Daughter of Heaven

by Leslie Li

  I attended my first French banquet soon after I graduated from college and went to live in Paris. Here I appreciated the Continental version of knife and forkery (no shuffling of cutlery between hands — a definite step up in eating efficiency) and took pride in using it in all my usual cheap eateries: the various self-services in my quartier, the more garrulous bistros, the cafés redolent of Gauloise and Gitane smoke. Mine was the life of a student at the Alliance Française sou-ing and centime-ing it. Eating out was a relative extravagance. Dining al fresco with a copain on a banquette near the Seine with an oblique view of Notre Dame was more in line with my finances and, often, my preferences. Dinner ingredients, fresh and inexpensive, came prêt à manger from the market stalls — street theater, in disguise — that flanked rue Mouffetard, rue de Seine, or Place Maubert-Mutualité: a slice of terrine du canard or pâté du porc, a wedge of Brie or Gruyère, a baguette pas trop cuite, a handful of grapes, a half bottle of a serviceable red Bordeaux, and thou, O Ville Lumière. What could be better?

  That last sentence was not a rhetorical question. It required an answer, which happened to be, in my book at least: a French banquet that pulled out all the stops. A French banquet held in a grand hôtel particulier in the sixteenth arrondissement where all the French women are terribly soignée and wear cocktail dresses, understated diamonds and pearls, and their hair in upswept chignons; where all the Gallic husbands are smartly but soberly attired to set off their wives, where both sexes dispense scintillating anecdotes as well as cultivated conversation. This was in great contrast to me, a Chinese-American version of Claudine à I’Ecole who spoke French like a vache espagnol. But I was too naive and too enchanted by my fellow guests, the iced champagne, the gilded foyer, the elaborate crystal chandelier, the baroque silver nameplates, and the single perfect red rose on my plate — and on the plate of every other woman present — to notice. I felt like a child let loose in a toy shop. Indeed, in locating my place at table — there were more than twenty of them — I likened the search to the children’s game of musical chairs. Once seated, I looked for my escort at table, peering around what seemed to be a small topiary garden, complete with Hellenic statuary When I peeked, he did too. Chouette! In addition to musical chairs, blindman’s bluff.

  The French, as everyone knows, take eating very seriously. As seriously as do the Chinese, but without manifesting their gusto. “In so many traits the Chinese resemble the French,” the English writer Osbert Sitwell noted. “They are original, self-indulgent, fond of food and good things and gossip, kindly and deeply attached to their families, interested in the arts and commerce.” He continues: “The Chinese are witty in their lives, the things they make, if not in conversation; which [like the French] resembles a game of cards. I pull out this card, a philosophical tag, and you pull out the opposite one.”

  At this French banquet, I wondered if there were aspects of the Chinese variety, where the meal is the message, where talk is superfluous, indeed impolite, unless it touched upon the meal itself. Faced with the regiment of platters and plates before me, the battalion of glasses and goblets, the armaments of knife, fork, and spoon, I had my answer: not very likely As if to underscore the fact, the first course was a soup — crème de champignons — ladled from a porcelain tureen by a young man in livery The tureen was set on a rolling cart pushed by another and identically dressed young man.

  Soup at a traditional Chinese banquet, unlike at Li family dinner parties, is served at the tail end; it is set in the middle of the table; and if it is melon-ball soup, which it often was in my family, it comes in its own tureen. I knew I shouldn’t be doing this — comparing and contrasting the French and the Chinese — but I couldn’t help myself. It seemed the farther from my heritage I journeyed, the stronger its influence on me. It was perhaps for the same reason that artist, writer, and solitary traveler Gontran de Poncins settled in Cholon, a riverbank community of Chinese outside Saigon, to study and record the lives of his expatriate subjects: he suspected that the ancient customs of a national culture are best preserved and endure longer in diaspora rather than in the motherland.

  A cheese souffle and its accoutrements came and went, entering and exiting in the white-gloved hands of the same two young men. Around the table there was polite talk in measured tones — not the American effulgent discourse that conceals a complete background check that haunted my adolescence. Much of the talk concerned food, as consumed at this meal. Silence reigned at comfortable intervals, in moderate amounts. No heavy bowls or platters to pass or hold for one’s neighbor. No requests for second helpings. My wineglasses and water goblet were refreshed before they were half empty by unobtrusive hands.

  The next time the door opened, it was to emit a young serveuse, in ruffled organdy cap and matching starched apron, bearing before her an immense domed silver platter. This was a deviation from established procedure. Her burden would have been more appropriately borne by the two young men. Here was my first clue that something if it was not yet amiss would be soon. My adrenaline level rose; my eyelids lowered. I prayed. The maid removed the silver dome, like a prestidigitator in a magic show, to the oohs and ahhs of the guests and the satisfied grin of our host. “Turbot à la meunière,” she announced, then began to circumambulate the table. This was like theater. No. It was theater: the fish was getting a round of applause. We were clapping. We were actually clapping. The women with their perfect maquillage, the men with their urbane repartee. I clapped too, hoping all the while that so secular a display of appreciation in no way weakened the efficacy of my fervent prayer: Please let her stop at someone else’s chair. Please let her pass me by.

