Chinese Cooking for Diamond Thieves

by Dave Lowry

  I glanced up the street. The cruiser had paused. The driver was talking to a woman who leaned over to hear what he was saying. I put my back against a phone pole. My knees felt like they didn’t want to lock, no matter how I tried to make them. The muscles in my thighs were suddenly quivering. If it wasn’t for the pole, I’d have been sitting down about where I’d put Mr. Bald Warm-up Suit just a few minutes before, on the sidewalk.

  The woman stepped away from the cruiser and waved to the cop. He kept driving down the street toward me, then eased up and stopped. The passenger’s window rolled down. I stepped away from the pole and took a couple of steps toward the car. I was happy my legs seemed to be holding me. And a little surprised they were.

  “That your Toyota there, Massachusetts?” the cop in the passenger seat asked me. He jerked his head in the direction of the car’s tag.

  “Yes, sir,” I said. I’d picked it up the day before.

  “You’re parked in a limited-time spot. You got someplace you can move it?”

  “I do, officer,” I said. “To St. Louis.”

  11

  Rule #70: Snow fungus and white wood ear are the same—and, yes, that is important.

  I could have called Langston Wu before I got to St. Louis. It would have been polite. I was planning to stay with him, after all. Maybe even move in, if he had the room. On the other hand, Langston showed up at my house unannounced one afternoon back when we were juniors in high school. He brought a bag full of live eels with him. My mother, I thought at the time, was actually considering killing him when she came into the kitchen and there was Langston dumping a dozen squirmy, slimy gray eels into her granite sink. Langston was the sort of guy who appreciated the spontaneous. I couldn’t think of anything much more spontaneous than showing up at his front door in the middle of the morning, asking him if he’d like a roommate. Immediately.

  That’s where I was, twelve hours, more or less, after I’d left Buffalo. At his front door. Langston opened it at my second round of knocking. He was wearing a sweatshirt inside out and a pair of running shorts. His black hair stuck up at a bunch of odd angles all over his head, like a collection of exclamation points, like he was a cartoon character drawn to express only surprise. Which, at that hour of the morning, he was.

  “Tucker?” He rubbed his hand over his hair and made it stick up even more. “What the hell are you doing here?” He looked sleepy. I assumed he was working in a Chinese restaurant. I couldn’t picture Langston doing anything else. If he was—if he was working in any kind of restaurant—he was keeping late hours. People who’ve never worked in eating places, and who go there just for meals, don’t realize how much of the work goes on after the last diner has left for the evening. Restaurant workers keep vampire hours. A restaurant doesn’t just shut down, not even after the last dish has been washed, the last stained, wrinkled linen whipped off the table and tossed into the laundry hamper. There is always something else to do: prepping for the next day, scrubbing a sink, worming a piece of wire into the gas port of a stove to clear out the gunk that accumulates inside. Then there’s the decompression hour, where workers gather someplace to nibble and drink and complain about their jobs. By the time most chefs and other restaurant workers get to bed, it’s closer to morning than to anything like night. It was already past nine now. For a working chef like Langston, that would have been the best part of his sleep.

  “You know,” I said. “Happened to be in the mood for some fish maw soup and realized I was out of snow fungus. Thought I’d pop over here and borrow some.”

  “Don’t have any,” Langston said. “Got plenty of bai mu er, though.” He stood aside and gestured for me to come in.

  I did.

  “You eat yet?” he asked.

  I shook my head. I followed him into the kitchen. He took a plastic tub of rice from the refrigerator and dumped some into a pot, then poured in water and set it on the stove, lighting the burner underneath. He filled a kettle with water and lit another burner. I sat at the table. He sat across from me and folded his arms across his chest. I could see scars, old burns and a couple of new ones, on his forearms. Cooks in Western restaurants have scars like thick red smudges where their arms come down accidentally on the side of a pan. Chinese cooks like Langston—and me—have kitchen scars that are fine ribbons, either scarlet or tan, depending on their age, where our forearms have encountered the thin, searing edge of a wok. I had my own collection, most of them healed into shiny streaks by now. It had been a while since I’d gotten any new ones.

