Daughter of Heaven

by Leslie Li

  One night during inventory week when my mother phoned my father to pick her up at the station as was customary, he didn’t lift the receiver off the cradle but let the phone ring, which woke us up. Eventually the ringing stopped, but soon it started up again. My father forbade any of us to answer it and instructed us to go back to bed. We were wide awake when some time later my mother, who must have taken a taxi, rang the doorbell. Like the phone, the doorbell continued to ring. We crept downstairs to the kitchen where my father, seated at the kitchen table, pretended to read the paper.

  “Mom’s buzzing the doorbell. Why don’t you let her in?”

  My father frowned and shook his head. When we moved toward the door, he forbade us to open it and commanded us to move away By this time my mother was pounding on the door, crying and pleading with my father to let her in. We started to cry, too.

  “Please, Daddy, please let Mom into the house.” His mouth was set and, by his bulging eyes, his flared nostrils, I could see that he was holding his breath, holding back his anger.

  Dinner that evening had consisted of the detested trio — fish sticks, buttered noodles, and string beans. Detested but consumed. Now out it came, not just a mouthful, but the full meal. Not nearly intact, but mostly digested. No one noticed, much. Not with everything else going on and everyone coming apart, except for my father. Or, in retrospect, especially my father. Covertly but inexorably, as time would tell.

  My father let my mother cry and pound on the door until he felt she had learned the lesson he wanted to teach her, that is, long enough to feel that he was in the driver’s seat. Then he nodded at us, affirming yet dismissive. We rushed to the door, unlocked it, and let my mother in. We gathered around her, sobbing and hugging her, and my mother wept and hugged us back. My father stood a few feet away, expressionless, wordless, alone.

  Sautéed Prawns in Their Shells

  1 pound prawns, with shells

  2 stalks green onion or scallion

  2 tablespoons fresh gingerroot, slivered

  1 teaspoon salt

  1½ teaspoons light soy sauce

  2 tablespoons rice wine or sherry

  3 tablespoons peanut oil

  Remove legs from prawns but leave intact shell and tail. Shred green onions (or scallions) lengthwise and cut into 1-inch pieces. Mix light soy sauce and rice wine (or sherry) together.

  Heat wok. Add oil and heat until very hot. Add salt and garlic and cook 1 minute until the garlic is golden but not brown. Discard garlic. Add prawns, green onions, and ginger. Saute prawns on both sides till pink. Quickly add soy sauce mixture. Stir-fry for 30 seconds to blend all the flavors. Serve immediately.

  Makes 4 servings.

  Note: Cooking prawns this way traps the flavor of the sauce inside the shell while protecting the flesh from direct contact with the wok. This makes the prawns juicier and tastier. The proper way to eat the prawns is to place one in your mouth and remove the shell solely with your teeth while you are sucking (noisily — it’s the polite thing to do) the sauce trapped inside. Gastronomic, no-hands multitasking.

  AGAINST THE GRAIN

  The status of noodles in Chinese cuisine is a complicated affair. Noodles exist in a culinary limbo. On the one hand, they are dismissed as snack food, not a real meal. On the other, they are banquet fare, the feast’s grand finale. Noodles in their long form are de rigueur at birthday celebrations and anniversaries, since their length connotes long life, which along with health and wealth is the appropriate triad of wishes for such occasions. No dim sum brunch is complete without their short form — silver pin noodles, made from wheat gluten and tapioca flour and rolled under a knowing palm to no longer than a bean sprout. While they always end a banquet, noodles can also begin a day, as Nai-nai chose on occasion. Her breakfast noodles, or gee ma wot mein in Cantonese — which my sisters turned into a juvenile joke, “Gee, Ma! What? Mein again for breakfast?!” — were cut from wonton wrappers into half-inch strips, boiled in water, bathed in oyster, soy, and chili sauces, laced with sesame oil, and flecked with toasted sesame seeds. Besides a day, noodles can also begin a life. The sub gum variety — egg noodles in chicken or pork stock — is traditionally served to guests at a baby’s one-month “coming out” party.

