by Leslie Li
Outside the back door, when I saw the vestibule light go on, I had steeled myself for the encounter with my father. The time he had let me wait in the cold and dark had not been punitive but fruitful. Those long, humiliating minutes had closed my heart to him completely. If at one point I had been near tears to recall those of my mother and those that I’d shed in response, that moment of weak-ness and vulnerability had passed without a trace. My eyes were dry; my heart was ash. I ignored the cold. The numbness in my feet and fingers had spread to the rest of my body, infiltrating my feelings but one; I despised my father. This knowledge warmed me, as did its corollary: my refusal to be my mother.
I heard the slide and the tinkle of the chain being drawn back and released, the turn and click of the lock being sprung. The door opened. My father, in his robe and slippers, stood before me. He waited several seconds: for me to speak, to explain about forgetting my keys, to apologize for coming home late and waking him up.
“You’re late,” he said, finally. “Do you know what time it is?”
I continued to look at him, expressionless, indifferent, giving nothing away.
“No.” It was the first time I remember lying to my father. Later, to soften the blow, to cover up my cowardice, I told myself it had been a half-lie and so a half-truth: yes, I knew it was later than I promised, but, no, I didn’t know the exact time.
“It’s after one o’clock,” he said. “Where’s your key?”
“I forgot it, on the sideboard.”
I clamped my mouth shut. My upper and lower teeth clicked together like castanets and ground upon each other. I’d come close to apologizing — a reflex action, a learned response — but I’d caught myself just in time. I was learning. I’d get better at this. He would not humiliate me like he humiliated my mother.
“You woke me up. Did you know that?”
I bit my lower lip. I was sure I’d woken up my mother too, but he would have forbidden her to open the door for me. Just as he’d forbidden my sisters and me to open the door for her. I bit the inside of my cheek. My jaws ached. But I would not say I was sorry If I even thought the words, I would begin to cry, on both counts: I would be me, timid and obedient, and I would be my mother, meek and submissive. I would not be my mother, to beg and plead, to be humiliated in front of her tormentor, in front of her children.
My father waited in the doorway, unmoving, expectant. I thought: He’ll close the door on me if I don’t give in. He’ll lock me out of the house if I don’t apologize. I feared he would, he wielded such power as patriarch. I hated him, my dependency on him. My hatred must have been greater than my fear. He must have known this, even if I didn’t. He must have felt it, because he stepped back from the door as though the force of my hatred had pushed him away to allow me to enter. For a split second, I hesitated, disbelieving. I’d won. I had triumphed over my father. As I crossed the threshold and walked into the house that first morning of the New Year, I felt that I had breached a second boundary, one invisible but more substantial, a barrier that, once broken, forbade me to return to the other side of my father’s fatal concession and my empty victory.
When I got into bed, after my father had mounted the stairs and returned to his, I began to cry silently into my pillow, so I wouldn’t wake Marcy, who was asleep in the dormer of our bedroom. Why was I crying? I should have been happy I should have felt jubilant.
Tears falling. If no one else sees them, do the tears exist?
BITTER RICE, SWEET RICE
When I was in China, I learned to end a meal with pure rice, quite plain, and to taste every grain. It is one of the most beautiful tastes in the world, freshly-boiled rice. I don’t know if it would be if it was all you had every day, if you were starving. It would be differently delicious, differently haunting, don’t you think? You cant describe this taste.
— from “The Chinese Lobster” by A. S. Byatt
In 1984 I was a single mother working at a public affairs company in New York as a research associate, churning out synopses of current events in the countries we represented — the Sudan, Venezuela, Costa Rica. Before then I worked at a variety of clerical or secretarial jobs, so I could give my son the attention and energy that such jobs didn’t deplete. When he was old and independent enough and began attending a private school, I was able to give him greater latitude and take for myself a more responsible and demanding job, one that would both pay his tuition and engage my understimulated faculties. It was at this time that a magazine called Rice, geared for Asian-Americans, hit the newsstands.
“Rice!” Sharon, one of my coworkers, snorted. “What kind of name is that for a general-interest magazine! Here. Take a look.”
I leafed through the first edition. Rice was indeed a general-interest magazine, like the old Look or Saturday Evening Post. Sharon, who watched me, arms folded across her chest, was Irish-American. Would she have been so scornful if the magazine were dubbed Potatoes? Or how about All-American Meat and Potatoes?
“Actually, I think the name is well chosen,” I said. “Rice is common fare among Asian-Americans — perhaps the one across-the-board common denominator that we of Asian extraction share. Other than rice, what do we have in common? Certainly not religion. We’re either Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, or Christian by conversion. Physical features? A Chinese-American will hardly be mistaken for an Indian-American, or a Filipino-American for a Japanese-American. And our secular customs and political systems differentiate us farther still. But we all eat, much and often, rice.”
I was shaking and red in the face. I could feel the radiant heat that had risen there. This seething anger made manifest shamed and embarrassed me. Normally, I spoke little on the job. Platitudes. Pleasantries. I didn’t want to be the nail that was hammered down, a person who stood out. Now I’d gone and done it. Shown that I had emotions, strong ones.
