse. I knew he was dead; I could tell. The light of knowledge had gone out of him. All he knew had escaped into the air. I glanced around frantically, as if somehow I could find it and gather it back. It’s in books, he would say to me if he were here, go find it. But he was gone. He was empty and inert.

I dropped and kowtowed to him three times. After the third time of pressing my forehead to the cold tile floor, I rose and began a long and agonized wail for help, not stopping until I heard the jumbled footsteps, the eunuchs and the kitchen workers, the scuffing and clattering. Their faces, their eyes when they stumbled in and saw him, were pale and sick and horror-struck. It was as if civilization itself had died. It was the beginning of the end. All of us knew it somehow, and all together we lowered ourselves to the floor before him. Men and eunuchs crowded into the doorway, ten deep, twenty, and when they saw, they too fell to the ground.

The call was going out. I heard a bell clanging. Suddenly I knew, from deep inside me, that he was going to have one of the greatest funerals the capital had seen in decades, with a banquet lasting three days for his family, his friends and admirers, the princes and the great scholars and the high officials. And I would prepare his glazed duck.

When Maggie finished she sat for a moment in silence. This man in front of her was part of a pattern that went back in time, across generations; he was connected. Not merely to a single person, such as a spouse – she knew how quickly that could be torn away – but to a whole line. No, she thought, a civilization. She watched him move around the kitchen as if from a distance, from a boat offshore, from a life that would never be like his. Not that she felt envy. She had made it one of Maggie’s Laws this past year not to covet the lives of others. She had learned to guard against such feelings in order to continue to have friends, to have a life; almost everyone she knew still possessed what she had lost, which was normalcy and love. She didn’t know yet about this man’s private life, but now that she’d read the prologue, she did see he had something else, something that clung to him like a light. It was a connection over time, insoluble.

As a state of mind, a multigenerational sense was new to Maggie, or at least foreign; she was from L.A., where many people, including her own responsible but solitary single mother, had come from someplace else. People made their own lives; that was what Matt had always said. He’d done it. He placed himself in the world. He spent lots of time on jets and married a woman who did the same. And in his mid-thirties, after years of loving her because she was the peripatetic observer and writer he had come to know, he began vexingly to still love her but to wish that she were different. Then the moment he felt it, he had to tell her; that was the way he was. He started waking her early in the morning with his hand on her abdomen, on the warm spot in her center. Think about it, he would say in her ear.

What? she’d ask, sleepy, but then she’d open her eyes and see his gaze and know. She loved this about him. Even when they didn’t agree – as happened, halfway through their marriage, with children – he was a natural river of honesty. She had learned with him to be honest in return, and so she told him the truth, which at first was some version of “I don’t know.” Let me work a little more, she would say. Let me think about it. They both knew it was not what they’d agreed. Still, she’d consider it. Give me a year. In this way they bumped along.

She watched the chef drop the shrimp into a sizzling wok and swoop them around with his arms. She took up her pen and wrote, He has a shape like a marmot. It felt good to write, not to think about Matt. Now he was adding something to the wok – what? – which made the shrimp fragrance climb. She didn’t want to break the spell by asking. He turned the shrimp onto a plate and cranked off the hissing ring of flame.

Only then did he turn and see that she’d finished. “Hi,” he said.

“I love this.” She touched the pages. “Can you tell me what happened to them?”

He wiped his hands on his apron. “First the dynasty fell. That was 1911. They had to leave the palace. They all opened restaurants, Peng and my grandfather Liang Wei here in the capital and Xie in Hangzhou. They did well. My grandfather wrote The Last Chinese Chef and it was a sensation. Everyone prospered, for a while.”

“Until?”

“Communism. The new government closed the restaurants down. They kept a few places open for state purposes. My grandfather’s was one of those liquidated. That turned out to be lucky, because a few years later they were jailing people who ran imperial-style restaurants.

“That was what happened to Xie. His place in Hangzhou was one of the ones they left open. But later, having his restaurant was what got him sent to prison. He died there. But he’d had a son in the thirties, who grew to be a great chef too. This is my Uncle Xie in Hangzhou – the one I call Third Uncle.”

She looked at her notebook, checking the names. “What happened to Peng?” she asked.

“Peng’s fortune was not shabby.” He pronounced the name back to her the proper way, pung. “He was admired by the Communist leadership, especially Zhou Enlai. No matter that he cooked imperial – he was that good. They wanted to keep him. They gave him a restaurant in the Beijing Hotel, Peng Jia Cai. He became their imperial cook. In the 1950s that place was the be-all and end-all. He was amazing. Even my father said that of the three of them, he was the best.”

He put down a plate of pink shrimp under a clear glaze. No additions or ingredients could be seen, though she had watched him add many things. The aroma seemed to be sweet shrimp, nothing more.

He took one and held it in his mouth, dark eyes flying through calculations.

Her turn. She put one in her mouth and bit; it burst with a big, popping crunch. Inside there was the soft, yielding essence of shrimp. “How do you make it pop like that?”

“Soak it in cold salt water first. That’s what I was doing when you first came in.”

“It’s great,” she said.

“Good,” he corrected. “Not great. I can still detect the presence of sugar.”

“I can’t.”

