by Leslie Li
Some she had already crimped shut, while the thin oval skins of others awaited our assistance, or interference, as the case turned out. The latter we sealed shut with egg yolk, then dropped into a pot of boiling water. Most of these jiaozi resurfaced shortly, in separate components — first a wad of soggy dough, then a mush of minced meat.
While Aiying disposed of the defective dumplings, Regina engaged us in a third kitchen game. This one employed another New Year specialty, one that augured long life, and required the winner of this contest to hold bean-thread noodles, or “silvery threads of longevity,” in her chopsticks longer than the other contestants before inserting them into her mouth. The object of the game, as we played it, was simply to grasp the slippery strands between our chopsticks at all. Despite the potential for mischief, or at least distraction, that four children let loose in a kitchen were capable of unleashing, and despite the creative culinary entertainments they created for us to offset that possibility, Aiying and Regina managed to produce a full-scale Chinese banquet for a dozen or so people. Much of it had been prepared in advance, not because the two cooks knew that we would be invading their kitchen, but because the use of knives and cleavers is forbidden on Chinese New Year: no one wants to be accused of “cutting into” the family’s luck by wielding a sharp instrument.
When everything was ready, the cry “Chi fan!”— “Dinner is served!” — went out, whereupon we all took our seats around the dining room table. We heaped oohs and aahs upon each dish that the beaming, if exhausted, cooks set before us. “Happiness to everyone” wasn’t said but served in the form of shark’s fin soup. Then came “Happy Spring Festival,” also unspoken but more than implied in the shape of spring rolls. Next came a banquet favorite: a ruddy-brown lacquered Peking duck with the requisite pancakes, scallion brushes, and plum sauce. It preceded a concoction made with dried oysters, or baosi word that means “something good is bound to happen” — black mushrooms, bok choy, and fat choy a black hairlike seaweed whose auspicious name not only signifies wealth but also provides half of the Chinese New Year greeting. Taken together, the ingredients comprise a dish appropriately called gung hay fat choy.
Midway through the meal came the pièce de résistance. Always it was a fish, or yu, homonym for “abundance,” and always it was served whole, with head and tail attached, to assure a favorable start and finish. Usually it was a sea bass, steamed, scorched with piping-hot peanut oil, sprinkled liberally with slivers of fresh ginger and green onion strips, and bathed in soy sauce. The fish was followed by the bean-thread noodles — those that had not slipped through our chopsticks onto the floor or made it into our mouths — as elusive at the table as they had been in the kitchen and a clear indication that dinner was winding down. Nearly as slippery, and further proof that the meal’s end was near, was the subsequent dish: tangyuan, a viscous, sweet soup whose glutinous rice-flour balls symbolize both the year’s first full moon and family unity By then we were full to bursting, but we always made room for the finale — long-life buns — sweetened steamed bread, tinted pink and shaped to resemble peaches, which connote longevity.
The food marathon of many dishes and (it seemed) as many hours was over. All that time, hardly a word was spoken. The grown-ups had been nearly as mute as we, reduced to an almost reverential silence that was broken only by an appreciative gustatory comment. We children regained the full use of our tongues and revived our scant knowledge of the Chinese language the moment we saw Grampa draw out of his sweater vest pocket four hong bao, one for each of us. “Gung bay fat choy!” we sang in chorus, as we ripped into the red envelopes. Silence, we discovered, had its compensation after all.
In 1965 Grampa returned to China at the invitation of Mao Zedong, but our Chinese New Year celebrations in New York did not end with his departure. Nai-nai took his place as keeper of the Spring Festival culinary flame. Keep it and fan it she did, in a way that was more elemental and less extravagant than when Grampa and his cooks had possession of it. The apparent simplicity of Nai-nai’s life and of the meals she cooked was nevertheless deceptive. Such artful husbandry was highly labor-intensive. It was humbling to witness this tiny but determined woman who in her seventies and eighties rose with the sun to tend to her vegetables and retired from her gardens just before sunset. No doubt she took pride and satisfaction in diurnal rhythms. And justification: such bounty should require unstinting effort. One reaped what one sowed.
The foundation of her vigilant simplicity was adaptability, no less at Spring Festival than at any other time of the year. Holiday delicacies, such as fat choy and shark’s fin, were all well and good if you liked that sort of thing. But for this homespun woman who valued ingenuity over indulgence and economy over opulence, there was another way to welcome the New Year. Like Aiying and Regina, she would prepare a feast of dishes befitting the important occasion as generous in number as they were auspicious in name. Only she would use everyday ingredients, many of which she grew in her own gardens, plucked in the wild, or selected from Chinatown’s most reputable shops.
