The Best Contemporary Women's Fiction: Six Novels

by Jenna Blum

"With your husband when he died?"

  "That's what he says."

  "Is he sure?"

  "No. The face is not distinct."

  He was silent with her for a minute, or at least his voice was silent. She could hear him chopping. She liked that they could be quiet together. It was like being in a room doing things, different things, two people in proximity but separately productive. It had been that way with Matt, even if they needed their time apart to keep it working.

  "I feel like I can't think about anything else but finding her. It's like with Shuying, where I had to get the sample, I had to see her face, but even more powerful. I need to see for myself what kind of woman this is."

  He was silent for a minute. "I just hope when you do see her, it's going to make you feel better."

  "It's always better to know." Maggie needed to place the woman in her ladder of esteem, drink in her aura of looks and personality, judge her. She needed to steady herself that even if this woman had attracted her husband's attention she still was no match for Maggie. That she had never been. It was basic female power restoration.

  "I can't believe it when I hear myself," she said to Sam Liang. "I tell you the most personal things."

  "I like that," he protested.

  "I think I've told you too much."

  "Why? I'll tell you one about me. Will that make you feel better?"

  "Yes."

  "All right. This happened right after we came back from Hangzhou. By the way, it was strange, wasn't it? Coming back from Hangzhou. After being together for two days. Always the two of us, and then boom."

  "It was strange," she agreed, glad he had said it.

  "So we came back. I called my father. I told him this was it, Uncle Xie was dying, please come. Get over your fears. He needs you. And by way of explaining why he couldn't, he sent me the story of his life, up to the time he escaped from China. As if I was going to read this and say, Oh, Dad, I see now, you're right, this was so bad you should definitely never come back to China. But I didn't feel that way. I called him and said, I understand, but really, you are safe, nothing will happen, and please please come see Xie before he dies. You must. Please. I begged him."

  She felt a pang for him. "Did it work?"

  "No. He said no."

  "I'm sorry."

  "Even me, his son, asking like that, it wasn't enough."

  "You can't change him. I don't know what his deal is, but most likely it's beyond your reach."

  "You're right."

  "At least now you have his story."

  "It was worth the wait."

  "Will you send it to me?" said Maggie.

  "Yes! That's why I called you, if you want to know the truth. I want you to read it. But I can't find your e-mail."

  "Send it," said Maggie, and dictated her address.

  He moved over to his computer and clicked a button. "There. I just e-mailed it. Let me know what you think."

  "I will." She felt a little better, talking to him. The way he was, the way he thought, left her feeling lifted. He reminded her of the world beyond herself. What was more, he had the makings of a great cook. She felt he deserved this prize with every inch of his soul. "Do you know what I want more than anything?" she said. "I want you to win. I want you to have this."

  She could hear a smile in his voice. "Then for you I will try to get it."

  "Not for me! For your family."

  "Okay," he said. "For them."

  11

  The most important thing is to preserve civilization. As men we are the sum of our forebears, the great thinkers, great masters, great chefs. We who know the secrets of food must pass them on, for our attainment in food is no less than our attainment in philosophy, or art; indeed, the three things cannot be separated. These are the things that make us Chinese. In the West, it is different. There, Plato is one of their favorite sages. He teaches them that food is the opposite of art, a routine undertaken to satisfy human need, no more—worse, a form of flattery. We Chinese look instead to the Analects of Confucius, where it is written that there is "no objection to the finest food, nor the finest shredding."

  —LIANG WEI, The Last Chinese Chef

  *** I was born to my father late. He may have been one of the great chefs of his time and written a book that made him gastronome to a generation, yet he did not have a son—not at least until his wife died in 1934 and he at last—for he had long ignored the urgings of his friends—took a second. He could have done it sooner. Many men in those days did. They chose a concubine. Liang Wei could have done it without raising an eyebrow, for his wife had proved barren, but he never did. He wanted to be modern. He was a traditional chef, a product of the Forbidden City, of feudalism, but he would not take a second.