He smiled. “Remember I told you we strove for formal ideals of flavor and texture? This dish is a perfect example. One of the most important peaks of flavor is xian. Xian means the sweet, natural flavor – like butter, fresh fish, luscious clear chicken broth. Then we have xiang, the fragrant flavor – think frying onions, roasted meat. Nong is the concentrated flavor, the deep, complex taste you get from meat stews or dark sauces or fermented things. Then there is the rich flavor, the flavor of fat. This is called you er bu ni, which means to taste of fat without being oily. We love this one. Fat is very important to us. Fat is not something undesirable to be removed and thrown away, not in China. We have a lot of dishes that actually focus on fat and make it delectable. Bring pork belly to the table, when it’s done right, and Chinese diners will groan with happiness.”

“That’s different,” she said, scribbling. “What else?”

“That’s just flavor. We have texture. There are ideals of texture, too – three main ones. Cui is dry and crispy, nen is when you take something fibrous like shark’s fin and make it smooth and yielding, and ruan is perfect softness – velveted chicken, a soft-boiled egg. I think it’s fair to say we control texture more than any other cuisine does. In fact some dishes we cook have nothing at all to do with flavor. Only texture; that is all they attempt. Think of bêche-demer. Or wood ear.”

Maggie considered this. As a concept, texture was not new to her. Many of the greatest dishes she had experienced on the road delivered their pleasure through texture: fried oysters, with their dazzling contrast of inside and out; the silk of corn chowder; the crunch of the perfect beach fry. But all of these relied on flavor too. “You must do something to give them a taste, surely?”

“Yes – we dress them with sauces. But plain sauces, way in the background. Anything more would distract. The gourmet is eating for texture.

“Once you understand the ideal flavors and textures, the idea is to mix and match them. That’s an art in itself, called tiaowei. Then we match the dishes in their cycles. Then there is the meal as a whole – the menu – which is a sort of narrative of rhythms and meanings and moods.”

“My God,” she said, writing rapidly.

“Everything plays in. The room. The plates. The poetry.” He plucked up another shrimp with his chopsticks and chewed it thoughtfully. “The problem is, this shrimp falls short of true xian. Xian is the natural flavor. If it doesn’t taste natural, the chef has failed to create it.”

“So you’re saying, it’s the natural flavor, but it’s concocted.”

“And there’s the paradox,” he said.

She smiled and wrote it down. “You concoct it how?”

“By adding supporting flavors, mostly. Every flavor has a specific effect on every other flavor. But all this must be invisible. Believe me, a Chinese panel will know this. And this shrimp – right now – is not quite there.”

“So are you going to use it in the banquet?”

“Not unless I get it perfect.”

She ate another. “I think it’s pretty great.” There was a silence while they both ate and her eyes wandered to the prologue. “Could I borrow this?” she said, touching it. “I’d like to read it again.”

“Take it. I printed it out for you.”

“Thank you.”

“I’ll give you more of the book later, if you want.”

“I do. But right now I’m going to clear out and let you work.” She packed everything up into her bag.

“I hope you’ll come again,” he said. “Come on. I’ll walk you out.”

They pushed through the door and crossed the large, darkened dining room, him moving a few steps ahead to hold open the wood-and-etched-glass door out to the courtyard. “You know?” he said. “We’ve been talking about food all this time. I didn’t ask you – what’s the other thing you’re doing here, in Beijing?”

She turned, halfway down the steps. The raw sadness of the last year came back over her, the sudden slam that could never be undone, the frantic constriction, the struggle to get control. Sometimes even the ministrations of her friends couldn’t get through to her. It was in her job that she’d found a small tunnel of light, especially during the weeks of each month she spent away, writing about other people’s lives. There’d been the kindness of the Malcolms, the retired Maryland couple on the Eastern Shore who worked six commercial crab pots and consumed their entire catch, eating crab at every meal through the season. There was Mr. Loeb, the stout pastrami man in Nebraska, delicate and graceful with a knife, the last counterman in the Midwest to slice the fragrant rosy slab by hand. Being with those people helped her. In their normalcy they relieved her. They didn’t ask questions. She didn’t have to tell them about the mess that was her life.

Now Sam Liang was waiting.

“I’m a widow,” she said. “A year ago my husband died.”

She waited while he took this in, while compassion, and some of his own fears, crossed his face. She had seen it in people’s faces so many times by now. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“Thank you. It’s been difficult, but I’m better. It’s been a year.” That, she thought, was enough to say. He didn’t need to know how raw it still felt. And he certainly didn’t need to know about the widening sea that separated her more and more from other people, about the long days this summer she had spent lying on the bunk on her boat, ignoring the messages on her cell phone. She made her voice brisk. “My husband did some work here, and some matters in China came up related to his estate, so I had to come.”

“I see.” A lift of his eyebrow acknowledged the potential for a challenge. “I hope it goes well. Good luck. Are you very busy with that? Do you have the time to come back again?”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “I’ll be going out of town in the next day or so, but until then I’m okay.”

“Do you want to come tomorrow, late morning?”

“That will work,” she said, and stepped past him over the sill.

“Maggie,” he said, as she turned for the street. “What you told me. I’m really sorry.”

“Thanks.” Not that you know anything about it.

“See you,” he said.

She raised a hand and walked all the way to the turn in the road along the lake before she looked back. In that blink she saw him withdrawing, his blue jeans, the old-ivory skin of his hands, and then, click, the gate closed.