The Best Contemporary Women's Fiction: Six Novels

by Jenna Blum

  I lay as quiet as a stone while the moon rose over the Tianjin rooftops. The roomful of men, worn-out kitchen men who had cooked by hot steamers and cleaned and gone finally to their beds, quieted to a soft forest of sighs and snores.

  I waited hours to get up. To climb down I had to step on the bed of the man below. "I'm sorry, Comrade." And I whispered a local slang word for the bathroom. The man snorted and returned to sleep. I hunched down the center aisle, holding my midsection as if ill, concealing my bundle. I slipped out and passed the rear of the kitchens. The last of the men were inside cleaning, and they had set racks of leftover buns in the doorway, which they would divide up later and take home. I took five dozen, wrapped them in three tight cloths in my bundle, and continued on, holding my middle, into the latrine, then out again through a back door that gave onto a Tianjin alley. We were never prisoners in our workers' collectives, but if a man did leave, there was nowhere else to go.

  I set out walking. First I cut across the city, with its silent shadows, and then through the hours of thinning buildings and finally the countryside, due east, by the stars. Later, by the sun. I walked without stopping until I came, finally, to the flats that led to the sea. The air was cold, which was good for the baozi. As a cook I was well fed, better than most people, and I had the reserves to walk a night and a day without food. I only drank, stopping when I could at farmers' pumps.

  By the time I reached the flat, fine, oily sand it was night again, and I could walk no farther. I stumbled out onto a pier crowded with boats. There were fishing boats, squat, of dark, heavy wood, and lined up in their berths, the larger craft—metal-hulled diesel-engine boats scavenged from the years of war, patched, remade, bumping the wood pilings, lines clinking. I had taken my last steps; if I did not lie down, I would collapse. So I staggered out along a wooden plank beside one of the berths, maneuvered my leg over the rail, and stepped aboard a boat. It was a large one, fourteen meters of hull at least. Three metal doors. I pulled at one; it opened. Down a ladder was a wedge-shaped space, and a bunk. I untied the baozi from my waist and collapsed.

  When I awoke, a man was bending over me with a long knife, the tip of which he pressed ever so gently against my throat. I felt my eyes popping wide as I shrank away, but he followed me easily with the sharp point.

  "Don't move," he said in the Tianjin dialect. With his free hand he checked me for weapons, feeling only my sewn-in hukou and a few unpromising coins in my pocket.

  "If you want to kill me, it's no problem," I croaked. "I am dead already."

  He grazed me again with the knife, as if considering it. He had a wide, squat face, creased and salt-burned with thick caterpillar brows. It was impossible to tell his age. "You look alive to me."

  "Not for long."

  "Unless?" he prompted.

  "Yuan zou gao fei," I whispered, Travel far and fly high. Slip away. Disappear. Start again.

  I saw in his face that he understood. "Where?"

  "Anywhere," I said. A minute ago I had been a dead man. Now my heart raced with hope.

  He looked me up and down. "You don't have anything."

  "I have that," I said, and pointed with a look. "Open it."

  He finally pulled the knife back a few inches and reached for the bundle, still keeping his eyes on me.

  He untied the first knot and I could see the change in his face when he caught a whiff of the aroma, and then he laid back the cloth and saw the baozi, cooked, in their neat, slightly compressed rows. He leaned his face close to them and breathed. In those days meat dumplings were festival food, and though a man like him was blessed that he might eat his fill of fish, a meat dumpling was something he tasted only a few times a year. And these were buns from Gou Bu Li.

  He glanced back at me. He had decided. "All right," he said. "I'm going south. I have cargo going to a work unit in Fuzhou. I can drop you near there. It'll be eighteen days, maybe twenty. I have four men. We go out on the tide tonight. You stay here until I tell you." He threw me a boiled-wool blanket, left, and locked the door.

  It was twenty-one days to Fujian Province, around the Shandong peninsula and down the coast past the great mouth of the Yangtze. When finally we came to the first wet fingers of the Min Jiang estuary, north of Fuzhou, he said I should get off there instead of near the city. Go ashore in some quiet place. Hide for a while.