  She stopped to the right of my chair. I was still looking down at my lap. She tilted the platter at an angle that, without being insistent, was a clear invitation to me to view its contents. I turned my head and looked. Despite my adrenaline level, which urged me to flee, I maintained enough presence of mind to remain in my chair, there to discern that what she was presenting to me was a whole fish, which if this were a Chinese banquet would have made its appearance toward the end of the meal But this, I reminded myself, was not a Chinese banquet, where the fish would have had eyes, white and jellied from poaching. This fish’s eyes had been removed, which, to my adrenaline-addled brain, was one step closer to the Chinese tradition of leaving them in, but was three steps further from the American practice of removing not only the eyes but also the head, tail, and spine. I tried to take succor in this, but couldn’t. I was too aware that the young woman holding that heavy silver platter of whole but eyeless fish was waiting for me to do ... what? Take the tray from her and set it in the middle of the banquet table for each of us to serve ourselves, the Chinese way? Take the platter from her and pass it around, American-style? Or take it from her so she could serve me, friendly American-style?

  I looked from the sightless fish into the maid’s seeing eyes, hoping for kindness, a sign, a clue. That she dropped the platter.

  “C’est joli,” I said, softly. I steeled myself and waited for the walls to come tumbling down.

  “Mademoiselle ne voudrait pas partager?” She looked down and nodded, just perceptibly, toward the platter, toward the serving fork and spoon. She looked into my eyes and smiled graciously “C’est très bon, je vous assure.”

  I smiled back, in gratitude. I picked up the fork and spoon, extracted a small portion of the delicate flesh, set it on my plate — though not as deftly as she had maneuvered me out of my predicament — and returned the utensils back onto the platter, which she must have felt was lighter by more than just the ounce or two of fish I’d removed. At least, so it seemed to me by the ease with which she carried it to the next, and knowing, guest.

  Chinese culture is rife with pithy maxims, sound bites with significance, the most memorable of which were not uttered, stereotypically, by Confucius or any of the other lofty sages but sprang from the lips of the common man. It is these earthy folk sayings, not the pearls of Eastern philosophical wisdom, that
formed my earliest consciousness, that infiltrated the very marrow of my bones.

  Aphorisms like “first the flower, then the fruit,” proffered to console the parents of a newborn baby girl (the flower), to diminish the disappointment that it wasn’t a boy (the fruit), and to encourage them to try again. Which was to say that the birth of a baby girl was tantamount to a failure, and a grave one at that.

  When Nai-nai was born at the end of the nineteenth century, a fourth and unwanted daughter of a poor peasant family, her mother, who knew she must either drown or smother the infant, was wily enough to devise a way to keep her. When my mother gave birth in the middle of the twentieth century, she felt compelled to apologize to my father four times, once for each daughter. Compensating for being only half Chinese, she believed that “four candles do not take the place of one lamp.” The culture of her Cantonese father had infiltrated her bones, too. His Polish wife, who nonetheless knew something about Chinese patriarchy, was another story My Slavic grandmother bore five daughters, leavened by a single son, the penultimate child. Each time she gave birth — at home with a midwife in attendance, in Minneapolis — she summoned her husband to her side, unwrapped the swaddling clothes upon the newest squalling family addition, and announced in a defiant tone, “See? A girl.” (Or “Another girl”) She then dismissed my grandfather with an imperious, “You may go now.” Even in confinement, Nana was secretly formulating a master plan for her girls, one she felt she would encounter little ardor for and therefore little interference from a husband constitutionally interested in lamps.

  I was the one who came closest. Second in line, thus first to fulfill the Chinese horticultural adage, the flower’s exegesis. The one requiring my mother’s most heartfelt apology for having held out my father’s greatest hope, only to snatch it away. For my dereliction of duty, I was tacitly given certain privileges, and I silently assumed certain burdens that my sisters didn’t share. Not that they wanted those medals of honor that came with being a tomboy: the calluses on my hands big as walnuts; the scabs and bruises that healed only to make room for larger, uglier ones; the smug knowledge and titillating and incautious use of swear words, curses, and dirty jokes. The acceptance of these privileges was not without its equal share of punishments. Reciprocity, after all. With a semi-blind eye, my father allowed me to ice-skate on Indian Pond after school, before I did my homework, before it got dark. But he grilled me mercilessly after I completed each homework assignment. He permitted me, encouraged me, to grow into the tomboy I became. But I had better not come home crying if I was bested by or hurt in a fight with a boy or in a, contest of kinetic skill or a match of wits. When he caught me filching one or two cigarettes from his packs of Kents so I could smoke them in the woods with the boy who lived next door, my father shut me in the master bathroom with a full pack of cigarettes and told me I could come out only when I had smoked them all. (I was let out after two cigarettes and the promise never to smoke again.) He also invited me to accompany him in Katrinka, the old Buick, to pick up my mother at the subway station at the end of her workday so that he could teach me how to drive. At eleven years of age, it was my calloused hands on Katrinka’s steering wheel, my father’s foot on the gas pedal. My life has probably always been that way: my father providing the impetus; I directing its course.