As at Grampa’s house, soup initiated the New Year meal. If it wasn’t gow-gay, then it was wonton, or “swallowing a cloud,” soup. This killed two birds with one stone, so to speak, since the wontons substituted very nicely for the customary jiaozi. Also similar to Grampa, Nai-nai served up a whole sea bass, head and tail intact. She did deviate, however, from Grampa’s New Year feast — and official Chinese culinary canon — by offering boiled white rice, that common staple banished from Chinese banquet tables for being too ordinary. The simple reason for its inclusion, banal or no, at our banquet table is that we craved the great absorber, particularly to sop up the delectable juices in which her meat, poultry, and fish dishes floated. Another deviation from Grampa’s method, we ate our New Year’s dinner home-style, that is, all the dishes at the same time, rather than banquet-fashion, one dish after another. And instead of the usual whole chicken or duck for auspicious beginnings and ends, Nai-nai’s see yao gai chicken wings invited us to “soar one thousand miles.” Closer to earth, Nai-nai also slow-simmered pig’s knuckles, whose homonym means “treading the azure clouds of good fortune.” Perhaps Nai-nai made this unusual porcine choice for Spring Festival in deference to my mother, who not only loved eating feet — chicken, duck, pig — but who as a professional tap dancer in her youth had trod the more solid floorboards of the stage. As for dessert, gone were the long-life buns, replaced by a better bet for longevity than the sugar-flour-food-coloring confection: golden-hued fruits au naturel. “Prevents colds,” Nai-nai declared. “Better for the teeth.”
Though the dishes placed before us at Nai-nai’s table differed in both style and content from Grampa’s, the atmosphere of pleasure, bounty, and accord prevailed at both, as well as an almost unbroken silence. I didn’t then, but now I understand this camaraderie without conversation, this communion without comment: At a Chinese table, it’s the unspoken words that count. The meal is the message.
Grampa’s and Nai-nai’s Chinese New Year banquets are a thing of the past. Today I celebrate the holiday in Chinese restaurants with family and friends, or with a few simple Chinese dishes that I cook at home. Still, despite the many years since I sat down to chi fan with them, the message of my grandparents’ meals remains audible, and all the louder for Nai-nai’s and Grampa’s absence: May you enjoy good fortune and prosperity say the New Year fruits and seeds and flowers. Happiness for all declares the shark’s fin. Abundance intones the sea bass. Family unity says the slippery-ball soup. Long life murmurs the peach. To say more would be superfluous.
Whole Steamed Sea Bass
15 slices fresh ginger
2-pound sea bass, cleaned and scaled, with head and tail
5 spring onions or scallions
¼ cup peanut oil
1/3 cup chicken stock (See Note.)
¼ cup light soy sauce
¼ teaspoon ground black pepper
a few sprigs of cilantro
Peel ginge
r and cut into slices the thickness of a quarter. Put 5 slices inside the fish cavity. Finely shred the rest. Place two of the spring onions on a large plate. Lay the fish on top of them. Shred the remainder of the spring onions.
Set the plate on the steamer rack of a wok fall of rapidly boiling water. Steam for 18-20 minutes. Remove plate from wok. Garnish fish with shredded spring onion and shredded ginger.
Heat the peanut oil to sizzling and pour over fish. Mix chicken stock, light soy sauce, and black pepper in a bowl. Heat in wok, then pour over fish. Garnish with cilantro. Serve immediately
Makes 4-6 servings.
Note: To make basic chicken stock, put 1 chicken, 3 stalks green onion or scallion, 1 tablespoon salt, and 2-3 quarts water into a pot so that the water just covers the chicken. Bring all ingredients to a boil. Turn down heat and simmer
2 hours, skimming off fat and scum. Remove chicken. Adjust seasonings to taste.
Pig’s Feet with Ginger and Sweet Rice Vinegar
3 pounds pig’s feet (pork knuckles)
2 pounds fresh ginger
Seasoning:
6 cups sweet rice vinegar
2 cups Chinese brown vinegar (or 1½ cups white vinegar)
¼ cup sugar
3 cubes chicken bouillon
Drop pig’s feet into pot of boiling water for 2 minutes. Remove and scrape off any remaining hair. Cut into 2-inch pieces. Place in empty pot, cover with cold water, and bring to boil. Simmer for 35 minutes. Drain and rinse with cold water.
