Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change (52 page)

She was the inventor of our trip—and it took some considerable inventing—and she is also the inventor of herself, as miraculous and unlikely as modern China in all its glory. Han Feng left the People’s Republic in 1985 to move to New York, but has recently taken a Shanghai apartment, relocated her production to her homeland, and started dividing her time between the two countries.

Shortly after I published my article about Chinese artists twelve
years ago, I was invited to a dinner in New York at which my host told me, “One of my friends is bringing his new girlfriend tonight. She’s Chinese and doesn’t speak much English. I put her next to you since you’ve been there recently.” Han Feng and I began dinner with stiff attempts at conversation in a language we only half shared. I volunteered news of my recent research. “I don’t know much about contemporary art in China,” she said. In a vague attempt to keep the conversation from dying, I related some of my adventures. I wasn’t sure how much was getting through, but at some point I mentioned Geng Jianyi, and she sat up suddenly and said, “Geng Jianyi from Hangzhou? Really, really good-looking, about our age?”

“Yes, that’s the one!”

“I dated him in high school and I never knew what happened to him!”

She came from a country of a billion people; I’d been there. How could we not have someone in common?

Since then, I’ve learned that Han Feng knows most of the world’s interesting people, and I’ve been lucky to be invited to the divine dinners she cooks at home and those she organizes in Chinatown, where one runs into Jessye Norman, Lou Reed, Susan Sarandon, Rupert Murdoch, Anthony Minghella, or, just as likely, her wisecracking upstairs neighbor, or the fur buyer who once paid her a compliment. Her satisfying, throaty laugh makes every evening feel like a celebration. Han Feng is profoundly international. “I love wherever I am and whatever I’m doing,” she once said to me. She arrived in the United States as “a Chinese peasant potato,” as she says. “Some people climb staircase of success,” she told her then husband. “I take express elevator.” Soon she met someone who wanted to back her design activities and promised to make her rich and famous. “I said, ‘Maybe we can forget about famous and concentrate on very rich.’ ” Since then, she has developed a private label that has been sold at Bendel’s, Takashimaya, Bergdorf’s, and Barneys; designed opera costumes for the English National Opera and the Met; and made a line of clothes for the Neue Galerie in New York. She is an international style icon who has been the face of Christian Dior in China and has graced the covers of American magazines.

After her divorce, she had a long-term relationship, which ended when her boyfriend said he wanted to move in. “I can’t believe it! I say, ‘Move in? Move in? I don’t have that kind of closet space!’ ” Most people fall in love with Han Feng if they get half a chance. The king of Morocco has commissioned her to make many of his clothes, and she has been a regular guest at his palace. “I stay there and see all the pomp and circumstance,” she confided, “and I think how glad I am to live a simple life!” It’s the most high-powered simplicity I’ve ever encountered; whatever kind of potato she was when she left China, she’s become an orchid of the first order.

We started in Shanghai, where my favorite place was the YongFoo Élite, brainchild of a local decorator who leased the former residence of the British consul and spent three years and $5 million restoring the space, furnishing it with antiques, and replanting its gardens, giving it the aura of the old Shanghai: decadent, lavish, and sophisticated. While we rhapsodized about the sweet shrimp, the fish fried with pine nuts, and the quail’s eggs roasted with octopus and pork, our Chinese friends were impressed by the romaine salad—an exotic touch in such a setting. Dessert is not always Chinese cuisine’s strong point, but the crisp date pancakes with sesame seeds were both tangy and sweet, as if they were already nostalgic about the rest of the meal. After dinner there, we went to a jazz club that felt like a speakeasy and met up with artist friends. Later, we headed off to the perennially fashionable Face Bar, where we met a Chinese doctor friend of Han Feng’s, who took my pulse and prescribed a health regimen even as we lounged on opium beds drinking hot brandy toddies; the next day, I found myself being whisked off to the acupuncturist.

Ordering in Chinese restaurants is an art. In New York, Han Feng will spend half an hour talking to a Chinatown waiter about what she wants. If saints are usually represented with their primary attributes, then Han Feng should be painted with a menu. She reads the pages as if they were poems—poems in need of editing—and seems to inspire the kitchen with her particularity and fervor. She inquires about the freshness of ingredients and tries to balance the meal so that
it has hot, cold, and tepid dishes; spicy and mild tastes; fish, meat, and vegetables; heavy flavors and lighter ones. Each meal needs to be conceived as a whole. The Chinese spend a larger proportion of their income on food than almost any other nationality. In his great book
Food in Chinese Culture
, K. C. Chang talks about “food as social language” and “food linguistics”; in dynastic China, you respected a visitor by cooking a dish yourself even if you had servants; you honored ancestors with food sacrifices. The food is the society.

