Chinese Cooking for Diamond Thieves

by Dave Lowry

  As a chef, I came to the conclusion fairly quickly that as a fellow chef, Kuo was okay. I was better.

  13

  Rule #81: Between substance and appearance, know when to focus on which.

  I’d been sharing the apartment with Langston for a week. We slept in the first morning we’d had off on the same day. We made a leisurely breakfast, then Langston said, “Okay, big brother. We’ve put it off long enough. Let’s see what you’ve still got.”

  “Isn’t so much what I’ve still got as how much you’ve lost,” I said.

  We changed into sweatpants and a couple of layers of long-sleeved shirts. We went downstairs and out into the alley behind the apartment building. My breath came out in a puff of steam that hung in the still, cold air. The sky was the color of an old nickel. The wind dragged torn clouds slowly over it. It was a winter sky that threatened snow. I stood still, sinking down to get my balance, letting my knees relax, trying to center the mass of my body over the spots right behind the balls of my feet, the spot traditional Chinese medical anatomy calls the “gushing spring.” Then I began dribbling a pair of imaginary basketballs, faster, faster, until the palms of my hands were just a blur. It forced the blood to begin to circulate, along with my chi, my energy. I felt my arms tighten with the movement, then slowly start to relax. I stopped shivering.

  For a while we stretched, bending over, swooping down, cranking our trunks in big circles, making wide patterns with our swinging arms, just moving gently, carefully. Then, still working separately, we moved slowly through the basic forms we’d both been trying to perfect for almost ten years. Splitting, drilling, pounding, exploding, and crossing, stepping in straight lines, shifting back and forth, weaving, always moving ahead, always taking territory from an opponent, then turning, and going back the other way. We moved deliberately, exaggerating the actions, punching, slapping, dropping our bodies close to the ground, then coming up again, always attacking. We weren’t trying to stretch and loosen our muscles so much as we were trying to get our ligaments and tendons to respond. Chinese fighting arts are divided between waigong and qigong: external and internal arts. External arts, like gungfu, emphasize the same kind of physical movement and training that Western sports like boxing and wrestling do: the muscles, the “red.” Internal arts, like the xing-i Langston and I did, worked on strengthening the “white,” the ligaments and soft tissue. Instead of contracting muscles to make power, the idea is to relax, to be soft and pliant, right up until the moment of impact. It’s like the difference between getting hit with a sledgehammer and getting hit with a whip.

  I took my time. I worked slowly as I went through the fists. I felt the creakiness working its way out. I felt all those miles sitting behind the wheel of the Toyota across the country, then standing and washing dishes for what felt like about twenty-five hours a day. Within twenty minutes or so, my legs were trembling just a little with the effort. Being relaxed is harder than it sounds.

  After an hour of solo work, we faced off. Langston was puffing, I noticed. His face was flushed, even in the cold. We started stepping back and forth together, facing each other. It looked like we were dancing. Only instead of dancing, we were launching attacks, receiving them, shifting away, then countering. Langston punched, exactly the way I’d punched the guy back in Buffalo, fist pounding in vertically, his elbow parallel to the ground. I slid back and brought my open palm down in a sweeping motion before he could connect with it, pulling his punch and his arm toward me, pulling him off balance just enough to take the power out of the attack. He scraped his back foot up to compensate and simultaneously drove his other fist up in front of him, almost like he was making an uppercut to his own chin, then arcing it out, aiming for my nose. We had a few misconnections. It had been a while since we’d trained together. He nailed me once with a fist that glanced off my cheek when I didn’t move as quickly as I should have. I hooked his ankle and swept him, intending to catch him before he went down, but I missed grabbing him to stop the fall. He landed hard on his shoulder, and I heard his breath go out in a whoosh. We slowed to correct our rhythm, then sped up gradually as we got more comfortable with each other’s timing and sense of space again. After about fifteen minutes, we were moving together like a pair of machines. All the gears clicked between us. It didn’t take long to make our strikes and our shifting back and forth start to fall into a long, polished groove. We’d done it before. Lots.

