by Leslie Li
“Don’t I know it,” Delin replied. “Don’t forget, I was a farmer once myself. And I remain a farmer at heart. If it weren’t for China’s growing pains that have pulled me out of the rice fields and onto the battlefield, what would keep me from retiring from military life and returning to the rice paddies?”
A rhetorical question which forced an infuriated Dejie to set down her ivory chopsticks for fear her fellow diners would see them trembling in her hands or hear them clatter in bitter defeat against her porcelain bowl, and which permitted Nai-nai to digest her gratifying triumph even before she finished her meal. Nai-nai had wooed and won, with rice. And why not? Would Silvana Mangano have been as voluptuous and alluring in the film Bitter Rice had she been plucking potatoes from sandy soil instead of ankle-deep in a toe-sucking, flooded rice paddy? Then again, food has often served as a metaphor for sex — or sometimes sex’s twin sibling in that whither goes one, the other is never far behind — and never anywhere longer, or more closely, than in the Middle Kingdom.
During the Shang dynasty (1523 — 1027 B.C.), the ruling house indulged in orgies so extreme that gluttony, drunkenness, and debauchery are cited as principal reasons for the dynasty’s downfall. The depraved Shang was followed by the virtuous and longest-lasting Chou dynasty (1027 — 256 B.C.), who were the first to apply Chinese philosophical and cosmological concepts to food — the harmonizing principles of yin and yang and the balancing aspects of the five elements: fire, air, water, earth, and metal. Like its predecessor, the Chou dynasty didn’t divorce human sexuality from the sensual appreciation of food. The fifth-century philosopher Kao-tze explained the inclusion of sex with (and often while) eating in simple mathematical terms: “Food plus sex (without excess of either component) equals nature.” The Shang concupiscent glutton had become the Chou sexually moderate gourmet.
By the Tang dynasty (a.d. 618 — 907), food was more than just good-tasting; it could be good for you. Physicians and pharmacologists rather than cooks and gourmets became the prime authorities on correct eating practices, which now served the causes of physical health as well as hedonistic pleasure. Still, the new food-as-medicine theory did nothing to change Kao-tze’s food-and-sex equation. Even Tang aphrodisiacs had surefire medicinal properties, such as crab apples soaked in honey and cinnabar served promptly after dinner. In fact, a criminal headed to the execution ground was given a string of crab apples for his last meal, so that he might feel elevated and cheerful during his last journey on earth.
Scholar-gourmets and professional cooks replaced medicine men as keepers of the gastronomic flame in the subsequent Sung dynasty (a.d. 960 — 1279), China’s Golden Age. The sophisticated Sung were responsible for the conscientious development of regional styles of Chinese cuisine, as well as a principal paradox in Chinese food philosophy: complex culinary extravaganzas of common ingredients artfully prepared.
An invasion of the Mongol hordes ushered in the brief, barbaric interlude of the Yuan dynasty (a.d. 1271 — 1368), where dining habits included eating hacked carcasses of lamb barehanded (with a little bit of help from the handy pocket dagger). The ultraconservative Ming dynasty (a.d. 1368 — 1644) followed, reviving the traditional Confucian culture of their Chinese forebears, including the ceremonial uses of food offerings to the spirits of the dead and the further refinement of dishes destined for the palates of the living.
By the time my grandmother was born at the end of the Qing dynasty (a.d. 1644 — 1912), the culinary principles and techniques espoused and adopted over five millennia had transformed the Middle Kingdom into a country of gourmets, no matter if one were rich or poor. In fact, it was the peasantry who through sheer necessity, ingenuity, and improvisation invented innumerable delicious dishes composed of simple, inexpensive ingredients for which Chinese cuisine is renowned today; and chao, or stir-frying, a method of quick cooking which is not only fuel-efficient but also blends the various flavors of the principal ingredients without sacrificing their texture. In other words, the kind of dishes Nai-nai herself made in both China and New York, and which she had Dashao prepare, whether she ate alone or had guests to dinner. In either case, both women agreed with Qing philosopher Yuan Mei’s basic tenet: “A good cook cannot without the utmost application produce more than four successful dishes in one day.... It’s no use to give him a lot of assistants; each of them will have his own ideas, and there will be no proper discipline. The more help he gets, the worse the results will be.”
