The Last Chinese Chef (18 page)

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

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

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

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

 

 

S
am 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?”