Peel ginger and cut into 2-inch pieces. Pour vinegars into pot and bring to boil. Add sugar and chicken bouillon. Mix well. Add ginger and simmer 25 minutes. Add pig’s feet. Bring back to boil. Reduce heat and simmer until pig’s feet are completely tender. Remove from heat. Let stand 3 hours before reheating to serve.
Makes 6 servings.
THREE SHORT FISH TALES
(AND ONE SHRIMP COCKTAIL)
Fish, whether freshwater or salt-, occupies an exalted place at the banquet table and the uppermost reaches of China’s protein pantheon. Perhaps that’s because that quintessential Chinese icon, the dragon, is covered in fish scales. Or because the spoken word for fish, yu, is the homonym (same sound, different ideogram) for “good fortune.” Surely because its flesh, whether sweet or briny, is succulent and delicate, a unique gastronomic experience.
Fish tales, on the other hand, occupy the dunce’s corner in Li family lore. Our pelagic stories fly in the face of what is probably the most famous Chinese fish folktale — not surprisingly, a study in Chinese filial piety.
Once upon a time, there lived a widow and her little son. The widow loved her son very much and gave him the best ears of corn to eat and the softest grains of polished rice. And the son in turn loved his mother very much, as good sons will. One year, a plague of locusts stretched across the land, eating everything in sight: every kernel of corn, every grain of rice. Famine bent people’s heads in unrelieved sorrow, and many of them went hungry. To make matters even worse, it was a particularly cold and cruel winter that year, and the widow lay wrapped in her blanket on her bed of straw, for she was very sick from lack of food. Her son knew that no food was to be had anywhere, for the locusts had eaten the fields and the paddies clean, and the land lay under a thick layer of snow.
“If I might just have one fish to eat, I know I would get well,” the woman told him. She was so weak she couldn’t lift her head from her pillow But when he went to the river to cast his net, his heart sank: the river was frozen solid. He was near despair when an idea came to him. He walked to the middle of the river and lay down, vowing to lie there until the heat of his body melted the thick ice. He lay there all winter long, then through the first days of spring. He felt neither cold nor hunger, so great was his resolve, so deep was his love for his mother.
Then one day, he felt the current flowing beneath him. He plunged his arm into the water. When he raised it, he held a great squirming fish. He ran home with his catch and cooked it for his mother, whose strength returned as quickly as she ate it. And so it was that the filial son saved the life of his starving mother.
My mother has her own fish, or rather shrimp, story to tell, which in its own way proves her to be as dutiful as the aforementioned Chinese son. Her father-in-law, a candidate for the vice presidency at the time, arranged a banquet in honor of his daughter-in-law, who had just arrived in China and whom he was meeting for the first time. The banquet would be a formal affair, with many guests and a strong potential for mishap, particularly since it was not a secret that my grandfather had opposed the marriage, my mother being neither Chinese in culture nor (completely) Han by blood. Worse, she had made her living on the stage. She had been an entertainer, a le hu. The dinner party, her first public appearance in Chinese society, where first impressions also tend to be the last, had two goals: to welcome my mother to, and to test her suitability for, her new home.
The banquet was opulent and lengthy. One course followed another in almost interminable succession. One of the dishes served was salt-and-pepper shrimp, still in their shells, for succulence and best taste. Chopsticks poised, my mother watched as the other dinner guests suavely placed whole shrimp in their mouths and, with a minimum of maxillary activity and solely with their teeth, removed transparent exoskeletons, spanking clean and miraculously whole, which they daintily spat out onto small plates, there specifically for that purpose. Since she was new to China, a novice to the difficult language as well as to the dexterous feat of shelling shrimp with her teeth, she ate, as discreetly as she could, all the shrimp she was plied with, shells and all.
If my mother’s “shrimp cocktail” demonstrated her adherence to local propriety, her conscientious yielding to foreign ways, it was her “fish diplomacy” at the same event that won my grandfather over in the end, and through a brilliant stratagem my mother had unwittingly employed. To welcome her daughter-in-law to her new home, Nai-nai had given my mother a heavy chain — sautoir-length — of Chinese gold, so soft it was malleable, a quality upon which this fish tale hangs. Attached to the chain at regular intervals were short lengths of finer links at whose ends dangled different Chinese coins, also of 23-carat gold. To set off the necklace, my mother had had a dress made, a silk chipao in a subdued color. On the day of the dinner party, she tried on both dress and parnre in front of the mirror only to realize that they were suitable for an evening out but not quite grand enough for a banquet at which she was the guest of honor. What to do?