My grandmother’s sweet victory with brown rice the first evening she invited Delin and Dejie to dine with her not only satisfied all three nonsubsistence food factors — improvement of her relationship with her husband, increased social standing for herself, and deserved comeuppance of Dejie — it also had far-reaching effects. It was unthinkable for Dejie not to reciprocate and return the invitation. But which cook to employ? Her Western cook, whose meals Delin found heavy? Or her Chinese cook, who served boiled white rice? If Dejie ordered him to make brown rice, which she now knew Delin preferred, that would be tantamount to admitting a second defeat to my grandmother. And if he cooked white rice, Dejie would be deprived of the lusty accolades which Delin had heaped upon Nai-nai. Nothing less than all-important face was at stake, and the prospect of attaining it seemed to be receding. The fact that she employed two cooks to Nai-nai’s one, formerly a matter of prestige, was now a cause for shame: my grandmother’s abstemiousness had proven superior to Dejie’s extravagance. Or if not quite shame, then at the very least a diminution of her status — an indication of her epicurean ignorance or arrogance, or both. Which just goes to show what a long, long way a little rice can go.
“Leslie.” It was the president of the company who had spoken my name, who came into my tiny office and sat in the chair opposite my desk, rolling his unlit cigar between his right thumb and forefinger.
I slammed Food in China closed on (too late to sweep it off) my desk and got back to work snipping out articles from the New York Times, International Herald Tribune, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Economist, and other publications that had to do with our clients, of which China was not one.
“Whatcha reading there?”
“It’s a book on China,” I said in a slightly husky voice. “Chinese cultural anthropology”.
Which at least sounded more serious than if I’d said Chinese food. If I was about to be fired for neglecting to do work for which I was being paid, it might as well be for something serious. My boss never came into my cubbyhole of an office. He sent for me to come to his suite. With the shoe on the other foot, it could mean only one thing: he’d come to boot me out of my job, now that he’d found a good reason.
“China, huh. That’s an interesting coincidence. How’d you like to write a briefing paper on China?”
So that’s how you were fired from this company. Pierced and bleeding and carried out the door at the end of a barbed sarcasm.
“The president of the Sudan is going to China in three weeks. He needs a crash course in Chinese history, economy, and politics so he can sound knowledgeable when he meets with Deng. But he also needs to know something about Chinese customs so he doesn’t make an ass of himself at state dinners and the like. You’re Chinese. I’m sure that you know a lot about these things.”
He paused, twirling his cigar.
“Of course,” I said.
“And what you don’t know you can find out through research, which is what we’re paying you for. Not that you’ll do the research. Someone else in the company will do it for you. You’ll be too busy organizing it, editing it, writing it up in a briefing paper that Nimeiri can read on the plane. After all, you’re the expert.”
“Of course.”
“So you’ll do it. You’ll take it on. It’ll mean a lot of work. How much, I don’t know. This is the first time we’re doing something like this. It could mean longer hours at the office. Maybe a weekend. You’ll be exempt from your present duties, of course. This briefing paper is primary. Crucial. And we�
�re in a time crunch. We need the paper in two weeks, and we haven’t even started on the research, which will probably take a couple of days. Think you can handle it?”
“Of course.”
“Good,” he said and sprang out of the chair. “So who do you want to do the research, all the research, and nothing but the research? They’ll have to get on it right away.”
“Well,” I said, drawing out the word, as though I was thinking of possibilities, “it should be someone who’s already interested in China.”
“Got someone in mind?”
I held up the copy of Rice. I told him who’d brought it to my attention just a few days prior.
“Sharon it is,” he said.