  Almost ten years before, one evening the summer we both turned twelve, we were hanging out on the front porch at Langston’s parents’ house in Andover, when his uncle came out and got us.

  “Let’s go, guys,” he said. Langston’s uncle, when he wasn’t working as a real estate lawyer, practiced taiji, which he told us was too complicated for us, and xing-i, another Chinese fighting art he said was also too complicated but that, if we caught him in the right mood, he told us, he might show us. Apparently, that evening he was in the right mood. He led us to the backyard. He showed us how to stand: much like the way a person would in the prow of a canoe going through swift water. My forward foot was pointed straight ahead, the rear foot out at an angle for balance, my weight centered. He put my left hand up in front of me, open, fingers pointing up. My right he had me hold in front of my belly, open, so the thumb pointed back at me. It seemed simple. It wasn’t. He corrected our posture. He made me round my shoulders. He pulled my head back so my chin wasn’t sticking out. He pushed my butt in to straighten my posture. He shaped and molded both of us until we were exhausted just trying to stand as he wanted us to. That was my introduction to xing-i. An hour and a half in the humid heat of a Massachusetts summer, spent just learning how to stand.

  Now it was almost ten years later and instead of a summery Andover backyard under the shade of the maples, Langston and I were in an apartment alley, with the wind whickering around the corner of the building, snipping at us. It didn’t matter. We didn’t feel the cold much. We were both perspiring. We moved together until we were too tired to do it anymore, even though neither of us wanted to admit it. Finally, Langston said, “It’s no use. We both still reek.”

  We didn’t. We looked okay, considering we were both out of practice. I didn’t argue though. “No point in wasting more time on this,” I said. “It’s a lost cause.”

  On Monday Kuo, the head cook at the Eastern Palace, quit. Word was that he was recruited by another restaurant. Leong wasn’t happy about it. Leong was not particularly stoic when he was unhappy.

  “I bring these guys here. I teach them to cook, teach them how to run a kitchen,” he ranted. He was standing there in the kitchen, hands on his hips and taking up space, while I was in the process of turning a pile of dark green peppers into neat, chopped squares. When the dishwashing was slack, he’d had me cutting vegetables, doing prep work. “What they do then?”

  He didn’t wait for me to tell him what they do then.

  “They leave!” he said. “Up, go, gone!” Mr. Leong was steamed. He’d run his hand through what was left of his hair, and the carefully swirled circle of thin strands that had been so artfully and inadequately covering his bald spot drooped off the side of his head.

  I didn’t say anything. I was enjoying the feel of the cleaver in my hand, working it, feeling it slice cleanly through the peppers. I liked watching the pile of emerald squares growing next to my cutting board. I was in a nice rhythm, the cleaver moving exactly as I wanted. It felt like doing xing-i with Langston.

  “I hear you think you can cook,” Leong said suddenly. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him put his hands back on his hips. “How about you show me? We need cook now. How about you make cashew chicken for me? You show.”

  “Nope,” I said. I kept chopping. The blade of the cleaver made a satisfying crunch as it sliced through the peppers.

  “Hah?” he said. I stopped and looked at him. He’d probably never had a dishwasher say that word to him before. It was almost like it didn’t register.

  “I cook Chinese foo
d,” I said. “You want somebody to make cashew chicken or beef and broccoli or pork fried rice, you can find twenty of them around here. I’d rather wash dishes.”

  That wasn’t true. Not even slightly. I was getting sick of washing dishes. Really sick. It had reached the point where prepping, cutting up carrots or onions or the green peppers I had in front of me, was like a vacation compared to the dishwashing. I felt like a jockey who was spending his time mucking out stables instead of cantering on the back of a horse. I was ready to ride. And if getting into the saddle meant turning out orders of General Tso’s chicken and egg rolls, I was ready to do it. I just wasn’t ready to admit that. Not to Leong, anyway. Fortunately, I didn’t have to.