Dejie, my grandfather’s second wife, had also given my mother a welcoming present, and on that very day: a gold-fish — bulbous-eyed and luxuriantly finned — carved from copper-colored jadeite and big as a child’s fist With a few bends and twists of a few links in the chain, my mother attached the jadeite fish to the gold sautoir.
When my mother appeared at the banquet wearing the combined gifts from both his wives, my grandfather beamed with undisguised pride, pleasure, and, possibly, relief. Any reservations he might have had regarding my American mother’s ability to grasp the subtleties of Chinese manners and mores were dispelled by this eloquent tribute she unknowingly gave to both women and, by association, to the man who had married them. What might have been a recipe for domestic disaster (Dejie’s vindictiveness was legendary when she felt slighted) turned out to be a diplomatic coup. Seated between my mother and his second wife (my grandmother was not present due to Dejie’s maneuvering), my grandfather took his daughter-in-law’s hand and patted it paternally. “Hen piaoliang. Hen congming.” “How beautiful you are. And how intelligent.” From then on, he never questioned my mother’s Chineseness nor her appropriateness as a daughter-in-law. And all because, on the night of a big dinner party, my mother’s aesthetic sense told her to hang a jade fish on a gold chain.
Unlike my mother, I did not acquit myself so graciously in my own fish test, though there were certain similarities. My gastronomic gaffe also occurred at a banquet, one not in my honor nor in Shanghai, but for a Czech painter and his pia
nist wife in Paris. I blame this example of food shame on my personal social ineptitude and agoraphobia, though to be fair, having been raised in an insular Chinese household, I was ill-prepared for dining out in the Western world.
Mealtimes at our house meant eating. Speaking was almost always out of turn, both before food went into one’s mouth and after one had swallowed it. Silence was broken now and then by my father and Nai-nai, who spoke in Chinese, a language unintelligible to the rest of us. Silence for us children at mealtimes was therefore not only the cultural norm, it was reinforced by our linguistic ignorance. What a rude awakening it was then when, invited to a grammar school friend’s house for dinner for the first time, I discovered that I was expected not only to say something but to engage in a lengthy conversation. More like the Spanish Inquisition! My friend’s parents must have thought I barely spoke English or, worse, pitied me for being slow.
And the surprise, the disorientation, the terror I felt when, as a high school student, I was called upon to pass bowls or platters of food around the dinner table of a classmate — a bit like buckets in a fire brigade, only in this case it was to put out the fires of hunger in our stomachs. Which could only smolder, given the inefficiency of such a method. Compare it to reaching out with one’s chopsticks and plucking the desired, pre-cut portion from the various dishes set in the middle of the dining table, accessible to everyone. Oh, the interminable waiting demanded of you while your neighbor spooned onto his plate the desired portion from the heavy, slippery bowl you held for him, since there was no place on the table to set it down, given the profusion of cutlery, china, and glassware. With the disconcerting array of bowls to pass around, and the varying time each person took to transfer his portion from bowl to plate, there was always a bottleneck or two somewhere along this human food chain. This meant cramps in one’s arms from holding aloft tottering platters while the viands they bore turned a shade paler or congealed before one’s very eyes. After these pre-consumption prerequisites called proper table manners were dispensed with, you would think it was finally time to eat what had taken so long to find its way onto your plate. Surprise: that slab of roast beef you had swung off the meat platter required cutting before it could enter your mouth. This feat required not only dexterity of both hands, but the frequent shuffling of knife and fork back and forth between them. If right-handed, you cut your meat with that hand while, with your left, you plunged the tines of your fork into it to hold the chunk of meat steady. Once you had a bite-sized piece on the end of your fork, you then had to transfer that implement into your right hand, which raised the morsel to your mouth, which then removed, chewed, and swallowed it. Caveat: before you could switch your fork from your left to your right hand, you first had to set down the knife already in your right hand, laterally, on the right edge of your plate. For another forkful of meat, or any food that needed dismembering, you then transferred the fork from your right hand to your left, picked up the knife lying on the edge of your plate with your right hand, and repeated the sequence of events described above. After a few such repetitions, your veal cutlet, lamb shank, or chicken breast was stone cold. And if it wasn’t, it would soon be, for inevitably one of the invited guests would pipe up, sweetly, “Excuse me, but would you mind passing the butter?” Or the salt. Or the dish of mashed parsnips. Multiply this request for extra condiments or second helpings by the number of guests seated around the table, and you will have some idea of how I experienced my first American dinner party.