Chinese Cooking for Diamond Thieves

by Dave Lowry

  Ms. Masterson nodded slowly. “So let’s assume, the three of us, that the Flying Ghosts or some other gang has some interest in what happened at Wing Sung.”

  “A financial investment?” I said. “Maybe Mr. Sung was on the hook for gambling debts, or they were leaning on him to pay them protection; something like that.”

  “Something like that,” Ms. Masterson said. “I just stopped by to let you know we’d identified Chu.”

  “Will there be a big memorial service?” I asked.

  “I doubt it,” Ms. Masterson said. “Chu did not seem to be an imposing figure. The information we got on him from the cops in Montreal is that he was a small-timer. Pretty low in the organization.”

  “A wu ming shao zu,” Corinne said. “A little soldier with no name.”

  “Chinese gangs have lots of those kinds of people in them?” Ms. Masterson asked.

  “Sure,” Corinne said. “That’s who does all the work. Lots of times they’re in the country illegally. They’re usually not very well educated. They might not even speak English. They get used by the gang. They’re dispensable.”

  “Rough life,” Ms. Masterson said. “Same way back in the old days for Italian immigrants, Irish.”

  Corinne shrugged, then nodded. “It’s not like the choices for them are joining a gang or going to med school. It’s a chance to make money, to feel like you’re important, like you’re part of a group. That’s pretty attractive compared to the other stuff they could end up doing.”

  “Like working in a Chinese restaurant, for example,” I said.

  “Good point,” Corinne said. “But at least we’re not found beaten to death.”

  So far, I was tempted to say.

  “What were you doing in Seattle earlier this month?” Ms. Masterson asked, suddenly. It was a police technique. Quickly change the topic when you’re questioning someone, and it’s more likely something will slip out. Assuming Corinne was hiding something that might slip.

  “Qingming,” Corinne said.

  “Oh,” I said. That was at least one question answered.

  “Oh?” Ms. Masterson said.

  “I wondered,” I said. “Makes sense.”

  “Not to me.”

  “Qingming is a Chinese festival,” I said. “It’s when you go to your ancestors’ graves and clean them up, sweep up leaves or whatever, and leave offerings.”

  “I went to my parents’ graves,” Corinne said.

  “Like Memorial Day?” Ms. Masterson asked.

  I nodded. “Only not many people on Memorial Day decorate their ancestors’ graves with bottles of liquor, roast chicken, rice dumplings, stuff like that.”

  “Chinese ancestors like to eat well,” Corinne said.

  “Speaking of eating well,” Ms. Masterson said, “am I ready for the second lesson?”

  “We’ve just been talking about a dead guy, a dead guy we both went to look at, and you’re thinking about food?”

  “Life goes on,” Ms. Masterson said.

  “Are you sure you’re not Chinese?” Corinne asked.

  27

  Rule #44: When it’s interesting, you may as well stick around to see how it comes out.

  These carp, unlike the ones Corinne and I had seen a few days earlier at the fish market, were still alive. Like the catfish back at the riverside lunch place where we’d eaten, they were swirling lazily in the tanks of the market, looking me over with their big, expressionless eyes, moving on after considering me as a possible food source. I wasn’t. But they were. The day wasn’t going to end well for one of us.

  I’d parked the Toyota behind the Eastern Palace and walked down to Seafood City, a few blocks away. It wasn’t even nine o’clock in the morning yet, but the place was already busy. Cooks, amateur and professional, in lots of cultures make a big deal of going shopping first thing in the morning. Chinese, in particular, seem to think that food tastes best if it’s purchased not long after the sun comes up. Or maybe they think that’s when all the good buys are. I’ve never known why. Now, though—while the chill of the night still hadn’t lifted outside, making me zip up my jacket on my walk there—the place was filled. I liked to listen to the bickering and arguing between the guys behind the counter and the customers, mostly older women, on the other side. I could pick out several dialects of Chinese as some of the women chattered among themselves. Other customers added Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian. Behind the counter, it was all Spanish. The two sides came together in broken English marked by accusations and protestations and lots of intercultural exclamation points.

  “You charging that much for those shrimp? How old those shrimp!”

  “Those shrimp fresh!”