The best food in China is not necessarily in the splashiest places. Crystal Jade is in a Shanghai mall and looks like it, but the Cantonese dim sum there is divine—fried potato dumplings that melt in your mouth; roasted skin of baby pig, duck, and chicken; shredded daikon with dried shrimp layered in a kind of phyllo pastry. Across town at Jade Garden, the throbbing bass beat from the nightclub downstairs obtrudes, but not enough to diminish the lotus root stuffed with sticky rice or the tea-smoked duck, which is to waterfowl what Lapsang souchong is to Lipton.

On New Year’s Day, we drove to Hangzhou, where Han Feng grew up. According to a Chinese saying, when you die, there is heaven; but when you live, there is Hangzhou. The city lies beside the West Lake, where pleasure boats travel from island to island, and the sun glints off the urban skyline on one shore and elegant, tall pagodas on another. A typical local dinner includes
chou doufu
, or “stinky tofu,” which tastes like elderly athletic socks left through a muggy summer in a dank locker and then boiled in sour milk; a street hawker of
chou doufu
was recently arrested for violating air-pollution laws. It is an acquired taste I have yet to acquire. We headed to the gala opening of the new Hangzhou Opera House and afterward, unready to call it a day, indulged in a late-night foot massage: our feet were soaked in Chinese herbs, pounded with rubber mallets, rubbed with heated salt, and kneaded in every conceivable direction. We drove back to the hotel at 2:00 a.m. in absurd bliss.

The following day, we went to lunch at Longjing, a tiny establishment with just eight tables arranged in private pavilions around a
beautiful garden in the middle of a tea plantation. This was Chinese cooking so refined that some of its particular triumphs were lost on our inexperienced palates. We had twenty-two dishes: rare delicacies such as steamed turtle wrapped in lotus leaves; a broth of locusts and old duck (old ducks are supposed to warm you up in winter), which sounds rather bizarre but was in fact glorious; a rich, delicate soup called Heroes’ Soup in honor of the fish in it, which are boiled alive; fatty pork slow-cooked for four days and served with eggs; and braised venison. We had quenelle-like fish balls, made by nailing a fish to a plank, scraping the flesh off one layer at a time so that it becomes completely soft, beating the resulting mush with cold water into a foam, then poaching it. “Making that is hard like hell,” Han Feng said, “and no one has ever done it better, even for an emperor.”

We drank the fresh local Longjing tea, for which the restaurant is named, while a violin prodigy, winner of the Paganini Competition and part of Han Feng’s extended circle, gave a sweeping virtuoso performance, at once precise and passionate and thrilling. Han Feng took us to the Ming-era Guo Family Garden at the west end of the lake, less touristed than some other Hangzhou parks and magnificently restful. Later we visited the Zhiweiguan restaurant. Where Longjing served up food that was exotic to a Western palate, rare and understated tastes impossible to conceive outside of China, Zhiweiguan was so glitteringly splendid and yet so wholly accessible that it could sustain a hopping trade on New York’s Upper East Side. For one dish, the chef cut a single, narrow eleven-foot-long strip of pork (like a continuous ribbon of apple peel), spiraled it into the shape, more or less, of a stepped pyramid at Chichén Itzá, and roasted it. At the table, the server unwound it, cut off short pieces, and wrapped them in spinach pancakes. A whole chicken stuffed with garlic had been wrapped in thin paper and then encased in salt before baking—the meat was almost implausibly juicy.