  And then she died. He put on a grand funeral, more than he could afford. The sutras were chanted for forty-nine days. When Qingming came in the spring, the day of Pure Brightness on which the dead are honored, he offered his prayers at her grave. Then he sent for the matchmaker.

  He wanted someone young, he told the older woman, but not too young. He wanted wide hips for bearing. And he wanted a girl who could cook. Someone had to oversee his kitchen at home while he ran his restaurant. His own hired cook was not enough. For my father, even the food at home had to scale the heights. He was one for whom every mouthful, even the most insignificant snack with tea, was worthy of talent and attention.

  Wang Ma the matchmaker brought him my mother, age twenty-four. Her name was Chao Jing, Surpassing Crystal. She didn't look anything like her name. She was a plain jug of a girl with a flat, freckled nose. Yet her eyes sparkled with intelligence and humor. She was strong in the kitchen and superlative at the market, the latter a skill for which my father had not dared to hope. No one could outdo her, not even Ah Heng, the hired cook. It was Ah Heng's right to do the shopping. He gained a critical slice of his income through the small commission he took on each purchase and, like so many cooks in Peking then, he had used that little cash stream to build up a gambling operation that he ran in his family home nearby. Despite all that, he would step aside sometimes and let my mother shop. She cared about food; the vendors knew it and they loved her. They all wanted to please her. She always brought home superior ingredients at a lower price.

  And she ran a great kitchen. I think often of the banquets my father served at home almost every night, taking a few hours' leave from the restaurant to come home and dine—great meals that he could never have staged without Ah Heng and above all my mother. Even if the meal was a simple one, even if the guests were few, he always expended as much care and love on each dish as if he were entertaining Yi Yin himself, the greatest chef in history, who like him started as a slave. He would think many days ahead and call together friends whom he loved. He would send out a poem of invitation. All the recipients would fall into a passion of expectation. There would be a thematic reason to gather: the Osmanthus Festival, the anniversary of the birth of a poet, the first crabs of the season. Guests might present a painting or a work of calligraphy to accompany the meal. Remarks on cuisine would lead naturally to remarks on poetry, the two subjects sharing to a surprising degree both vocabulary and a style of critical expression. Eventually poems themselves would be invented, inspired by food, lubricated by wine.

  People think of the history of cuisine as being a story that is told in restaurants, but in China it is very much told in the kitchens of the great houses. It was true of my father. His reputation had three legs, like the bronze vessels of yore. There was his famous book, there was the restaurant, and there was the cuisine of his home and family. Sometimes I felt that his home kitchen on Houhai was where he really created his food, with his wife shopping and helping. This was his real child in life, his bequest: Liang Jia Cai. Liang Family Cuisine.

  Preparations for the evening meal started early in the day. I learned there was no better place to be than behind my mother on the way to market, weaving under the crystal autumn light through the crowd on Hata Men, soaked
in the gay chatter and the golden laughter and the calls and whistles of the sweets vendors with their bright, fluttering flags. The world was a festival to me, one that could not be dampened even by the Japanese occupation with its columns of soldiers and its strange kimonoed women. Once we got to the market we were back in our own world, the Chinese world, and we chose with unfettered joy from the capons and bamboo shoots, water shields and fresh duck eggs, prawns, succulent live river eels, wild herbs from the marshy estuaries of the south, and three colors of amaranth. Walking home we would sing songs.

  As I grew, my father and Ah Heng let me watch them cook. They loved having me there, even if they usually grumbled and shouted me out of the way. Then one or the other would hiss me over to his side, pull out a secret ingredient—some crumbled herb or paper-wrapped bit of paste—from his pocket, send out an exaggerated, theatrical pretense of a glance to make sure the other wasn't looking, and then add it to the dish. As if they had anything hidden from each other. But each loved the special surge of face that came from imparting a rare secret, and so they played the game. And I learned.

  Some evenings, when the meal was over and the guests had gone home, my father would sit a while in the kitchen. He would smoke a little tobacco in Ah Heng's water pipe and tell stories of the Forbidden City while the kitchen was cleaned.

