by Jenna Blum
"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 ultr
a-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 daybreak, 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.