  “Okay.” He still had his hands on his hips. He reached up with the right one and became suddenly aware of the thin curtain of hair hanging off the side of his head. He hoisted it delicately and started trying to smooth it back in place. “Okay,” he said again. “You make something Chinese, you smart guy. You show me how it done.”

  I did. First, I asked Li if it was okay for me to use Kuo’s wok that was sitting cold on the burner. Technically, he was the senior man in the kitchen at the moment, with Kuo’s defection. I wouldn’t have gone near any wok without showing him the courtesy and respect of asking first. Li shrugged and nodded. It was too early for even the earliest of the lunch crowd to be around. The dining room was empty. I checked the cooler. I found chicken thighs and chopped them into bite-size pieces, leaving the bones in. I mixed soy sauce, sesame oil, and rice wine with the chicken and tossed it all into a clay pot, a bigger version of the one I’d cooked the pork in for the dinner with Corinne back at my parents’ house. I put the cover on before setting it on the stove and clicking on the gas burner. While the chicken cooked, I added a gurgle of rice wine to a couple tablespoons of fermented black beans, put them in a small dim sum steamer, and set them over a low flame in a metal pot with water. I heated Kuo’s wok. When it started to smoke, I tossed in a handful of the green pepper pieces I’d prepped, searing them against the side of the wok. When they got a little char, I flipped them and added a scatter of chopped green onions, soy sauce, and rice vinegar. Then I tilted in the dish of steamed black beans.

  Leong was sitting at a table near the kitchen door, making out a shopping list. His wife was with him, with a laptop in front of her, going over the books. I brought the chicken in to the dining room, to their table, still in its pot, then came back with green peppers. I stood off to the side while Leong opened the clay pot. The steam came up in a small perfumed cloud. He sniffed it.

  “Sanbeiji,” he said. He tried to hide it, but I could tell he was surprised. Sesame oil and soy sauce, mixed with the alcoholic smack of rice wine, together with the fragrance of slow-cooked chicken—not much coming out of a Chinese kitchen smells better than three cups chicken. The smell alone is enough to set mouths watering.

  “Where you learn cook Taiwan food?” he asked.

  “Nowhere,” I said. “That’s not Taiwanese. It’s the original version, the one that came from Ningdu, in Jiangxi.” He looked at me again. The expression on his face was a combination of surprise and confusion. I’d seen it before. A lot of Chinese are astonished that any non-Chinese can name a city in China other than Beijing. “The Taiwanese version is almost always made using Shiaoxing wine. I used straight mijiu. Gives the chicken a crispier texture.”

  “You know what the story is about where this dish came from?” his wife asked. She was at least two feet shorter than her husband, plump, with an oval face, her hair in a curly perm that the waitresses had told me she had done regularly at a Korean hair salon a couple of blocks away. A lot of Chinese women in the United States think Koreans have some special hair-care secrets. Korean hair stylists are for a lot of Chinese women what reliable bookies are to gamblers: carefully cultivated and kept happy, they are considered an invaluable asset.

  “You know that story?” she asked again.

  It would have been hard to say just how much I enjoyed being able to say that I did.

  “Story is,” I said, “that Wen Tianxiang, back in the Southern Song Dynasty, was in prison, getting ready to be executed. The jailer supposedly came up with this recipe because it didn’t need a lot of pots to make.”

  I handed them each a pair of chopsticks. They poked into the pot and lifted out pieces of the chicken. Tendrils of steam came off. The smell made me hungry. Mrs. Leong took a bite; then Mr. Leong did the same. Then they tasted the green peppers.

  “Kuo made this,” Leong’s wife said.

  “Kuo didn’t make it this well,” Mr. Leong said.

  “He didn’t steam the black beans in rice wine,” I said. “That’s the trick. Brings out all their flavor.”

  “He should be cooking for us,” Mrs. Leong said. She spoke English. She was from Fujian, which had its own dialect. She spoke Cantonese okay, I’d observed, but it was slow between her and her husband, and so when they really needed to communicate, they tended to switch into English.