There was a happy and unexpected ending to this story. The result of Sharon’s research and my writing wasn’t a briefing paper but a briefing book weighing in at some 140 pages. It took eight long days but no weekends to complete, and I finished the project well within the time allotted. The paper contained not only the original four chapters on Chinese history, economy, politics, and customs but also chapters on geography, foreign relations, government, ethnic minorities, and culture, which was the longest. My boss was elated with the finished product, which became a prototype for two more such books I would compile: on Venezuela and Costa Rica. For my labors, I received a generous bonus and a new title: director of communications and publications. But the source of my greatest satisfaction lay in neither one. I had, during those eight days of nonstop immersion in all things Chinese, become obsessed with learning all I could about the land of my forebears — so much so that I wanted to write another kind of book. Now that I had 140 pages of preliminary background research, I wanted to write a biography of Li Zongren, my grandfather, the first popularly elected vice president of China. His military autobiography already existed. I wanted to make his extraordinary life available to a readership wider than West Point cadets and veterans of foreign wars. What had once been inconceivable had become, in eight days, a distinct possibility And to think: it had started with a grain of rice.
Cantonese Fried Rice
4 tablespoons peanut oil
1 beaten egg
½ cup onion, diced
½ cup celery, diced
½ cup roast pork (char siu) or ham, diced
½ cup cooked shrimp (not canned), diced
3 cups cold cooked rice
1 teaspoon salt
½ cup peas, fresh or frozen
3 stalks green onion or scallion, diced
2 tablespoons dark soy sauce 1 tablespoon light soy sauce
All solid ingredients should be diced to pea-size.
Heat wok. Add 1 teaspoon peanut oil till sizzling. Stir-fry beaten egg 20 seconds. Set aside. Add 1 teaspoon oil, heat until sizzling, and stir-fry onions and celery 1 minute. Set aside. Add 1 teaspoon oil, heat till sizzling, and stir-fry roast pork and shrimp for 2 minutes. Set aside.
Add 2 tablespoons oil to wok, heat until sizzling, and stir-fry rice, breaking up the clumps. Season with salt, stir till heated throughout.
Add all other ingredients. Season with light and dark soy sauces. Mix thoroughly.
Makes 4 — 6 servings.
Seven-Treasure Rice
3 dried Chinese mushrooms, soaked in hot water for 2 hours
4 strips bacon
1 packet chicken giblets (liver, heart, and gizzard)
¾ cup long-grain white rice, washed and rinsed
¾ cup glutinous rice, washed and rinsed
2¼ cups water
½ cup celery, diced
½ cup onion, diced
3 stalks green onion or scallion
½ teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons light soy sauce
1 teaspoon sesame oil
Remove stems from mushrooms and finely dice caps. Slice bacon into thin strips. Dice liver, heart, and gizzard.
Cook rice in 2¼ cups water. While rice cooks, heat wok. Stir-fry bacon strips with giblets till done, about 3 minutes. Set aside. Using what remains of the bacon fat (if there are no remains, add 1 tablespoon peanut oil), stir-fry celery, onions, and mushrooms 2 minutes. Add giblets and bacon.
Add cooked rice when done and still hot to ingredients in wok. Add salt, soy sauce, and sesame oil. Mix well.
Makes 4 — 5 servings.
IN THE FOREST OF OSMANTHUS TREES
Under blue mountains we wound our way,
My boat and I, along green water;
— Wang Wan, Tang dynasty poet
You must go when the osmanthus trees are in bloom,” my father told me when I said I wanted to visit Nai-nai, who, after fifteen years in the United States, had returned to her natal town of Guilin.
But that was only half the story. The other half was that for the past few months I secretly had been writing what I hoped would be a joint biography of both my grandparents. Originally it had started out as a biography of my grandfather, but the more I tried to keep Nai-nai out of it, the more she intruded. Besides, she was alive and Grampa was not, and what questions I had I could ask her myself in my spotty Mandarin or employ Daddy as my intermediary He was proud that I’d finally taken an interest in my Chinese heritage, though he wouldn’t say so. And I was certainly not ready to tell him the reason for my interest. He’d only pull a long face and make that scornful “toc” sound deep in his throat. There was a third reason why Nai-nai couldn’t be left out of the biography: she was left out of most of Grampa’s life. Here was a way to reunite them. To know Nai-nai, both for myself and for the book I was writing — a book which was, in part, an apologia for not having known her, not having wanted to know her all the years she lived with us — I had to set her in the proper context: on home ground. For that, I had to go to Guilin.