“Well, you don’t have to get defensive about it,” Sharon said, smiling, like the Cheshire cat who’d caught the mouse, the timid mouse who’d shown she had sharp teeth after all. She cast Rice a deprecating glance. “Keep it,” she said before she sashayed down the hall.
Research was what I was paid to do at my company. Well, research was what I’d do, this time for my own purposes. I bought the book Food in China: A Cultural and Historical Inquiry. I meant to validate, if only in my mind, the appropriateness of Rice as the name of a general-interest magazine geared for Asian-Americans, with the assistance of a bit of rice cultural anthropology. My anger served as the wind in my sails, the fire in my belly. What I was angry about was not so much Sharon’s dismissive remark about Rice, which, in my eyes, was dismissive of the billions of people who eat it — Asians certainly, and mostly — as the fact that I knew more about the culture and history of the Sudan, Venezuela, and Costa Rica than I did about China. I’d never felt this way before: I wanted to know about China and my Chinese heritage, something that had been foisted upon me, something I’d either taken for granted or forgotten because I was “assimilated,” because I was brought up short by a subliminally snide or openly racist remark.
According to Food in China, there are two species of cultivated rice: Oryza sativa, which was domesticated on mainland Asia between northern India and southern China; and Oryza glaberrima, grown first in West Africa and apparently independent of its Asian cousin. While Oryza sativa has long been cultivated in South, East, and Southeast Asia, the following images are universal, and to me intensely personal and symbolically Chinese: a lone man behind a wooden plow, strapped to a water buffalo, turning over the soil of flooded paddies; rows of bent women up to their knees and elbows in muddy water, planting the rice seedlings every several inches, in relentless rows; bamboo-hatted laborers harvesting the mature plants, then threshing the kernels from the stalk, and finally winnowing the chaff from the grain.
“I’m full. May I be excused. . . to finish my homework?”
My father, peering over into my bowl: “Finish your rice.”
“But I’m not hungry anymor
e.”
“Leave the meat and vegetables, then. But finish your rice.”
When my father was a boy, my grandfather wanted him to see how the Chinese agrarian majority lived. Particularly, he wanted his son to witness the cultivation of rice, which the Chinese had grown and consumed at least as early as 5000 B.C. During vacations, my father would leave the private Presbyterian boarding school he attended in Canton and return to the family home in rural Langtou-cun, outside of Guilin. There, he saw in the paddies all around him the backbreaking stoop work that the cultivation of rice required and the daunting ratio of effort to reward. There, he needed to be admonished only once by Dashao, Nai-nai’s cook at the time, to eat all his rice, if nothing else, “because every grain of rice in your bowl is a drop of sweat from a poor peasant’s brow.” Though he had to remind us more than once to eat the remaining grains of rice in our bowls, my father omitted to tell my sisters and me the why and wherefore which that particular injunction from his youth would have clarified. He also spared us yet a second admonition (if he ever knew it himself), which I found in the pages of Food in China: “If you don’t eat every grain of rice in your bowl, your future spouse will have a pock-marked face.”
Why this near-sanctity of rice? I read on and discovered that until the Yuan and the Ming dynasties, rice ranked first in status among the six grains, above wheat, barley, two kinds of millet, soybeans, and red lentils. Because it was labor-intensive and difficult to grow, and then only in southern China, it was expensive and consumed almost exclusively by the nobility. Highly nutritious, especially in its brown, unmilled form, it was easily digested. Subtle in flavor, it was an “absorber,” a bland medium which took on, emphasized, or unified the flavors of other foods with which it was prepared. In other words, rice was a nutritional tabula rasa offering unlimited possibilities for culinary creativity, a blank slate ready to receive the artistic strokes of whichever dishes accompanied it. Thus did rice become the foundation of the fan-tsai principle, a Chinese gastronomic concept that decrees that any meal be divided into two unequal parts: fan, which literally means “cooked rice,” but which is in fact any grain food in any form; and tsai, which originally meant vegetables but now includes meat and fish as well. Fan is fundamental and therefore the meal’s more abundant component; tsai is supplemental, a flavor enhancer, a gourmet grace note. Without fan, one doesn’t feel full; without tsai, the meal lacks taste. Only at Chinese banquets are the proportions reversed, and not till the end of the meal does a speck of fan appear — too ordinary to be prominent but too basic to be ignored — a hedge by the host against the possibility that a guest might walk away from the table without both consummated taste buds and a sated stomach.
Which brings up another kind of nourishment provided by a shared meal: communication, albeit nonverbal communication of the Chinese variety. Often has an Occidental come away from a meal offered by a Chinese host starved for talk more meaningful than pleasantries and platitudes, not understanding that the meal itself — the quality and the quantity of the food, the number of guests invited, the degree of formality, the importance of the occasion — was the message. Food eaten in the company of others is much more than the mere satiation of one’s hunger; it is the great social facilitator. A shared meal can (1) initiate or maintain interpersonal relationships; (2) express the host’s status, whether economic (how much can the host afford?), social (how much does he owe his guests?), or cultural (is she patrician or plebian in her gastronomic pleasures?); or (3) reward, punish, or in some way influence the behavior of the invited guests.
