by Dave Lowry
Parker Huang, who was manning the first wok station at the Din Ho Restaurant, was going with a soup called Buddha Jumps Over the Wall. I was surprised. It was probably the most famous dish from Fujian Province—and certainly one of the most complicated meals of any style of Chinese cuisine. Even a basic recipe called for more than two dozen ingredients. Dried scallops. Boiled pigeon eggs. The leg tendons of pork, duck stomach, chicken, bamboo shoots. It was extravagant. The rest of us would be plinking out “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” while Parker was performing all four of Vivaldi’s Seasons. The dish was supposed to be so delicious that the aroma alone would have the Buddha leaving his meditation cushion and hopping over the monastery walls for a taste. Popping the lid off a pot of that soup was going to be impressive. I wondered, though, how many of the judges would really be able to appreciate a gourmet delicacy like that.
Langston and I had both been right about Hung I-mien, the head chef at the Red Dragon. He was going with soy sauce chicken. Chicken, I thought. It was too safe. Jiang su ji was one of those dishes, from Canton, that Chinese and Westerners both liked. It wasn’t exotic. A whole chicken braised in soy sauce, with anise, rock sugar, and some other stuff, then hacked into pieces and arranged on a platter. It was sold in a dozen good Chinese restaurants all over town. Even some of the cheaper take-out joints had it on their menus. Jiang su ji was good, even in the cheap joints. And it would please the judges, a taste of familiarity. It lacked the flair, the exoticism, though, that I was guessing the judges would want in a winning entry. If Parker was going overboard with his Buddha Jumps Over the Wall soup, Hung was being too conservative with soy sauce chicken.
And Langston?
“He is making steamed shredded three meats,” Mr. Leong said. He looked at me.
I cocked my head and pursed my lips. Which I tend to do when I don’t want anyone to know what I’m thinking. As with my initial meeting with Ms. Masterson, I lack the ability to conceal my thoughts with a blank face. Sometimes, like with her, I go for looking up and raising my eyebrows. Or I do the head cock and pursed lips instead, which is another one of my ways of trying to be a blank slate. To add to the effect now, I crossed my arms and sat back in my chair.
Langston’s the one to beat, I thought. His choice was a good one. An excellent one. It was a Shanghai-style classic. Three meats: lean pork, ham, and chicken were all steamed, along with slivers of bamboo shoots, then sliced finely into long, skinny needles. The shreds went into a bowl, laid along the side vertically, alternated with the shredded bamboo shoots until they filled the bowl. Put a plate on top the bowl, flip it over, and pull it off and you have a perfect mound of the meats sitting beautifully on the platter in three colors, drizzled with a light chicken stock–based sauce. It was a very “Chinese” Chinese dish, with lots of eye appeal. It was also just right for putting in the middle of the table for diners to sit around, picking it apart slowly with their chopsticks, nibbling and talking, and talking and nibbling, for a couple of hours, sipping tea all the while. The problems of the world could be solved over a mound of three steamed meats and bamboo. It was too subtle and at the same time too plain—steamed meat wasn’t really all that exotic—for a lot of non-Chinese diners. Chances were good, though, that the judges would eat it up—literally.
“You worry?” Mr. Leong asked me.
“No worry,” I said. I unfolded my arms and stood up.
It was a little past eleven when we finished cleaning the kitchen that evening. A party of twelve had come in at nine. I was fairly sure they were college students. From their ages, I was guessing grad school. About half of them were Westerners; the others were Chinese. I peeked out through the swinging door when Corinne delivered their order. I knew the Chinese students had done the ordering. Boiled dumplings. A soup of ham and winter melon. Orange peel chicken. Dry sautéed green beans. Crispy garlic shrimp.
“They specified boiled, not steamed dumplings?” I asked Corinne when she came into the kitchen to deliver the order.
“Shui jiao,” Corinne repeated. “Don’t you speak English?”
