The Best Contemporary Women's Fiction: Six Novels

by Jenna Blum

  "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 sauteed 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. Qifen 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?"

  "I will," he said, surprising her. "But I think in a different form."

  "Good," she said, "because I love it." She turned to the second platter, which held lotus root and crisp, strong-tasting yellow celery and sausage. Also delicious. Then the beggar's chicken. It looked at first like a foil-wrapped whole bird, but he undid it, folded back layers of crinkly baking bags, and broke the seal on a tight molded wrap of lotus leaves. A magnificently herbed chicken aroma rushed into the air.

  Maggie couldn't wait. She picked up a mouthful of chicken that fell away from the carcass and into her chopsticks at a touch. It was moist and dense with profound flavor, the good nourishment of chicken, first marinated, then spiked with the bits of aromatic vegetable and salt-cured ham which had been stuffed in the cavity and were now all over the bird. Shot through everything was the pungent musk of the lotus leaf.

  At once she knew she should write about this place. She should give the recipe for this dish, catch the glorious bustle of this restaurant, describe these tall windows looking over the majesty of the lake and the virgin green hills beyond. Her one column was inadequate—inadequate even to tell the story of Sam Liang, which was so much richer than anything she could contain in a brief piece. And in addition to him she had so many moments, like this one, this lunch at Lou Wai Lou.

  After they ate they walked outside and stood on the steps to look out at the lake. "The thing I can't believe is that behind me"—she waved back over her left shoulder—"is that gray, honking city. While over there"—she pointed across the water—"I see nothing but trees and hills. No development. In this day and age that's amazing! What's over there?"

  "Monasteries and stuff," he said. "Temples." Then she looked around and saw that his attention was focused away from her and the lake, trained on the bottom of the steps, where an older man used a bucket of water and a brush as long as a mop, which he dipped in the water and swirled on the wide smooth pavement.

  "What's he writing?" she whispered.

  "A poem. Unless it's a short one, the beginning will be gone by the time he gets to the end. It will evaporate away. That's the idea. It's like a recitation."

  "But who is he?"

  "Just a guy out enjoying the day."

  "Can you read the poem?"

  "Me? No! Impossible." He looked at Maggie. If she stayed here, in time she would understand more. Only half the beauty of what the man was doing was the poem, beyond doubt some beloved classic. The other half was his calligraphy, which rendered each character into something like an abstract painting, beautiful, but all the more indecipherable to Sam. "Elder Born," he said in polite Mandarin, "may I trouble you as to the author of this poem?"

  "Su Dongpo!" the man cried up the steps, delighted.

  "It's the guy the pork dish was named after," Sam said to her.

  He knew how strange the connection between food and poetry seemed at first; he remembered his Uncle Xie explaining it to him. "The number-one relationship is between the chef and the gourmet, my son. The chef must give the meishijia what he wants. Here in Hangzhou, for a thousand years, the meishijia have been the literati, so we give them dishes named for poets. We create carvings and presentations to evoke famous poetry and calligraphy parties throughout history. We strive for dishes of artifice which inspire poetic musings. The highest reward for any Hangzhou chef is to hear poetry being created and applauded by his diners out in the dining room—oh! Nothing else in my life has given me such a good feeling, except my wife and my son and my daughters—and you, my son, of course. This is what you must understand if you are to be a true Chinese chef. Eating is only the beginning of cuisine! Only the start! Listen. Flavor and texture and aroma and all the pleasure—this is no more than the portal. Really great cooking goes beyond this to engage the mind and the spirit—to reflect on art, on nature, on philosophy. To sustain the mind and elevate the spirit of the meishijia. Never cook food just to be eaten, Nephew!"

  Sam had tried, but here he truly was held back by being a foreigner. He had been born, raised, and educated in America. He lacked the dizzying welter of references and touchpoints that would have been his if he had grown up here. He had only his uncles. They had done their best to fill him in on five thousand years of culture, starting the moment he arrived. For this he not only accepted their abuse, he was grateful for it.

  In another taxi they sailed back up the road toward the lake and the hotels. It was time now. He needed to get on to his uncle's.

  He had called. He was told Xie had been carried down to the kitchen and was waiting for him. His wife, Wang Ling, was there beside him, and since yesterday all four children had been home—three daughters and a son. Only one of the daughters, Songling, still lived in Hangzhou; she managed another venerable restaurant called Shan Wai Shan. She was the only one of the Xie children who had followed her father into the world of cuisine. The other two daughters, Songan and Songzhe, and the son, Songzhao, all had professional careers and families in Shanghai. They were Sam's generation, and he thought of them as one thinks of far-off cousins, rarely seen but always spoken of with fondness. When they were born, their father had insisted upon using the traditional generation name, so that their given names all shared the same first syllable. By then, in the 1950s, this was hardly ever done—but that was Third Uncle, a stubborn reprobate, still using the generation name even after his own father had died in prison for being an imperial cook.

  The old man had used the same iron will on Sam. No one was harder on Sam than Xie. None had used harsher names. Xie had called him a worthless lump of mud and a motherless turtle. He told him he didn't deserve to be a Liang. More times than Sam could bear to remember he had taken away what Sam was in the middle of cooking and dumped it out. "Zai kaishi yixia," Uncle would order, slamming the clean wok back down in front of him, Start again. And Sam would swallow back the humiliation and know that Uncle would not be teaching him if he didn't believe he could learn it, could do it. Each time Sam would resolve to keep trying.

  And now Uncle was slipping away from the earth, and
all Sam wanted was to get to him, quickly, and be with him once again, while he lived.

  She turned to him in the back seat. "If you can just tell me a good place to eat tonight. Near my hotel."

  "By yourself?"

  "Of course by myself."

  "You can't eat alone," he said, and even as he spoke he asked himself what he was doing. Why not just say goodbye? It was time for him to go to Uncle's. "I told you, that's one of the important things about Chinese food. Maybe the most important thing. It's about community."

  "I'm okay eating by myself. I always eat alone on the road, and always always since Matt died."

  "That's bad luck. I might have to try and change you."

  "You can't change me," she informed him.

  "But to eat alone is anti-Chinese."

  "I'm not Chinese. Look, Sam, you're being so nice and you really don't have to be. It's just, I'm here. I don't want to waste a meal. Tonight I want to go someplace good. Just tell me. That's all."

  "I could easily give you a place. But the thing you should really do is come with me. Eat with the Xie family. Then I will bring you back here."

  "I don't want to get in between you and your family."

  "You won't. You'll be watching a lot. I'll be the only person you can talk to, and I might be occupied. You okay with that?"

  "Yes," she said. "I'm a writer. I love to observe. But this is your family. It's a sensitive time."

  "But I would like you to come."

  "Okay," she said after a minute.

  He felt himself smile. He was relaxed with her, which he hadn't felt in so long. She was a friend. Nothing wrong with it.

  They had reached her hotel parking lot. She slid out the door and pulled her bag behind her. "Will you wait for me a moment? Just let me put this stuff in the room. I'll be right back."

  "Okay," he said.

  Maggie closed the door and trotted away from him to the entrance. She was aware that he was watching her from behind. When she was younger she would have worried about whether her shape was pleasing or not, but not now. She was old, forty, and besides, he was not interested. Still, she was glad she was going along. She felt a pull to him. Maybe they'd be friends after all.