  “Fresh, yahh! Mebbe they fresh las’ week!”

  “Why you bussing me ovah dis? You tink I own dis place? You tink I getting rich here?”

  It went on and on. It was good-natured. Neither side expected the price to change. It seemed like it was enjoyable for all of them to bicker. It was kind of like the UN.

  I waited my turn, pointed to the fish I wanted, then waited again while a fishmonger hauled it out of the tank in a dip net. He tossed it, thrashing in the air, to another, who heaved the fish onto a wide flat stainless steel table beside a sink. The carp still thrashing, the fishmonger whacked it hard, then hard again on its head with a short, nasty-looking club.

  “You want cleaned?”

  I didn’t. I took the fish after he’d bagged it and paid at the counter, then walked back toward the Eastern Palace. The sun was up enough now to cast long shadows. Mine stretched out in front of me, holding a plastic sack of fish.

  Five willow fish is one of those Chinese dishes—there are literally dozens and dozens of them in China’s culinary lore—that has at least a couple of stories behind its creation. Like most dishes with those kinds of stories about how they were created or developed, few of the tales are really all that credible. But they are interesting. The best one concerning five willow fish explains how a hermit living in a lakeside hut created the recipe’s particular method of cooking fish. The story might be legend, but the hermit, Tao Yuanming, was real. He was a middle management office worker during the Eastern Jin Dynasty, in the fifth century. When he got tired of the bureaucracy, he chucked it all to go off and live in a hut on the shore of a lake. He became one of those semi-crazy eccentrics who lived in isolation, writing poetry and thinking deep thoughts.

  I explained all this to Ms. Masterson, who had been waiting for me at the rear door of the Eastern Palace that morning when I got back with my carp. She was there for her next lesson, the one I’d promised after our conversation with Corinne about Chinese gangs the day before.

  “Was that a popular job in China back then?” she asked. “Being a hermit?”

  “China back then was lousy with ’em,” I said. “The Chinese have a thing for the eccentric, the iconoclast, the person who goes off and lives by himself, lives a life of contemplation and doing artistic stuff.”

  “Kind of like guys who take off from their home and their college and go out to master Chinese cooking?”

  “Kind of,” I said. “But I don’t drink enough wine to qualify as a real Chinese eccentric.”

  I had the carp stretched out on a cutting board in front of me.

  “You want to learn to cook Chinese food,” I told her, “you need to be able to dismember animals. A carp’s a good place to start.”

  “So how come the knife’s in your hand?”

  “Because it’s a cleaver, not a knife. And because I’m going to show you a way of cleaning a fish that takes a lot of practice. You might want to watch it first.”

  “A gracious way of saying I’d be in over my head,” she said.

  “I’m the soul of graciousness.”

  I used the Jiangsu method of cleaning a fish, taking out the entrails through the gill slits so the fish remains whole. It’s harder than it looks. It makes for a nice presentation of the fish when you’re done, if you do a good j
ob. Using my cleaver, I sliced slash marks across its flank. Then I flipped it and did the same on the other side. I cut deep enough to go well into the flesh. My cuts opened wide pink gashes in the meat. I put the fish in a bamboo steamer and covered it, then put the steamer on a wok that was already boiling water.

  “That’s it for now,” I said.

  “You pinched the fish,” Ms. Masterson said. “Then you held your two fingers against your other middle finger. Is that some kind of ancient Chinese cooking ritual?”

  “You’re observant,” I said. “You’d make a good cop. Actually, it’s an old trick to measure the cooking time of a whole fish. You hold the fish at the thickest part of its body between your thumb and forefinger. Then you measure that space on your other middle finger. For every joint of that finger between your thumb and forefinger, you can assume you’ll need to steam the fish about fifteen minutes.”

  “How did you learn that?”

  “Results of a youth wasted in the kitchen of many a Chinese restaurant,” I said. I started putting together the ingredients I was going to use in today’s lesson with her.

  “Are you worried?” Ms. Masterson asked me.

  “Not really. There’s no way a laowai is going to be named the best Chinese chef in town.”

  “I’m not talking about the contest,” she said. “I mean are you worried that someone—some people who seem organized, probably some people who are involved in the kind of gang activity that often features a lot of violence—have made two runs at you? Are you worried about the fact that they are obviously after something and they are just as obviously not going to stop until they get it?”