Tuan, who’d just finished up a load of dishes and was leaning with his back against the rim of the sink, snorted. He was picking up enough of the language to start to get some jokes.
The boiled dumplings were consistent with the rest of the order; it was a pretty typical Szechuan dinner menu. I assumed the Chinese in the group were showing their Western colleagues some of the basics of Szechuan cuisine. The three of us went to work; it didn’t take long. By the time the grad students filed out of the Eastern Palace, telling a beaming Mr. Leong who was standing at the front counter that they were delighted to be having “real” Chinese cooking for a change, the dining room was completely empty. We relaxed in the kitchen.
Li took a generous helping of dumplings from the freezer and tossed them into a heated wok, where they instantly began to crackle and hiss. At the Eastern Palace, we all preferred dumplings fried on the side of the wok—“pot stickers”—to the steamed or boiled versions. Well, actually Thuy and Tuan, our dishwashers, liked them better steamed. But dishwashers were too low in restaurant hierarchy to have a full vote on stuff like that. So they were learning to eat them the way the rest of us liked.
Eleven o’clock is late for most people to eat. And usually none of us who worked in the kitchen or in the dining room wanted a big meal at that time of night. We weren’t really hungry. We’d been nibbling, sampling, all night long. We needed more to decompress from the dinner shift than to sit down to a full meal. For some restaurant crews, that means a trip to a local bar. We had a ceramic jug of fiery Chinese liquor we broke out occasionally. Mostly, though, we just wanted to sit around for an hour or so, snacking, drinking tea, talking. The first restaurants in China were probably doing business back in the Song Dynasty, starting in the tenth century, catering to travelers. They specialized in the same sort of light snacks and tea. A thousand years before, cooks at those Chinese restaurants sat down after their places closed, eating and drinking more or less exactly what we were eating and drinking.
Corinne came in after the last customers had finally ambled out; we’d just sat down. Langston banged twice on the door, then paused, then banged again once. It was the system all the restaurants used, the code that let you know there was a cook from another restaurant, or a waiter or waitress, who was coming by to sit around and talk and eat.
Thuy got up to let him in. Langston nodded at him, walked over to a rack of dishes, and picked up a small plate. Then he pulled a chair up to the table.
“You see the list?” he asked. He sat down. I passed him the little jar of hot chili pepper oil.
“I did.”
“Five willow fish,” he said.
“Steamed three meats,” I said.
“Both classic dishes,” Langston said. He spooned just a couple of drops of the orange-red oil onto the plate, then used a pair of chopsticks to swirl the dumpling around in it.
“By a couple of classic guys.”
“You think anyone’s in the running but us?” Langston asked.
“I was ruminating on just that,” I said. “Parker’s soup is a good choice if the weather’s cold. But I think it’ll be a little warm this time of year for it to have the full effect.”
Corinne found her own spot at the table and helped herself to the platter of dumplings. She picked up the ceramic teapot and poured a cup for Langston, peered over into mine and saw it was still full, then poured for herself.
“Hung’s soy sauce chicken?” Langston said, after he’d swallowed a bite of the dumpling.
We both shook our heads at that one. “And mapo tofu?” I said.
“A sentimental favorite,” Langston said. “But the judges are going to want to go with something that’s a little more exotic.”
“Chinese-y,” I said, “but not too far-out.”
“Yep,” Langston said. “You know them. They’re thinking of what kind of publicity they can get out of this. They’ll hope for
a write-up in the paper. It’s great publicity for all the Chinese restaurants.”
“But it would sort of defeat the purpose if the winning dish is something like hot and sour cat,” Corinne said. “It’s got to be Chinese. Just not too Chinese.”
“Right,” I said. “That would not bring in lots of business.”
The homey sounds of eating temporarily suspended conversation: slurping tea, sucking air to cool off the hot dumplings, the clack of chopsticks.
“You know, I’ve heard that all my life,” Langston said, after he swallowed a dumpling. He reached for another. “But do you think there’s some place in China where they really do eat cat?”