  I read somewhere that there are fathers who cherish their children and those who educate their children; that each type loves them in his own way, thinks it the better one. My father belonged to the second category to offset what he believed to be the deleterious effects of the soft love, the leniency, the latitude my mother gave us. He feared that we would grow up to be weak — powder puffs unable to withstand life’s hard knocks, rude disappointments, crushing rejections. To harden us, to prepare us, he saw to it that we received them from him rather than from a complete stranger. My father was nothing if not cautious. “It’s better to be safe than sorry. It’s better not to take any chances. If it’s not perfect (our test scores, our school grades), it’s not good enough.” From those maxims, I extrapolated: Not good enough is close to failure. Close to failure is worse than death.

  An eleven-year-old child thinks this way The eleven-year-old child I was didn’t know that my father’s near-military sense of discipline was both an awkward way of loving us and a symptom of his unremitting preoccupation with the obligations he bore as the single head of two households — his own and his aging father’s — whose ranks swelled or shrank according to which second cousin or third nephew was fleeing China for the United States, required introductions, English lessons, a place to stay, a job, a college education. My father, as eldest son and head of the Li clan, was honor-bound by filial piety to provide these services to extended family members, those interconnected strands in a wide and sticky web of distant relatives whose requests were summarily honored before his obligations to his own nuclear family were even considered.

  “What can I do?” my father would say when my mother protested yet another refugee to feed and house and send to college before any of her own daughters had the chance — and might not, if this free flow of finite funds continued. What will people say if I don’t do what they ask? is what he meant, and my mother knew it. Everyone back home will talk. They’ll speak against me. They’ll say that Yau Luen is a miser. They’ll say that I’m not fulfilling my filial obligations. With privilege comes obligation, and I have the privilege of being Li Zongren’s son. Not only would I lose face, my father would lose face. All of us would. What can I do?

  This last was a rhetorical question. My father’s mind was made up and my mother could do nothing to change it, for it concerned the most intransigent icon and underpinning of Chinese culture — face: its maintenance, its gain, its loss. My mother understood: these distant relatives, these people he didn’t even know, mattered more to him than his own family because of what they would say What we, his immediate family, said or thought didn’t matter, precisely because we were immediate family And we were American. Therefore what we said or thought didn’t count, wouldn’t reach the ears of people in China, the “they” of what-will-they-say whom he barely knew. They, not we, had the power to diminish or increase his face and thus control his fate. Our fate. We meant more to him, but they mattered more to him.

  This realization coincided with the growing importance my mother gave to her position as a clothing buyer at Saks Fifth Avenue and the personal satisfaction and financial remuneration she received from it. It was also at a time when production at the factory my father owned in Hong Kong was slack and profits were down: the electric condensers that he manufactured were becoming obsolete; computer chips were on the rise.

  It was my mother who made dinner when she came home from work, which was later than my father, who did the shopping. But one night a week when her store remained open until nine o’clock and she worked until closing, my father assumed both tasks. Only during inventory, when my mother worked every night way past nine, arriving home after ten or eleven o’clock, did my father cook dinner for us daily They were meals which, had we been able to decipher the acrid and bitter emotions that seasoned them, might have softened our hearts toward him.

  “Where did you go to college, Daddy?”

  “University of Chicago. And Beloit College.”

  “What did you study?”

  “Political science.”

  “Will I go to college, too?”

  “Of course. If you’ re smart enough.”

  “At college, what did you do for fun?”

  “I would go to the apartment of one of my Chinese friends Everyone would be there. All our Chinese friends. There were few Chinese restaurants, and no decent ones. American food! (A sour face.) We couldn’t eat it. So we would cook a real Chinese meal together.”

  “That doesn’t sound like fun. That sounds like work.”

  A wag of his head. “What do you know?”

  That my father couldn’t eat American food. At least not until he married my mother and she mad
e her version of it for him. But on her late nights at work, American food was what he made for the five of us. We all ate it, like a penance, in silent suffering. One such meal stood out in particular, served on Fridays, but capable of insinuating itself into another evening of the week: frozen fish sticks, baked; egg noodles with melted butter; and frozen string beans boiled within an inch of their life, wilted and gray with fatigue. I hated those Friday dinners and, despite my best intentions, despite the knowledge that my father was watching, silent and disapproving, I picked sullenly at my food. I would manage to get a forkful of the dubious fish and greasy bread crumbs or some limp, sodden noodles into my mouth. I tried not to chew but simply swallowed, or tried to. Instead I gagged. Out came the fish stick, nearly intact, back onto my plate. When I looked up, my father’s eyes were bulging in their sockets, his nostrils were flared, his breathing had stopped. This indication of his anger was all the more frightening because it was so quickly suppressed, gone almost as soon as it had appeared. No verbal tirade. No physical violence or the threat of it. Just his usual cold self-control and the withering request that I excuse myself from the table.