Few foreigners go to Shaoxing, and it is hard to understand why. The canals are romantic and dreamy, and the Qing dynasty houses are built right down to the water; the windows are adorned with carved
wooden screens, and women kneel beside the water to scrub laundry; the canal boats are as intimate as gondolas, and the boatmen use their feet to push the big oars. You can always see the grand pagoda on the hillside just beyond the city, and on the day we were there, someone was listening to Beijing opera at high volume, and the music echoed down the byways. To get to and from the canal boats, you travel by bicycle rickshaw through winding, enigmatic streets too narrow for cars. We ate at Xianheng and had several variations on
chou doufu
, some palatably mild. I took more eagerly to another local fermented specialty: Shaoxing rice wine. We also had eggplant with a peppery okra-like vegetable, and caramelized-pork buns, sweet and rich. For dessert there were sticky rice cakes with black sesame seeds, an almost bitter flavor, and honey. Han Feng led the toasting, and we felt ready to burst with food, alcohol, and pleasure. We realized that we were having an average of twelve dishes at each meal, and that we were having two meals a day, and that we were going to be in China for twenty-one days, which meant that by the time we left we would have tried more than five hundred dishes. We took some deep breaths.

For the Chinese, there are two great cuisines—Sichuan and Cantonese. Travelers know Cantonese because it is the cuisine of Hong Kong, but Sichuan province is still off most tourist maps. Sichuan natives talk about peppers the way other people talk about sports teams. Their cuisine makes Mexican food seem bland, but the heat is layered and complex, the different kinds of hot spices mixed and remixed, toasted and fresh, soaked in different agents to create a range of intense pleasure and exquisite pain. The trademark Sichuan pepper is
hua jiao
, which is in fact not a pepper at all, but the dried fruit of the prickly ash shrub. Amazingly potent, it makes your mouth numb, but it is a wonderful numbness. You can feel it setting about its anesthetic work as soon as you taste it, yet at the same time it seems to make your taste buds somehow more intensely awake. It’s almost as if whatever you’re eating has been stewed in cocaine. Strange and distressing at first, it becomes an object of longing.

We had lunch at My Humble House, a very unhumble restaurant
in Chengdu in a park surrounded by bamboo groves and waterways. The style is upmarket modern Chinese, with giant scholars’ chairs, a silk-draped four-poster bed on which you can loll, pools of carp, halogen lights, and tables scattered with silk rose petals. The food is Chinese fusion—incorporating the influence not of Western food, but of the multiple branches of Chinese and Southeast Asian cuisine—so, for example, the traditional Cantonese shark’s fin soup is made here with the addition of creamy pumpkin.

Sichuan is justly famous for its teahouses. Most Chengdu businessmen leave their offices in the afternoon and conduct business over tea. Women go to play mah-jongg, gossips to gossip, children to play. We went to Yi Yuan, the most beautiful teahouse in Chengdu, in a restored Ming garden with a dozen courtyards, reflecting pools, pavilions, walkways, gaming tables, great sculpted lake rocks, and bridges framed by pines. We sat at a table next to some Buddhist monks and drank perfumed tea.

On entering China Grand Plaza for dinner, I felt as Marco Polo must have at the gates of the Forbidden City. Here in what I had foolishly thought was the middle of nowhere was dazzling opulence. You walk through enormous doors into a vast lobby, where a pianist is playing Chopin on a concert grand, and see porcelain and furniture that could easily be in one of the world’s better museums. China Grand Plaza includes an art gallery, a spa with three gigantic heated pools and a bevy of gorgeous masseuses, two karaoke bars (one of which has a glass ceiling in which fish swim), four restaurants, and hotel guest rooms. The feeling is of extravagant elegance with a touch of
Goldfinger
.

A member of staff, in black with white apron and gloves, stands before each of the doors down a long, vaulted red-lacquer hallway. We were ushered into one of these private rooms, which make up the haute Sichuan restaurant; there is no communal space. Amid burnished Qing candle stands and expressive Ming calligraphy, we were given fresh tea and glasses of
baijiu
(Sichuan brandy), which burns like wildfire all the way down. We had “husband and wife” (spiced beef and pork lungs), and jellyfish with coriander, and then a light consommé of fresh worm herb, which, famous for its health-giving qualities, sells on the open market for as much as $2,000 a pound;
food and medicine are not clearly distinguished in China. Floating in the broth was a poached soufflé of bean curd and chicken. Abalone came over bricks of crisped rice. Kung Pao chicken was full of the freshest
hua jiao
. Halfway through dinner, a dancer came to our room to do a private “face-off.” In this old Sichuan tradition, a sequence of brightly colored cloth masks is worn in layers. As the dance unfolds, the dancer pulls a hidden string and one mask after the next is revealed. After dinner, we were offered Cuban cigars and a bottle of 1988 Château Lafite Rothschild, but, choosing our indulgences, had massages instead.