Corinne shook her head. “Maybe the Cantonese. You know the saying about Cantonese. If its back is to the sun, eat it.”
“Never heard of any Cantonese dishes that have cat in them,” Langston said. “I don’t think anybody, unless he was starving, would eat cat. Especially not a Chinese.”
I turned to Thuy. “Vietnamese do, though, right, Thuy?”
“Shut up, fan tong,” Thuy said. It was the first time I’d heard him speak Chinese. He called me a rice bucket. It meant I wasn’t good for much. As Mandarin insults go, it was mild. He’d heard one of us say it in the kitchen, I was guessing, and added it to his repertoire. Now he was trying it out for the first time.
“You’re starting to fit in just fine around here,” Langston said.
“Eat shit,” Thuy said to him, reaching for a dumpling.
29
Rule #23: Never be predictable.
I lost.
By three seconds. It had been the mile run we made in sixth grade PE. And I lost, to a guy named Ry Grant, running back for the North Andover Middle School Eagles. Which ruined, with those three seconds, the plan I had to impress Addie McDaniel with my speed, so much so that she would want to go out with me over the upcoming summer. And two days later, Doug Armand told Langston and me he’d seen Ry and Addie eating pizza together in Papa Gino’s at Shawsheen Plaza.
“Pepperoni or just cheese?” Langston had asked.
Pepperoni or cheese? I had a ball in my throat that tasted like I’d been trying to swallow clay. A summer I’d already had planned with Addie was dissolving right there as I walked along Lowell Street. I didn’t feel like crying—and I’d have rather had my arm cut off than have cried in front of Langston and Doug—but I felt that maybe life was going to be a little tougher than I had ever considered it. In the face of that kind of realization, crying wasn’t going to help. By the sixth grade, I already knew that. The thought of Ry and Addie sharing slices didn’t make the realization any easier. I was, though, completely confident in one thing: I wasn’t about to show I was bothered by it.
“Pepperoni or cheese?” I said, as nonchalantly as I could. “What difference does that make?”
“I’m hungry,” Langston said. “Helps me visualize the scene better.”
I’d never said a word to Langston about my crush on Addie McDaniel. And a lot of times Langston seemed like he wasn’t really dialed in to much that was going on around him anyway. So I figured it was my secret, and I intended to keep it. At other times, though, it was hard to tell just how much Langston knew. Because a while later, after Doug had peeled away from us to head for his house, right out of nowhere, Langston said, “Hard to figure what some people see in other people.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
He shrugged. “You know, Addie McDaniel, for instance. Hard to figure how she’d be interested in a guy like Ry Grant. Guy’s a jerk.”
Nine years later, it was me shrugging, standing over a wok sizzling with chunks of pork and little, dark green trees of Chinese broccoli. It was Monday, the first night of the competition.
“Take a break,” Mr. Leong said to me. “We no busy now. Go down to Din Ho watch.”
“Pass,” I said.
“Go,” Li said. “We’re covered here. Every table booked all night. So, busy but no surprises for us.”
I knew Li was being optimistic. Everyone in the kitchen had gone over the reservation book; we knew most of the names, had a good idea of what they’d be ordering. I knew, too, that Li was willing to take the risk of the “anthill” getting too busy, the Eastern Palace getting swamped with some unexpected orders, if it allowed me to go watch the competition. Which that night was at Din Ho, where Parker Huang was leading off in the batting order of the contest, preparing his Buddha Jumps Over the Wall soup.
“No thanks,” I told them both. I said the same thing the next night, when Jiangguo Wen made his mapo tofu. After that, they stopped asking.