  “He’s a gwai lo,” Mr. Leong answered. I was accustomed to this too. Sometimes Chinese would start talking about me, right in front of me, even though I was standing there speaking to them in Mandarin. I assumed they knew I understood—but that I didn’t really understand.

  “He’ll work cheap,” Mrs. Leong said. “He won’t know how much we’re paying the others.”

  “He knows exactly what you’re paying the others,” I said. “He speaks English, just like you’re doing now. See? Hear him speaking it to you?”

  They ignored me. “Nahh,” Mr. Leong said. “He can speak some Chinese. We don’t treat him like the others, one of the other places around here will swipe him.”

  “Again,” I said. “I’m right here.” It could be maddening if you let it get to you. I didn’t. After all these years, I tended to think it was just funny.

  “Hire him,” Mrs. Leong said.

  I started cooking at the Eastern Palace that night.

  14

  Rule #9: You’re unlikely to regret much of what you don’t say.

  “They said I’d find you out here,” the woman said. “You must be Tucker.”

  We were out in the alley behind the Eastern Palace. There was a lull between the lunch and dinner crowds. I was caught up on prep work and taking a break. I had been going through some slow stretches. I was finally getting re-accustomed to the long hours of standing doing kitchen work. The dishwashing had been a good way to break back into it. Now that I had been cooking there for a couple of weeks, at least I was moving around more, leaning over to grab ingredients, bending down to get something on the kitchen’s low shelves. I was still a little achy, my hamstrings tight. I had just straightened back up out of a squatting stretch to relax them when she came through the kitchen door.

  I must be, I considered saying. But I didn’t. It was a pretty good line, I thought. It didn’t seem like a pretty good idea, though. That’s because the woman—in a blue knee-length skirt, a crisp yellow blouse, and a dark blue jacket that matched the color of her skirt—was dressed either like an MBA graduate or a plainclothes cop. I couldn’t think of any reason an MBA grad would be hanging out at the rear of a Chinese restaurant kitchen and asking for me by name. I couldn’t think of any reason a cop might for that matter. I just assumed it was the more likely scenario. I went with it.

  “Yes, officer,” I said. “I am he.” I may not have graduated Beddingfield, but I did not leave Ms. Kresge’s third grade English grammar lessons without some benefit.

  Her eyes widened. Then she smiled. Her dark red hair was cut short, close to her face. She was short too. And athletic looking. She looked like she’d played field hockey in college, which looked, too, like it hadn’t been all that long ago. She was smiling. It was a good smile. Not the kind of smile that said “I’m just a friendly sort.” It was a smile that showed she didn’t take herself too seriously. But seriously enough. I’d seen that kind of smile before.

  “How did you kn
ow I was in law enforcement?” she asked.

  “I’ve been around a few law enforcement officers.”

  “That’s right,” she said. “Your father works for a national security organization.”

  I nodded. I didn’t say anything. It was a game. I recognized it right away. It was a game that cops and other people in law enforcement like to play. They like it because it’s a good way to establish their presence and to take the initiative and to put you on the defensive. They also like to play games. I knew that from being around my father and a lot of his friends. One reason they liked to play games, mental games, was that because from their perspective, dealing constantly with suspects and with people from whom you want to get information, it was also just a lot of fun. Trying to throw someone off balance mentally was something a lot of cops and law enforcement people enjoyed. It made the job more entertaining. She was already pitching ’em high and hard to me. I was supposed to be confused and wondering who she was, how she could know my name, how she knew my father’s occupation. I’d managed to connect with only one pitch, getting out ahead of her by letting her know I knew she was a cop. It wasn’t much. But it did make me feel good. It made me feel even better to say, “Do you have some mutual friends in the agency?”

  I didn’t say which “agency.” I figured she knew. I was going to make her volunteer that she did, though. I could tell she liked that.

  “I’m more in the domestic end of things.” She pulled a thin, black leather wallet out of her purse. She flipped it open. I knew she’d done it before. More than a few times.