  He pushed against the table so he was balanced on the back legs of the chair and looked at me. “You’re on.”

  I told him the story of my life, skipping the parts he knew. Since we’d known one another since second grade, that meant I could leave out most of it except the past week or so. I left out the part about Corinne Chang. I thought that part might be superfluous. I still wasn’t sure what it was all about anyway, and I didn’t feel like going into it, even with someone like Langston, who was a good listener. He sat and did just that and didn’t interrupt.

  “So,” I finished, “not having any other immediate prospects educationally, socially, or professionally for the moment, I thought I’d come out here and see if there were any restaurants looking to upgrade their kitchen staff.”

  Langston nodded. “And you, being a laowai with pretensions and a deep, probably neurotic need to try to be a part of a culture that neither needs nor wants you in the club, thought I might get you in the kitchen door of some place.”

  “Exactly,” I said, reflecting on the fact that was the second time in less than a week I’d had ethnic slurs used to my face. Corinne had called me a “big nose.” Which was mildly offensive but was really just an old term for Westerners, who, when they first appeared in China, seemed to have bigger noses than the Chinese were used to seeing. Langston was calling me a laowai, an “old foreigner.” I’d never known why it had become a standard Mandarin term for a Caucasian. It could be an insult. It usually was. But sometimes it was just a description. And even when it was used insultingly, a lot of my Chinese friends and coworkers like Langston used it more to tease than anything else. Any way it got used, it didn’t bother me. If you were going to be a white guy hanging out in Chinese kitchens, you had to put up with a certain amount of cultural insensitivity.

  The rice was bubbling in the pot now, thick, viscous enough that a pair of chopsticks would stand up in it. Langston leaned into the open refrigerator and pulled out a bowl of leftover chicken stew studded with feathery knobs of silver jelly-like fungus and stirred it into the rice. He poured the hot water from the kettle into a teapot. I found a couple of bowls in the cupboard and put them on the table with two teacups. Breakfast was served. Zhou, rice porridge that we both liked Cantonese style, with a sprinkle of pickled and slivered bamboo shoots Langston retrieved from the refrigerator. It was the breakfast I’d mentioned to Corinne that first morning back in New Hampshire. It was even better than I’d imagined it then.

  “Good snow ear,” I said, using the Mandarin word for the fungus, xue er. “Tastes like it’s from Dongxiang.”

  “It is,” Langston said. “Only it’s bai mu er.”

  This was our old, not particularly funny routine. Back in high school, cooking at his parents’ house one day, we got into an argument. I insisted “snow fungus” and “white wood ear” were the same; Langston said they weren’t. I turned out to be right. I never let it die.

  After we finished, we cleaned up our breakfast dishes, and Langston showed me the apartment. The place he was renting was on the top floor of a brick apartment building built back around the time of the World’s Fair in St. Louis, in 1904. More than a century later, it was near enough to Washington University to appeal to students looking for a cheap place to live. The landlord, Langston explained, was a local Chinese businessman. He’d figured out Chinese restaurant workers were just as able to pay rent as students and, unlike the students, didn’t leave for three months
every summer. If they had parties, they kept things quiet enough that neighbors up and down the street didn’t complain. The entire apartment building, all three floors of it, was filled with Asians. Most were Chinese, either fresh immigrants or ABCs—American-born Chinese. Some were Vietnamese or Cambodian, Laotian, or Thai. Most worked at various Chinese restaurants within walking or biking distance. Langston’s place was divided into his large bedroom in the rear, a small kitchen, and a living room with a fireplace that looked like it hadn’t seen a fire since the World’s Fair. Facing out onto the street was a front room that must have originally been some kind of parlor or sitting room. We were standing in the middle of it now.

  “All yours,” Langston said. “We can put up a sheet or a curtain right here”—he gestured—“and block this off so you can have some privacy and sleep in late as I know you’re accustomed to doing.”