  Hide where? I thought. How? But we came to a small cove and the captain took the dinghy down and put me off in calm, waist-deep water. We parted like brothers, with promises to meet again in this life or the next. I waded ashore in what felt like liquid ice, with my dry clothes over my head. They hauled up the dinghy and waited until they saw me emerge on a beach of pebbles and dry myself before they reversed their engines. Even then I stood waving until the lights of the boat had receded far out onto the water. Then I turned and walked straight inland.

  The trouble was, there was no land. Once I stepped off the pebbles I was in knee-deep water. I thought if I kept going I would be out of it, but the opposite happened. I was swallowed by water. Darkness fell. Creatures awoke. I heard the calls and slithers of every kind of inhabitant. I sloshed forward. I didn't know where I was. I was not cold; instead I burned with fever. I had to stop, lie down. I couldn't find a dry spot big enough. The best I could do was to sit in a wet lap of roots, half in the water, half out, my head against the tree, until I lost consciousness.

  When I awoke I was lying in a flat-bottomed boat, warm, heavenly, covered with a blanket, looking up into the freckled face of my mother. She was poling the boat. Surpassing Crystal, with her kind face and her strong hands; what was she doing here? Sitting behind my head with his hand on my shoulders was a young boy. It was myself. It was a dream. No. It was death. I had died. That was it.

  I was not dead, I was ill, and I was taken through the sweet milk of human goodness to a rough house on stilts, where I burned and sweated with fever. The woman cared for me. Hers was the face of God to me. She rarely left me when it was at its worst. She cooled me with wet cloths. The boy, called Longshan, came and went, helping her.

  I grew better. They lived in the swamp, far from their nearest neighbors in the rural commune. I sat on the porch, weakened, watching the light change over the waterweeds, which teemed, full of life, even in the approaching winter. Liuli—that was the woman's name—was a deft hunter and trapper. Her job in the commune was trapping eels for the workers' kitchens. This was the year when Chinese had to cease cooking at home and eat their meals in mess halls run by their work units. Luckily Liuli lived far from the village, and so from this particular social experiment she was excused. She delivered live eels twice a week and in return she received a modest quantity of rice, flour, oil, matches, and other staples.

  Naturally she was able to supplement this with the skimmings from her catch, but eel was only the beginning of what Liuli managed to bring to the table. She and Longshan went out and came back with snakes, waterfowl, frogs, and all manner of waterweeds and lily bulbs and lotus roots and aromatic marsh plants. I watched them with awe and ate their good, simple food. I grew strong again.

  They understood that no one should know I was there. Liuli said nothing on her trips to deliver the eels, and outside of that they saw almost no one anyway. The boy did not go to school. He had no father. What became of the man who begat him I never knew. He was a lonely child, half-wild; he attached himself to me as quickly as a water vine.

  I could have stayed there forever. Liuli was a simple woman, almost too shy to look me in the face, though she had nursed me away from death and washed every part of my body when I was sick. I respected her and would never have so much as looked at her in the man-woman way without her invitation. But I loved her. I don't know if I loved her as a woman or a sister or an angel, or in a part of the heart where those things don't matter. Yet with her and the boy Longshan I was, in those weeks, as happy as I have ever been. Barely able to communicate—for she spoke only a local Fujian dialect I could not understand—we had
come to know each other's human spirits through the unfolding days, first of sickness, later of laughter and shared chores.

  One night, before I left, I cooked for them. I waited until they were out trapping eels. They knew nothing of who I was or what I could do, so when they returned and found my meal upon the table their chins all but brushed the floor. Such heights of pleasure I felt then.

  I had prepared eel, of course, but not the stewed eel she made almost every night. Instead I made salt-and-pepper eel, thin little crisp-fried slices of fillet with a pungent wild pepper dip. I roasted a duck in the manner of Tan Zhuanqing, using the method passed down by my father, and then I made a second duck entirely of soy and gluten, and stuffed it with lotus root and lily bulbs and dried tofu and wild garlic, all bound by a mince of the dark green waterweeds that grow among the grasses. I roasted it until its skin was as crisp and shiny as that of the real duck.