  But noodles as the foundation of a “proper” meal? Never! That Buddhist maxim — “there is no chance; there is only law” — could well have been applied to Nai-nai’s kitchen. As incontrovertible as a law of physics, rice ruled at dinnertime. That other starch was banished from the table or, at most, to the bottom of the soup tureen.

  Why this preference for rice, this bias against wheat, at a Chinese table? Primogeniture, for one. Rice was cultivated in southern China as early as 5000 B.C., whereas wheat was grown in northern China only by the end of the second millennium B.C. A second reason is that the techniques for making wheat-based ping fu, or noodle food, such as the large-scale grinding of wheat into flour and the art of baking bread, wasn’t indigenous to China but borrowed from lands on its western frontier, possibly Persia. A third reason is the snob factor. As late as the Tang dynasty (a.d. 618-907), wheat and millet were China’s primary staple grains, and rice was a luxury item available only to the upper classes. But when the Sung dynasty (a.d. 960-1279) fled its northern court at Kaifeng and established its new capital at Hangzhou, a southern city in the country’s rice-growing belt, Oryza sativa became the preeminent grain for the first time in Chinese history The noodle was now both commonplace and secondary.

  Naturally, there arose from Nai-nai’s “rice law” — rice for meals; noodles for snacks — the desire to break it. This I did time and again, with impunity, when I lived in Italy, where the culinary tables of my upbringing were turned. My favorite snack-on-the-run when I lived in Rome and in Acireale on Sicily’s eastern shore consisted of rice — arancine, those savory balls of boiled rice with a hefty center of meat, cheese, and peas dipped in batter and bread crumbs, then fried to a golden turn. As for dinners, I often ate as my entire dinner a wheat-based pasta or, occasionally, baked polenta, made of cornmeal. But rice for dinner? Even risotto? Never.

  Little did I know then that my personal argument concerning pasta had a historical precedent: who invented noodles, the Italians or the Chinese? The most commonly told, believed, and erroneous, story is that Marco Polo introduced pasta to Italy after his long sojourn at Kublai Khan’s court during the Yuan dynasty (a.d. 1271-1368). Historical evidence decrees otherwise.

  Varieties of ping fu already existed throughout Asia: Russian pelemeni, Jewish kreplachs, and Tibetan mo-mo are just some of the examples. Proof positive remains elusive, but opinions about the origin of noodles abound, with the top contender for that honor being, in addition to China, Etruscan Italy, which, if the scant evidence proves true, would predate the Chinese claim by five hundred years.

  What is noteworthy about China and Italy, the two countries most contentious about the matter, is that, ironically, both countries share the same low regard for pasta. The insalata of Italian and Latin spoken in certain quarters of sixteenth-century Italy was termed macaronic Latin because, like Venetian macaroni, it was coarse, rustic, and rough. Adolescent aristocrats dispatched to Italy to absorb classical art and high culture were disparagingly called “macaroni” — Eurotrash seicento-style — by many of their countrymen. Similarly, in China, noodles and their cousins wontons, dumplings, and steamed or fried bread were considered poor man’s fare — fast food sold by street vendors from open-air stalls or ambulatory snack carts.

  Another irony is that, in China, the secondary position of wheat and the lowly status of noodles worked in their favor, and in the same dynasty which had demoted them, the Sung. Employing the cosmological principle of yin and yang, scholar-gourmets created a culinary concept of balanced opposites — a synthesis of rustic simplicity and gastronomic extravagance. How to reconcile these two opposing tendencies? Cooks would offer, for example, a simple dish of wheat noodles in soup at the same meal where they served that esoteric d
elicacy, swallow’s nest. This paradoxical paradigm of the earthy paired with the ethereal, the healthy with the hedonistic, has remained a guiding principle of Chinese culinary philosophy to this day.

  Actually, the commonplace noodle found its way into imperial haute cuisine even before the Sung dynasty officially sanctioned its consumption with the equation: frugality + refinement = elegant simplicity. The Han dynasty (202 b.c.-a.d. 220) emperor Wang Meng ate the slippery strands, and his imprimatur helped noodle sales zoom off the charts and provided a precedent for future pasta-loving Sons of Heaven. The Qing (a.d. 1644-1912) emperor Kuang-hsu liked a light ping breakfast of milk, rice porridge, and flat wheat cakes. And a typical repast consumed by his successor Ch’ien-lung included steamed dumplings stuffed with bamboo shoots and pickled Chinese cabbage. Tired of the usual feasts produced in their kitchens, imperial majesties were not above sending a runner out of the Forbidden City and into the local night market to buy a bowl of Old Man Wang’s Spicy Beef Noodles or Pock-Marked Mama’s Bean Curd, culinary icons of savory simplicity that no imperial chef deigned to reproduce.