  I unpacked the Toyota and hauled my stuff upstairs. There wasn’t much. Langston had a folding frame with a futon on it in the front room he’d told me was, for the foreseeable future, mine. I spread the futon on the wooden floor and put my sleeping bag on it. I arranged my clothes on a bookshelf built into one wall. I looked around. That seemed to be it, in terms of my personal property. I sat on the window ledge that looked out on the street below. Crusty mounds of snow the color of ashes were heaped along the curb. A couple of girls walked by, both in quilted parkas and very ugly big fur boots. A crow cruised by in a long glide. He landed with a single flap of his inky wings on the branch of a sycamore tree across the street. He was eye level with me. He glanced over my way, looking me over. Apparently I passed his inspection. He shrugged, shivering his black feathers, then settled down, watching, waiting. He looked like he was not intending to stay all that long there, but he was taking it all in, looking around to see what might be interesting for the time being. I knew how he felt.

  12

  Rule #31: Beginnings offer more options in life than do endings.

  Langston used to cook at a place called the Eastern Palace. He’d gotten the job the way all Chinese cooks got them. His cousin knew a guy who was the brother-in-law of a woman who’d worked once at the Eastern Palace. Something like that. There was an expression: “Jangling the wok.” It meant that if you asked any one person in a Chinese restaurant to bang their metal spatula against the side of their wok if they knew or were related to any other person, chances were good the noise would commence and just go on and on.

  Langston took me to the Eastern Palace the next afternoon. It was only about a block from the restaurant where he was now cooking, in a section of St. Louis ambitiously called Chinatown. It was more like China Street. The neighborhood was a section of street at the western edge of the city, about half a mile long, lined on both sides with Asian restaurants, grocery stores, and acupuncture clinics. Two different Chinese newspapers. There were cramped shop fronts selling insurance and cheap jewelry, and a couple of auto repair shops, where, according to handwritten signs that appeared stuck in the windows, Chinese was spoken and understood.

  The Eastern Palace, Langston told me, catered to non-Chinese diners at lunch. There were enough businesses and offices within walking or quick driving distance to make lunch the real moneymaker. The Eastern Palace, along with a dozen other similar joints, served standard Chinese American lunch fare to everybody from accountants to shoe sellers. Dinner, on the other hand, when most of the lunch customers had returned to homes out in the suburbs, comprised almost exclusively Asian diners. There were two different menus for dinner: one in English, the other in Chinese. I’d worked in Chinese restaurants like this. I was always irritated by the two menus. A lot of Chinese restaurants were still treating non-Chinese customers as if they were eating back in the sixties, when moo goo gai pan and chop suey were considered exotic. There were dishes on the Chinese side of the menu that weren’t included in the English version. I thought there were a lot of non-Chinese diners who would have been adventurous enough to try some of the authentic stuff, if it was offered to them. On the other hand, I hadn’t seen many Chinese restaurants go broke. So maybe the owners knew something I didn’t. Nobody in management had ever asked any of us in the kitchen how to run their places. That was probably for a reason.

  We went in the rear door off the alley, into the kitchen of the Eastern Palace. It was, like the kitchens of every Chinese restaurant where I’d worked, small. The average American living room was bigger. Under the soft buzz of fluorescent lights, three guys were working. One was scrubbing a wok the size of a kid’s sledding disc. Another was turning a chunk of beef into mouthful-size strips. The third was clattering a spatula against another wok where a thick cloud of steam was boiling up. I’d never been here, of course. But it all looked familiar.

  Langston introduced me to Jao-long, who told me to call him Jim; and Kuo, who told me to call him John; and to Li, who said I might as well just call him Li since he couldn’t figure out any way you could Americanize a name like that to make it easier. Then Langston took me into the owner’s office and introduced me to Ting Leong, who didn’t tell me to call him anything. As we stood at its door, he sat in his office, peering at a shopping list like it was the directions for defusing a bomb strapped to his own waist. His attention on the task was completely focused. Finally, he looked up at us. He was skinny, in dark pants with a short-sleeved white cotton shirt and under it a white wife beater. A long strand of silver and black hair was thoughtfully swirled over the bald spot on the crown of his head. His glasses were so smudged I didn’t think he could see me all that well. Apparently he saw I wasn’t Chinese, though. He turned to a woman, and the Cantonese was so rapid it was hard to even make out words—and it wouldn’t have done me any good if I had been able to catch them. I heard gwai lo, the Cantonese equivalent of laowai, except instead of “old foreigner” it mean something like “foreign devil.”