  At those times, depleted from yet another elegantly conceived and crafted meal, he often spoke most yearningly of the rustic. To hear him then, nothing was better than plain, everyday foods. He would insist that true cuisine was the perfect preparation of the simplest food, though we all knew he did not cook that way.

  He also told us how the Empress Dowager Ci Xi would make periodic demands for the rustic road food she was forced to eat when they fled from the Boxer Rebellion. This was part of the lore of the palace and taught to Liang Wei in the most meticulous fashion by his own master, the renowned imperial chef and antiquities connoisseur Tan Zhuanqing. Master Tan taught my father to make xiao wo tou, the rough little thimble-shaped corn cakes that the Empress remembered her bearers buying from vendors along the road, stopping their bumpy caravan in the flapping wind of a mountain pass to eat them, tiny and hot. Years later she would call for them when she wanted to feel alive again. She had been ordinary for a moment, almost poor, outside in the open air like any lowly person. Strangely, of all her memories, it was one of the most thrilling.

  My father used to say he detected a smirk on the face of Tan Zhuanqing when he prepared xiao wo tou for the Empress. Like many Chinese dishes, xiao wo tou has a second layer of meaning beyond how it looks and smells and tastes. Indeed, in the decades that followed, among food people the dish acquired a certain connotation. To cook xiao wo tou, to serve it, even to refer to it, was to speak of China's Marie Antoinette. Ci Xi cared nothing for her people. Her reign brought a system that had endured thousands of years to its end. Father taught us that when we made xiao wo tou we were making reference to the worst kind of imperial disregard for the common people, and so we must be extraordinarily careful where and when we served them. Delightful and rustic mouthfuls, they were also powerful political statements and could bring about a chef's downfall. Be careful, he told us.

  I never made them outside the house. In fact, after I went to work in the restaurant at sixteen, I never made them again.

  When I began in the restaurant in 1951, the government was getting ready to close down the industry. Liang Jia Cai was a favorite of everyone, even party royalty. They loved dining there. They always commanded the best tables. So our place was one of the last to go.

  I made the most of my few years at Liang Jia Cai, adding eight dishes that became top sellers. People started to say that the Last Chinese Chef would have a successor after all. I gave an interview in the new state-run pictorial magazine. Father was pleased. He worked with me every day to show me as many of the old dishes as he could remember.

  In 1954 our door was closed. They chose a final few restaurants to stay open for officials and guests of state, and shuttered the rest. At first Father was livid that ours was not one of the few left open. Yet we were lucky. A few years later, to run an imperial-style restaurant, even one sanctioned by the Communist state, would become very dangerous. This fate he was spared.

  When Liang Jia Cai was closed I was transferred to Gou Bu Li in Tianjin. It was a lucky placement, for Tianjin was not far, only 120 kilometers, and I could visit my parents often in their last years. The restaurant itself was one of the most famous eating places in all of China, but it was a dumpling house. There were few more proletarian foods. Even the name, which grew from the nickname of the original chef and meant A Dog Ignores It, gave the feeling of roughness. I was told they served many types of dumplings before liberation, but when I was there they made only their original steamed stuffed bun, filled with either meat or cabbage. That was all right. A great dish can be made with a cabbage. The best food can rest on the simplest ingredients. And there is nothing higher in its way than a fragrant, light-as-a-cloud meat bun. I made these day after day, week after week, for four years. I lived in the commune attached to the restaurant. We cooks had all been transferred there from other places, without families; we lived in the work unit. We slept in a long, low room with two lines of bunks. It was the best place in the world for me to hide.