The week went by slowly. Waitresses were talking about the contest, scoring it according to their own evaluations, most of which seemed about as reliable as Mr. Leong’s strategy. The other cooks mentioned it, those in our kitchen and those who dropped by after work. We didn’t talk as much about it, though. It was part of our image, as cooks, not to seem too eager or too invested in the contest. On Thursday I was up. I cleaned two big carp and carved deep slashes in their silvery flanks. I put each in a bamboo steamer, stacked the steamers, then balanced them over a wok bubbling with boiling water. I could smell the sweet, meaty aroma of the fish and the delicate woody scent of the bamboo as they began cooking. I shredded carrots, black mushrooms, and big, dark green leaves of pickled Chinese cabbage and fresh slices of bamboo shoots that had just appeared at the Chinese market where I bought the carp. I slivered a couple of thumb-size knobs of ginger. I’d had the stock going since about noon—made from chicken bones, slow simmered until it was glossy and thick. I added a blob of rendered chicken fat for richness. Once the stock was just hot enough to send some bubbles floating slowly to the surface, I added the carrots, mushrooms, pickled cabbage, bamboo shoots, and ginger. That’s the tough part, really. If the stock is too hot, bubbling, the individual vegetables get their flavors all mixed together as they cook. They need to be separate. They were.
I plated the carp, then added the five ingredients in neat clumps along the flanks of the fish. I thickened the stock, not with the cornstarch or arrowroot starch that most Chinese chefs use. Instead, I did it with water chestnut flour, which gives the thickened sauce just the right texture, not too gloppy, not too thin. I ladled the sauce just lightly over the fish. Ready to go.
I delivered the fish, their heads in opposite directions on the platter, like they were swimming around in a circle, and presented them to the six judges. I recognized most of the panel. Eric Tsang was president of the Chinese-American Association. He was big, with a wide, smooth, and florid face. Tsang was a major booster for the Chinese community, leaning on local businesses to sponsor lion dances at New Year’s and regular street fairs, and the Chinese Language School. Mrs. Zhao, sitting beside Mr. Tsang, was the director of the Language School. Her hair was done up in an elaborate swoop, with strands of gray showing. She had the very high, pronounced cheekbones that a lot of Chinese associate with the far Western regions of China. Dr. Luo was on her other side. He ran a medical clinic where all the older Chinese women in the area went because they were comfortable only with a Chinese doctor. The others I didn’t know by name. I recognized their faces; knew who they were. A couple of young hotshot lawyers and the wife of a guy who owned a Lexus dealership.
I stood by the table while they looked over my presentation, murmuring “ummmh” and “ahhh” and “hmmm.” Dr. Luo peered at me though thick glasses and said, “You steamed it instead of frying it.” It was an implied question.
“Yu-er-pu-ni,” I said. “The taste of fat without being oily. If I’d fried it, the flavor of the fish would have been lost. You couldn’t taste all the vegetables with it.”
“People like five willow fish fried nowadays,” Dr. Luo said.
I didn’t say anything. Which I thought was elegant.
Eric Tsang reached over and slowly spun the heavy glass lazy Susan so the fish platter stopped in from of Mrs. Zhao. As the Language School’s director, her status as an educ
ator made her the senior-most of the group. She had the first serving. She used her chopsticks to lift some of the meat from the flank of the carp, up near its head. Bad luck to eat a fish from the back to the front. The first bite should come from the head. In fact, the first bite should have come from the cheek of the carp. I was guessing Mrs. Zhao was being humble, not taking the choicest bite. The lazy Susan rotated; each of them took some of the fish, lifting it in their chopsticks, looking it over, then tasting it.
I stood and watched while they ate the fish. Mrs. Zhao looked up as she made delicate little chewing motions. Mr. Tsang looked down, I noticed, as he chewed. Nobody was making eye contact. Each seemed lost in his or her own thoughts, evaluating the fish. I could tell, for the lawyers, it was the first time they’d ever tasted five willow fish. They ate, tentatively at first, as if they wondered whether they’d like it. It was encouraging to see them go for second helpings, digging in with more enthusiasm.
“I must say it is amazing that you would know this dish,” Dr. Luo said, when the fish had been reduced to its skeleton and tail. “Where did you learn to make wuliu fish?”