  “You look for work?” he said to me in English once Langston had introduced us. He was in his late forties, I was guessing. He crossed his skinny arms and absently rubbed both elbows with his palms.

  “Exactly,” I said.

  “You wash dishes?”

  “I do,” I said. And I did. Or at least I was about to. Leong wheeled his chair around and reached to a shelf behind him. He tossed me an apron and pointed back through his office door into the kitchen toward the sink.

  “Knock you-self out.”

  I washed dishes all through the noon and dinner shifts. I must have done okay; Mr. Leong told me to show up the next day. I did. And the day after, and about 2,768 dirty plates later, rendered clean and sparkling under my ministrations, a week had gone by and I had enough money to pay Langston for my half of the rent with a little extra left over. It wasn’t something I’d want to make a career of. Still, it was nice to be back in a Chinese restaurant kitchen again. Being in a Chinese restaurant kitchen for me was like going back to my bedroom in my parents’ house in Andover. I’d spent a lot of time in both. I was comfortable there. I felt at home.

  There are Chinese restaurants in almost every city in the United States. Places the size of a public restroom that are exclusively for take-out, with steel grates and bulletproof-glass-fronted counters—all in dark places. Places that are giant, extravagant halls, with indoor streams and opulent architecture and menus that are pages long. I’ve never been to any of them, but I’m betting there are little prairie hamlets in South Dakota and tiny burgs in the swamplands of central Florida and wide-spot-in-the-road towns in the New Mexico desert that all have Chinese restaurants. Szechuan and Cantonese and Hong Kong style, and even some places devoted to the more esoteric of China’s cuisine—Hakka, Honan, Fukien. Americans, millions of them every day, eat Chinese food made and served in these restaurants. With all those thousands of restaurants and millions of people eating in them, it’s kind of interesting to consider that very few of those people have been in a Chinese restaurant kitchen. No reason why they should, really. If it’s a choice between a trip to Epcot Center or a visit
to a Chinese restaurant kitchen, go with the Epcot option. Still, a Chinese restaurant kitchen is a different world. And sure, most diners don’t go into the kitchens of any kinds of restaurants where they eat. It’s just that a typical Chinese restaurant kitchen is different from, say, a French restaurant kitchen. Or an American diner’s kitchen.

  All restaurant kitchens have their own setups and layout. They have their own specific rhythms, their own slang; they have their own customs and hierarchy. Right now, in that hierarchy in any Chinese kitchen, I was a sheng shou, a “new hand.” That meant, more than anything else, I kept my mouth shut. I watched while I worked. I learned how things went on in that particular kitchen. I listened to the guys talking. Chinese cooks never shut up. In some restaurant kitchens—I’d talked with enough cooks and restaurant workers to know—the energy comes from smoking or from a snort of something or a shot of something with a century-plus proof. In Chinese kitchens, the energy is most often supplied by talking. Chinese chefs rag one another. They rag until they run out of things to rag about. At least for the moment. Then they start talking aloud to themselves. Then they regroup and rag each other some more. It helps the time pass. It keeps everybody engaged. Nobody has time to daydream or drift off.

  I didn’t join into the talk at the Eastern Palace. I wasn’t a cook, at least not in that kitchen. Not yet. Dishwashers don’t rate. My second night there, I was joined by Thuy, a JOB—“Just Off the Boat”—immigrant from Vietnam who’d come over, he told me in broken but understandable English, after his father lost their Saigon business in a dice game. Unless Thuy or I fell behind and caused the three chefs to run short of plates or bowls, they didn’t even notice we were there. If we did run behind, they noticed right away. Not in a good way. I knew that from experience. I’d done my own share of yelling at dishwashers. So I didn’t say anything. And I kept up. During the lulls, I watched Kuo (“Call Me John”) cook. He was the head chef, the most senior in the kitchen, and he answered only to Mr. Leong. Even Mr. Leong was respectful when he spoke with Kuo. In a Chinese kitchen, the owner might be the guy who pays the bills and the salaries, hires and fires. The head chef, though, runs the place.