  “About that?” I said. “Oh yeah. Worried like you can’t believe. Didn’t you have to study psychology as part of your training?”

  She tilted her head in acknowledgment.

  “Then can’t you recognize anxiety in my behavior?” First Corinne, now Ms. Masterson. I was getting kind of tired of having to explain my fragile psyche.

  “You don’t show a lot.”

  “Part of my charm.”

  “You have a nice job here, I understand,” she said slowly. “But you’re not really tied down here.” She raised her eyebrows.

  “What am I going to do? Run? Where?”

  When she didn’t say anything, I took the other carp from the bag and put it on the cutting board, handed her my cleaver, and began talking her through what I’d just showed her. She did a reasonably good job. When I began to assemble the ingredients we needed for the rest of the dish, she leaned against the counter.

  “You’re staying because of Corinne.”

  “Corinne has even less reason to stay here than I do,” I said. “At least I have a friend here.”

  “And she has you, who brought her here,” Ms. Masterson said.

  “More like she didn’t really have any other place to go,” I said.

  When they were done, we ate the fish. I was happy with it. Ms. Masterson ate but not with her usual gusto.

  “It’s excellent, really,” she said, when I asked her about it. “It’s just that steamed carp isn’t my usual breakfast.”

  “Most important meal of the day,” I said. “Didn’t your mother teach you that you should start off with something substantial?”

  “If my mother knew I was eating steamed carp for breakfast,” Ms. Masterson said, “she wouldn’t think my becoming an FBI agent was the weirdest thing I’ve ever done anymore.”

  When Ms. Masterson left, I cleaned up the dishes we’d dirtied, then started peeling and chopping broccoli. Chinese cooking—the real thing—doesn’t use Western broccoli. They even had to come up with a name to describe it when they first saw it. But it’s expected in lots of Chinese American dishes; we always had plenty on hand, and while the task really should have gone to one of the dishwashers who served as prep cooks, I liked doing it. It scored me points with the dishwashers, and it was so mindless it gave me time to think.

  I thought about what Ms. Masterson had said, about my hanging around just because of Corinne. That wasn’t exactly true. Not exactly. I had a good job. Friends. No place else in particular to go. Would I still be here, I asked myself, if Corinne wasn’t here too? And was it worth it?

  I scooped up the broccoli with my cleaver and tossed them into a stainless steel bowl. And it hit me. The same way leaving Beddingfield to come to St. Louis had hit me. All at once. Like it had been forming in my subconscious, and all of a sudden, standing there chopping broccoli in the kitchen that morning in the Eastern Palace, it all came out. Clear and obvious.

  Was Corinne playing me? The whole thing: the weird phone call I’d intercepted back at my parents’ house; the trip to Buffalo; Bobby Chu; the phone call from her to come pick her up; the trip back to Buffalo; the mugging—all of it. I wondered if that night lying on her bed and the conversation we’d had driving back after the afternoon in Illinois, if the whole thing wasn’t some trouble a very unusual woman was in—and was dragging me in as well. If maybe Corinne was one of Toby’s “trouble drains”—a supersize version of it. And whether she was or wasn’t, there was still the big question: How was all this supposed to end?

  I picked up another head of broccoli. There was no shortage of Chinese restaurants. There were a limited number of chefs who could cook like me to fill the kitchens of those restaurants. I could get a job anywhere. I sliced the stem from the broccoli and began peeling it. My cleaver was so sharp it separated the tough outer skin into paper-thin shreds. That crow I’d seen back in the sycamore outside the apartment: I never had seen him again. Maybe he’d left town. Maybe that was a sign.

  I finished the broccoli and rapped the side of my cleaver against the cutting board, the steel pinging a sharp rhythm. I was so lost in thought, I hadn’t noticed someone had come in to the kitchen behind me when I said aloud, to myself, “Nope.” And I let out a long exhalation. “Gotta remember Rule Number Forty-Four. When it’s interesting, you may as well stick around to see how it comes out.”

  “How what comes out?” Thuy asked me.

  “Good question.”