I arrived in Nai-nai’s terra cognita in the autumn of 1986. Thirteen years had passed since she left our home in Riverdale to take up residence in the house she had had built as a wedding present for my mother and father. That house, which my parents never occupied due to the Sino-Japanese War, was my home for a full month.
“Tell us about where you lived, Daddy, when you were a little boy. Tell us what your home was like, in China.”
“When I was little, I lived in Guilin. I didn’t like taking a bath. I would run outside behind our house and hide in one of the big earthenware jars, bigger than me, one that wasn’t full of rice. One day I ran away from my amah and jumped inside one of those big grain jars. But she had filled the jar halfway with warm water, so I got my bath anyway.
“When I was little, I saw a tiger behind our house. When the tiger saw me, it started to chase me. I ran as fast as I could and jumped inside an empty grain jar to hide. I could hear the tiger growling and sniffing, but I was safe inside the jar. When the tiger went away, I climbed out.”
“That’s not true, Daddy. There aren’t any tigers in China. Only in Africa.”
“You ‘re telling a story.”
“You’re making it up.”
“We don’t believe you.”
“What do you know? You’re not even Chinese. All of you are juk sing.”
“Mommy, what’s juk sing?”
Silence. Then a shrug of her shoulders that says, I don’t know. Or, I won’t tell.
I followed my father’s advice: I timed my visit to coincide with the flowering of the osmanthus trees. That’s what Guilin means. Gui = osmanthus. Lin = forest. So when I stepped out of the plane on that moonless October night, my first sensation was olfactory. I smelled the city of my forebears before I saw it. Orange blossoms but subtler, more nuanced. I walked down the rollaway staircase onto the spottily lit tarmac toward the airport arrival and departure building. I knew they were there. Not Jiaqiu and Tanmin, Nai-nai’s nephew and his wife, sent to collect me, but the hundreds of limestone karst formations thrust up from their seabed some 300 million years ago and weathered and eroded into their present-day configurations. They would assure me of what the pervasive, sweet orange fragrance strongly suggested: that I was indeed, at last,
in the Forest of Osmanthus Trees.
Already I knew some of their names, some of their shapes, some of their legends. Old Man Hill, who sat facing the sea awaiting the return of his unfilial son for so long that he’d turned to stone. Piercing Rock, whose gaping hole was the result of a general’s arrow shot in a contest of strength that reestablished the allegiance of a rebellious tribe to the emperor. Elephant Trunk Hill, the pachyderm that deserted the emperor’s ranks to help Guilinese farmers plow their paddles during a famine, only to become petrified when a vengeful general thrust a sword into the back of its neck — the hilt of that sword the Buddhist reliquary tower that stands there today Taken all together, those limestone cliffs that invisibly but palpably surrounded me were once stones carried from the country’s vast interior by conscripted laborers to throw into the South China Sea. The laborers got only as far as Guilin, and the stones have remained here ever since.
Guilin’s importance as a commercial and cultural center began in 214 B.C., when the first Qin emperor built the nearby Lin Canal to connect the Yangtze and the Pearl rivers, thereby establishing a north-south trade route for military transport and trade. From the Ming dynasty (a.d. 1368—1644) to the 1950s, Guilin served as the capital of Guangxi province, which, located in southwestern China, was far from Beijing’s administrative authority and cultural Influence. The headquarters of an American air force unit in World War II, Guilin was described by author-historian Theodore White, then a foreign correspondent, as “the most lovable and abandoned city in the Orient. For intellectual Americans there was always good conversation; for Americans of a more earthy sort there were women.” And for a group of Chinese liberals who took advantage of Guangxi’s reputation as a prickly thorn in authority’s side, Guilin was a safe haven from which to irritate Chiang Kai-shek’s central government.