  The food was too much for them. The way it looked and smelled and tasted overwhelmed them. They had never had such dishes, even though each was prepared from the same foods they ate every day. Their faces lit up when they tasted it, and yet it made them almost frightened of me, of the fact that I could turn their food into a meal such as this. Liuli carried the things to the sink afterward and refused for the first time to let me help her clean. She deferred to me. She avoided my eyes.

  That night, I mentioned going. She was neither sorry nor glad. Of course I had to go. I did not belong there. I was not of their home or their lives. By cooking for them I had broken the bubble. Our separateness, the vast differences between us, now defined us. Liuli was self-conscious in front of me. She held herself away. I wanted to reach for her more than ever, but I did not. She was a good woman, a good mother; she and the boy had saved my life. Above all I had to show respect. I spent my last days on the water, playing with Longshan, unable to stop myself from casting long, speculative glances back up at the house where I knew she sat, divided, thinking of me.

  In the end she gave me some money she had saved, and that decided it. She pressed it on me; she insisted. I think we both knew if she hadn't done this I might never have left, and she didn't want that. She knew I would never have been able to look at her straight across, as an equal, which is the least any woman deserves.

  So she gave the money and I took it. Living as she did, on the water, she knew people who plied the sea for their living and could not be contained by governments or laws. Such people would take a man to Hong Kong and drop him on an outlying beach amid incurious fisherfolk—all it took was money. In China there has always been the hou men, the back door, which can be opened by money or relationships and through which many things can be negotiated. Thanks to her that door opened for me. When I went through it I was to keep going until I reached America, but I didn't know that then. I only knew it was the last time I would see her. I climbed into a boat at the edge of the swamp. She poled away backward, her eyes on mine, her face still, remarkably, like the face of my mother.

  ***

  12

  In the Peking dialect of my youth, food was always used to describe the basic things. To have work was jiao gu, to have grains to chew. To have lost one's job was dapo le fan wan, to have broken the rice bowl. These words made the difference between life and death for people who were poor. So these words contained a world.

  —LIANG WEI, The Last Chinese Chef

  On Thursday evening, after several days of cooking and sleeping and more cooking, Sam found his eyes straying to the clock. Tonight was Yao Weiguo's banquet for the committee—Yao, his main rival. Tonight was Yao, tomorrow Wang Zijian, and then, Saturday night, the last and tenth night of the competition, Sam. Although radio call-in shows had been burning with exchanges over the merits of the ten chefs, and wagers had been laid, the panel itself had kept completely quiet. None of them had leaked anything about the banquets thus far. Everything in the media was speculation. Sam had not heard a thing.

  He felt blessed to have the last slot. His flavors would be the final ones to linger in the judges' minds. On the other hand, they might be exhausted. He would take care not to overwhelm them. Better to reach for greatness in simplicity. This was what he had in mind anyway.

  He had forty-eight hours left. What remained was the last rehearsal of each dish, especially the ones that were new to him—these had to be done over and over. He was also still assembling bowls, plates, platters, paintings, and calligraphy in tune with the arc of the meal. Once any facet of the meal had struck a resonance in the diner, he wanted everything else in the room and on the table to multiply the effect. The effect could not be overt. It had to build quietly.

  He looked again at the clock. There was so much to do. He should work. But he felt a nervous and unceasing tug to go out, too, to go to Yao's side of town, to walk down the hutong that ran behind Yao's restaurant, the Red Door, to get close to his banquet, see what he could feel, what he could hear, what he could smell. He closed his eyes. Don't do it. But he knew he would.

  Night was dropping as he locked his gate, shadows growing, and he felt a familiar wave of love for the area he lived in. His neighbors felt the same. He could see it in the way the grandmas walked the small children, the old men shouted over their card games and in hot weather pushed their undershirts up to their armpits. It was in the way packs of young girls walked the lake, showing off their gazelle bodies in the latest formfitting clothes. He loved it for all these reasons, and then doubly, because in addition to everything else he was living in the house in which his family had lived, on and off, for more than eighty years.