  China’s last emperor, Pu Yi, possessed the most austere palate of all. He never touched the sumptuous dishes brought to him by a procession of eunuchs bearing silver platters set on porcelain trays. Reporting back to the emperor’s chefs after one such occasion, his eunuchs delivered this withering report: “The Lord of Ten Thousand Years consumed one bowl of old rice viands, one steamed bread roll, and a bowl of congee. He consumed it with relish.”

  Nai-nai would have approved. She too favored the pristine over the pretentious, the economical over the excessive. My grandmother had grown up in Guilin, Guangxi province, one of the few regions denied its own cuisine, unlike Canton, Sichuan, and Beijing. But Guilin, Guangxi province, is close enough to Canton, Guangdong province, that adoption of that most refined of Chinese cuisines, Cantonese — requiring only the freshest ingredients and unburdened of elaborate techniques or the aggressive use of condiments — seemed more like a birthright. After all, the two provinces combined constituted the single area known in ancient times as Lingnan. Historically and geographically, Lingnan was China’s rice bowl, so perhaps it was also out of a sense of regional pride that Nai-nai preferred rice and pooh-poohed noodles. But there was at least one occasion when Nai-nai’s incontrovertible law — the proper consumption of noodle food as a snack — was if not broken then at least modified by her son, who served it as the foundation of a memorable midnight supper.

  It happened one summer, on a torrid Friday night. I sat up in bed. I was hot and, having picked at that evening’s fish-stick dinner and been sent upstairs, hungry. To solace myself whenever sleep evaded me, no matter what the cause or season, I climbed the walls. Literally. The pebbly walls of the second-floor corridor had just the right width and traction, and with my sweaty hands and feet I scaled them like a gecko. I climbed to ceiling level and there I stayed and sniffed. Someone was cooking. I tiptoed downstairs — the light from the kitchen drew my creeping silhouette on the wall as I descended — and peered through the doorway My father was standing at the gas range, his back to me, in his undershirt, shorts, and flip-flops. He didn’t look like the man who ruined our summers by insisting we swim the width of Tibbetts pool without once treading water, or who taught us how to ride a bicycle, the one English ladies’ version he’d bought for the four of us to share and fight over. This was the same man who wore a suit and tie to work five days a week and walked briefcase in hand to the subway at 242nd Street to spend eight hours in his cramped Broad Street office at the tip of Manhattan, after which he made the same long subway trip back to the top of the Bronx to walk the mile or so home, this time uphill all the way. Who would then turn around an hour or two later to drive Katrinka down the hill to the same subway station to pick up my mother and drive her back home, at which time we had to clear the dining room table for dinner. During that hour or so between the two trips, this was the man, before whom I stood rigid as a martinet, who would then quiz me on my catechism lessons and the spelling of the score of words I needed to know for class the next day, who was quick to let me know when I’d made a mistake and silent when I hadn’t made one. But he was also the man who would sometimes ask me or one of my sisters if we wanted to accompany him down to the subway station to pick up our mother. None of us relished receiving, let alone dutifully accepting, the invitation and often employed the one acceptable excuse — homework — to refuse; not, that is, until he sweetened it with the prospect of letting us steer. For a while, the bribe worked, but after a few weeks, only with me. I loved sitting beside my father on the front seat in command of Katrinka — instead of standing in front of him being grilled — his foot depressing and releasing the pedal coordinated with my hands on the steering wheel as I turned it left and right. I did one thing; he did another toward the same end; we were a team. On evenings when I steered particularly well, he might say so. Or there might be only the most subtle of smiles, or not even that, just a relaxed expression on his usually closed, tight face. On evenings when I steered badly, he might even assure me that I hadn’t, or that it was all right, I’d do better next time. When the next times came, the relationship between my parents having grown worse with each one, I steered erratically I dreaded accompanying my father to the subway station at all — the tension when my mother entered the car sucked all the air out of Katrinka and made it hard for me to breathe. Yet I couldn’t bear not to, not because it was my obligation to accede to my father’s request but because I understood that the invitation, automatic by now, in fact a blunt command, issued from a well of loneliness so deep that it precluded even the thought of my refusing.