  My parents died within a year of each other and I had no one in the world except Jiang and Tan and Xie; though sworn brothers we were separated by both time and distance. I lost myself in the great kitchens of Gou Bu Li, which were divided into massive stations for each stage of production. There were the great floury, stone-topped dough surfaces, ringed with workers kneading, mixing, then turning out the perfect circles of half-leavened dough. There were the rows of supersized chopping blocks where the filling was minced and seasoned. There were the wrappers and crimpers with their gigantic shallow bowls of filling and their stacks of wrappers, constantly replenished. There was the cooking: the racks and racks of enormous bamboo steamers, each holding eighty, a hundred, a hundred and fifty baozi. I kept my head down. Like so many people at that time, I grasped that the key to survival was invisibility. My only goal was to live. I kept to myself.

  Others were not so lucky. First Xie's father went to prison. Then old Ah Heng, my father's home cook, was denounced. I was drawing every breath in fear. I was a Liang, son of the famous Liang who'd written The Last Chinese Chef. It was only a matter of time. I trembled every day, waiting.

  The first sign was a change in the red-character poster that had long been displayed in the kitchens. The old poster exhorted us to serve the masses with exemplary dumplings. Who would not want to do that? But then this vanished, and a new one appeared, filled with a denser text. I recognized it immediately. It was a passage from the writings of Chairman Mao.

  Sumptuous feasts are generally forbidden. In Shaoshan, Xiangdan County, it has been decided that guests are to be served with only three kinds of animal food, namely, chicken, fish, and pork. It is also forbidden to serve bamboo shoots, kelp, and lentil noodles. In Hengshan County it has been resolved that eight dishes and no more may be served at a banquet. Only five dishes are allowed in the East Third District in Liling County, and only three meat and three vegetable dishes in the North Second District, while in the West Third District New Year feasts are forbidden entirely. In Xiangxiang County, there is a ban on all "egg-cake feasts," which are by no means sumptuous ... In the town of Jiamu, Xiangxiang County, people have refrained from eating expensive foods and use only fruit when offering ancestral sacrifices.

  I looked at the bottom—"Mao's Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan," March 1927. Thirty-one years before. But I knew exactly why it was being posted now. Everyone knew. We were used to messages sent through historical symbolism. It was a signal. There was a shift. Those who had known privilege were in danger.

  If you went by what comrades were willing to say, everyone at Gou Bu Li came from a peasant or worker background. We were all completely pro
letarian. But everyone knew it was not true. Each learned to keep silent about his or her own past while avidly listening for clues or simmering talk about everyone else.

  So I waited. I watched. I knew something was going to happen.

  When it came, it was in the form of an order for food. I was in the kitchen, in the thrum of almost one hundred cooks, at my station, which was for wrapping. Wrapping was the most difficult, the most pleasing, the most subtle part of making Gou Bu Li's baozi. Each glossy-white bun had to be in the shape of a tight-budded chrysanthemum, closed at the top with no less than eighteen pleats. Mine were perfect. I worked with care. I kept my eyes down.

  One of the waiters from upstairs approached. "Comrade Liang?"

  "I am he." I did not interrupt my pleating rhythm.

  "There is a special order from a table upstairs."

  I looked up. There were no special orders. Just baozi, pork and cabbage. "What is it?"

  "They made me repeat it. They said they wanted xiao wo tou."

  "Ei? Say that again."

  "Xiao wo tou. They said it was your specialty."

  "Nonsense," I said. "Never heard of it. Don't know what it is." Though I did, exactly.

  "They said you would know," he said.

  He was young, the skin on his face tight as a plum. "Listen," I said, "you go back. Tell them you are sorry, we don't make that at this restaurant. What are you standing there for? Go!" And I watched him scuttle off.

  I did not see the boy again that night. When we finished I cleaned my area quickly and returned to the bunk room in time to roll up my few articles of clothing and hide them under my pillow. My hukou, my household registration, which gave me the right to exist in China, a home, a place in the pattern—this I left in its sewn-in pouch in my inner pocket. Later I would have to find a way to get rid of it.

  I washed thoroughly, scrubbing every patch of myself, thinking it was possible I might never wash again. I crept back into the bunk room after the lights were out, so nobody saw me hoist into my bunk with all my clothes on, even my shoes.