  The amount of effort and money Sam had poured into restoring all but the small north-facing room was another sore spot in Liang Yeh's refusal to come back. Sam wanted to bring him here. Show him. Here, Ba. Look.

  He had told him as much when he called him again, this morning. "The main thing is, Xie needs you. He's hanging on to see you. And you should come. Your house is waiting, your father's house. It's safe."

  In response to this, at least, Liang Yeh had been merely silent. This was an improvement.

  Sam walked to the subway, went south and changed lines. A few stops to the west brought him to the neighborhood of Yao's restaurant. He walked for a while, distracting himself as if on an aimless stroll. In time he gave in and drifted into the hutong that ran behind Yao's place. No one would see him walking. It was dark.

  The high rear windows of the place were flung open. As he crept closer he heard laughter from inside and the clink of dishes, then a rising cheer. "Hao! Hao!" came the voices, Good! Good! Sam felt the reflexive curl of tension. He shouldn't have come.

  He heard a sound to his right and turned to see a figure step out of the shadows—no, not one figure, two. Who?

  Sam made a silent mental shriek. It was Jiang. And Tan. Their mouths dropped in recognition too.

  The long stare devolved into suppressed laughter, and in a second all three of them were heaving and holding their sides. They hushed one another, which only made it worse.

  "Shh!" Sam sent a look to the back windows of Yao's restaurant, which were open.

  "Come!" Jiang croaked, wiping his eyes. "Why should we stand here? Let us walk over to the Uighur night market. It's just a few blocks. Have you eaten? I have not. I may faint from starvation! I may die! Come." And the three made their way down the hutong.

  In the market, cheap lights were strung across the alley and vendors shouted behind great wok rings with lids that lifted off to stately puffs of steam. Row after row of Uighur men with dark Eurasian faces ran charcoal grills, where they produced lamb in every form, from skewers to the tender minced meat that was marinated, griddle-fried, and stuffed in split sesame flat cakes.

  No doubt Yao's meal had been brilliant, Sam thought as they walked through the people and the tables and the hot smoky aromas. But what was that to him? His meal would be brilliant too. He felt confident when his uncles were beside him.

  After much surveying, they settled on thick hand-cut noodles
with green vegetables in broth and a huge platter of dense, chewy, cumin-encrusted lamb ribs. They ate in the companionable silence of relatives assigned to one another long before any of them were even born.

  As Sam ate, his eyes roved the crowd. After a minute he saw a distinctive curtain of black hair coming toward him—Xiao Yu, the girl he had seen David Renfrew approach that day in a restaurant. "Hi," he called out when she came close.

  She looked over, surprised. "Oh, Liang Cheng," she said, using his Chinese name. "I read the article in the paper about the competition. I hoped for the best. How was your banquet? Was it successful?"

  "I haven't gone yet," he said. "Saturday night."

  "Wish you success."

  "Thank you. And you? How are you?"

  "Very well. Hao jiu bu jian." I haven't seen you in a long time.

  "Actually," Sam said, "I saw you a week ago, but I don't think you knew. It was in a restaurant. I was on the other side. I saw David Renfrew go over and talk with you." They were speaking Chinese, but to say David's name he dropped back into English. The sound of it made her mouth tense. "Sorry," said Sam, seeing it.

  "Don't be sorry." But abruptly she looked at her watch. He had touched a sore spot. Something had happened. Sam remembered the odd trepidation he had felt when he saw Xiao Yu and David together. He felt it the minute David asked him for her name. He couldn't have said why. Sometimes it was not necessary to know, only to feel.

  "I should go," she said.

  Looking at her, he saw he had not imagined it. She wore the proud, taut chin of a woman slighted. "Please take care of yourself."

  "You too," she said. "Success to you."

  "Man man zou," he said, Walk slow, as he watched her wave and turn and disappear in the close-pressed night crowd. People moved by, under the lights, jostling, their talk and their laughter borne along with them. She was gone.