  Something on the stove was crackling and sputtering; on another burner something else sent up plumes of steam. When my father turned around, he didn’t seem surprised to see me.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” I stammered. “It’s too hot upstairs.”

  I walked over to the kitchen table, pulled out a chair and sat down. In front of me were two plates, both of leftovers: sautéed pork with Chinese string beans, as bumpy as the walls I’d just climbed; and laap cheung, savory Chinese sausage mottled with tasty, translucent globules of fat.

  “What are you making?”

  “Chinese food,” he said.

  “It smells good.”

  “If you’re eating with me, get me another egg from the refrigerator.”

  I did as I was told and got the egg, which he cracked on the side of the skillet where another egg already sizzled, its white creamily opaque, its bright yellow yolk glassy as a jewel. The pot of boiling water writhed with billowing strings of noodles.

  “Get me another bowl.”

  He divided the boiled noodles into the two bowls, scraped half of the leftovers into each bowl, and placed the fully fried egg on top of one of them, which he handed to me. He did all this with a practiced efficiency, an automatic sense of ritual.

  “Start, before it gets cold.”

  I broke the yolk with my chopsticks and let the viscous liquid seep into my noodles, along with the drippings from the pork and string beans. My father watched over the egg cooking in the pan. When it was done, he jiggled it into his bowl, sat opposite me, and lanced the yolk. Then he plucked a cube of fermented bean curd, dow see, from an open jar on the table. The cube — its consistency that of the thick white paste I used for art projects at school, the kind that came in a squat round jar with a brush attached to the lid — was the color of a mole, and I could smell it from where I was sitting: musty, pungent, overripe, decayed. He placed the cube on the rim of his bowl, pried away a dab of it, and swirled it into his food.

  “May I try some?”

  “It’s very salty. You won’t like it.”

  “Just a tiny bit.”

  My father extracted a dot of dow see from his cube and placed it on the rim of my bowl. I poked at the taupe smear glued to my bowl with the tips of my chopsticks, then stroked them against a thin slice of laap cheung. Not as ba
d as I thought it would taste. I bowed my head and began to eat in earnest, as my father did. Our silence was broken only by the ambient noise of our vigorous mastication, the refrigerator’s steady hum, the rasping of crickets outside the open kitchen windows, the whir of the small rotating fan. The food in my bowl was originally destined for my father’s, and I knew that I was depriving him of half his Chinese midnight supper. But my sense of shame was not so great that I ever considered relinquishing the half in my bowl which properly belonged in his. After all, as creator and enforcer of the punitive fish-stick-and-buttered-noodles dinner, he was responsible for my present hunger — it was fitting that he should satiate it. I also didn’t want him to have to eat alone, not when my parents’ marriage was dissolving, like the pierced egg yolk seeping and disappearing into his noodles. And so I ate with him, almost in tandem, my lips to the lip of my bowl, my clicking chopsticks, like his, shoveling into my avaricious mouth the Chinese leftovers, the freshly boiled noodles, the bits of crisp and runny egg. And as I ate, I watched my father eat with undisguised relish, his single-minded pleasure increasing my own. That he had reprimanded me only hours before for turning up my nose at a tasteless American supper only to invite me to consume a delicious Chinese one in his company surely had something to do with it. But even if a sense of vindication had not been an ingredient, still this midnight repast would have been satisfying, less in what it consisted of than what it meant. Without words I was apologizing for my inability to swallow his Friday fish-stick dinners. Without words he was forgiving me my rejection of those fish sticks with which he punished us and poisoned himself, each bite a door slammed against us, locking us out, so that he might hide unseen and unknown behind it. This late-night supper was the first time, and the last, that I would share a meal with my father, just he and I alone, in a silence arising from and infused with, if not communion exactly, then a rare and precious accord.