  28

  Rule #45: Never pass up the opportunity to have dumplings.

  The contest was simultaneously simple and elaborate. Typically Chinese. It would have been easy just to invite all the contestants to some place, have them all present their meals, and be done with it. That wouldn’t have had all the razzle-dazzle, though, that would bring a lot of publicity to the event. It wouldn’t have had the grand air of importance and formality that were essential for the restaurant owners to present their image to the public. Then, too, some of those owners could have argued that their chefs were working under unfair conditions if the contest was held away from the kitchens where they were accustomed to cooking. I knew the chefs; I’d eaten in their kitchens in the months I’d been in St. Louis. I didn’t think any of them would have a problem. I figured the real reason the owners wanted their chefs in their own kitchens for the judging had to do with the attention it was going to draw. And the business it would mean.

  Five restaurants had put their reputations on the line by nominating their chefs for the contest. Over the course of five nights, the five chefs were presenting their best, one each night. A panel of judges would go to each of the five restaurants in turn, bringing their appetites with them, and sit for a sampling of the dish. As soon as the story of the upcoming contest was published in the St. Louis Chinese News and then in the St. Louis Chinese-American Journal, reservation requests started coming in for every restaurant participating. The local St. Louis paper got wind of it and gave it a story too. Within a couple of days, all five restaurants, including the Eastern Palace, were booked solid. We were booked for every night that week, in fact, even on those nights when I wasn’t going to be presenting my dish. I’d never seen Mr. Leong so happy since he’d discovered a styling gel that kept his comb-over in place.

  The five owners got together at Wei Hong’s, a little café that sold Chinese pastries and tea an
d was kind of a gathering spot for restaurant workers. They each put their business cards into a box, and Mingyu Sun, the girl who worked at the counter, reached in and pulled them out, one by one. That’s how the contest schedule was decided. We’d get a visit from the judges, Mr. Leong told me after he came back from Wei Hong’s, on Thursday.

  “Not too bad,” he said. He had already developed a complex theory as to why this seeding was bound to work in our favor. “The judges have three nights before, only one after. They forget what the food tasted like on Monday and Tuesday,” he told me. “They remember Wednesday. Then they eat your dinner Thursday, it be most fresh when they thinking. They still thinking about it when they eat on Friday. Friday guy no gotta chance. They been eating this kind of good food all week. They sick of it.”

  It took Mr. Leong about five minutes to lay out his fascinating theory on why Thursday was so absolutely perfect for me that the contest was already more or less in the bag and I may as well consider it accomplished.

  “What are the other chefs preparing?” I asked. “Do we know yet?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Mr. Leong said, shuffling his hand into his pants pocket. “I write it.”

  We sat down and looked at his list. At China Gate, the head chef, Jiangguo Wen, was making mapo tofu. It was a good choice. A Szechuan classic. A braise of finely chopped pork, mixed with chili paste, little nubbins of black beans, and crumbles of soft, custardy tofu. Mapo tofu got its name, “pockmarked tofu,” supposedly because it was the invention of an old lady—po in Mandarin—who was disfigured, or “pockmarked” (mazi) by smallpox. I knew Wen’s version of the dish at China Gate. He made his own Szechuan chili sauce to go into it, instead of the prepared stuff from a jar. He had an advantage. Wen was from Chengdu, a city in Szechuan Province. He had relatives there who sent him a steady supply of Szechuan chilies. Chinese chefs make a distinction between huajiao, “flower peppers,” and shanjiao, or “mountain peppers.” Most of us had to settle for the former, which were more common. Wen, through his relatives, had access to some of the mountain peppers. These were a pure strain, much more fiery than what we could get, with a smoky, snappy flavor that upped the taste of the dish noticeably. In fact, we had a small jar of oil infused with Wen’s special peppers in the kitchen at the Eastern Palace, a gift from Wen. We’d ground the carmine dried peppers into powder, then added them to a couple of cups of hot peanut oil. We used just a few drops of the oil on pot stickers, to give them an unmistakable piquancy. There was no way I could make an infused oil taste the same. Not without those dried peppers. It made Wen’s mapo tofu unique. There were certain to be some judges who had a thing for Szechuan spiciness. Wen would have their votes.