I remember my father telling me about an incident where Nai-nai was able to employ all three of these non-subsistence food factors — to her advantage and her rival’s dismay — involving that simple staple, rice. The incident occurred not long after Nai-nai, who was my grandfather’s primary wife, learned that he had taken a secondary one, Dejie. At that time Nai-nai was living as a dutiful daughter-in-law in the house of her in-laws, while Delin, her husband, was away on a military campaign. Even though polygamy was a common practice, my grandmother was devastated by the news and helpless to change it. All the power rested with her husband, simply because he was a man. If she pouted or made a scene, he had ample grounds to divorce her. Then where would she be? Better to accept life as it was than yearn for the impossible. And so, urged by her mother-in-law, Nai-nai left the tiny village of Langtoucun for the much larger town of Kweiping, where Delin, now a brigadier general, was posted and living with Dejie. His house was large, befitting his rank, and could easily accommodate the two weary travelers who presented themselves on his doorstep: his primary wife, my grandmother, and their young son, my father, Yau Luen. It was understood that all three adults would fulfill the duties and responsibilities demanded by their particular station and status in life and reap the rewards and privileges inherent therein. My grandfather’s position was that of patriarch, with all the honor, respect, and obedience that word implied. My grandmother’s was mistress of the house, the smooth running of which included the hiring of servants, cooks, and a nursemaid for Yau Luen — tasks which she, daughter of poor peasants, had never had the occasion to perform. As for Dejie, her principal duty as secondary wife was to be of service to the first. She accompanied Nai-nai on her social rounds, helped her receive visiting family members and honored guests, and ran errands for her. At first. But Dejie preferred shopping sprees, mahjong parties, and soirees at the theater or the opera. She also preferred the company of her peers, the citified concubines of Delin’s officers, many of whom resented their inferior marital status, who put the bee in her bonnet: “Why do you attend the same functions as your husband’s first wife? There they treat her like a queen, and you like a lady-in-waiting. Is that the position you wish to hold? Have you no face? Refuse to accompany her. What could you possibly have in common with a farm woman like that?”
Their barbed stinger struck, stung, and stuck. Dejie stopped accompanying Nai-nai anywhere. She neglected all her responsibilities to my grandmother, which Nai-nai chose to overlook, realizing that Dejie’s recently acquired independent turn of mind would not long go unnoticed by Delin, or unremarked upon.
“When do I have time to fulfill my obligations to her?” Dejie replied when confronted by her husband. “My service to you takes up all the hours of the day and night. I accompany you to all your functions. I give speeches in your name. I dedicate schools and hospitals on your behalf. I receive and entertain important visitors when you’re away. Do you begrudge me the little time I spend with my friends? To befriend the wives of your fellow officers is to foster good relations between you and their husbands. As for your first wife, I sincerely doubt she wants my company. She prefers women like herself — simple folk from the country.”
My grandfather, who had been seated, came to his feet. “You will show more respect for my wife. I, too, am ‘simple folk from the country.’”
Nice of him to stick up for Nai-nai but, true paterfamilias that he was, for the wrong reasons. Of course it didn’t end there. Family dramas rarely do. The unresolved issue hovered in the wings of my grandfather’s household, forgotten but not gone, only to reemerge center stage some time later in a different form — that of food, rice specifically — the depiction of which requires a slight digression. As mentioned previously, part of Nai-nai’s duties at this time was to employ and oversee the household help. Because of his position and status, my grandfather encouraged her to employ a large contingent of servants. Dejie readily embraced having people attend to her every need. She had already hired, for her exclusive use, two maids, a secretary, two cooks — one for Chinese and one for Western food — and two tutors, one to teach her the English language and the other the King James Bible. Since my grandmother’s position was superior to Dejie’s, she was naturally expected to have the larger household staff, yet Nai-nai insisted on employing a staff of one. But such a one! Dashao. A woman who wore numerous hats, and always at the appropriate time and the proper angle, including
that of good cook.
“You must taste Dashao’s cooking,” my grandmother told Delin one evening after he was feeling the effects of a particularly heavy meal that Dejie’s Western chef had prepared. “It’s common knowledge that men make the best cooks, but Dashao is an exception to the rule.”
Delin understood the remark to be the thinly veiled invitation it was and presented himself at Nai-nai’s table the following evening. For his delectation, Dashao had prepared a feast: diced chicken and cashew nuts, minced pork and bok choy with mushrooms, served in a bean curd jacket; deep-fried fish with five-spiced salt; watercress soup; boiled rice; and for dessert, sweet walnuts. Thereafter, at my grandmother’s direct request, Delin and Dejie dined once at week at Nai-nai’s table, where there was a fundamental change in the menu.
“Ah, brown rice,” Delin sighed the first evening the menage a trois dined together. “I’d almost forgotten how good it tastes.”
“Do you really like it?” asked Nai-nai, who was taking great pleasure in watching Dejie poke dejectedly at the contents of her bowl. “Unpolished rice is grown by simple country folk. They don’t eat it, however. Oh, no. They sell it at market so that city folk can have their fill. If simple farm women didn’t grow rice of this kind, city folk would never know how good it tastes.”