Daughter of Heaven

by Leslie Li

  For most of its history, Guangxi has been known for four things: the aforementioned aversion to authority, its extreme poverty, the quality of its fighting men, and as a way station for opium shipments passing from India to Guangxi’s neighbor to the east, Guangdong province. Given Guangxi’s rebellious nature, it’s not surprising that the Taiping Rebellion, which hastened the downfall of the decadent Qing dynasty (a.d. 1644—1912), began here. Nor that the Northern Expedition, the purpose of which was to unify China and rid the country of its fractious warlords, had its starting point in the then provincial capital of Guilin. Despite the Northern Expedition’s success, Guangxi, dissatisfied with the policies of Chiang’s Guo-mindang government, threatened more than once to secede. Even today the independent-minded, multiethnic province, many of whose citizens belong to the Zhuang ethnic minority, is officially known as the Guangxi-Zhuang Autonomous Region.

  All this I knew because I’d read it in scores of books, in hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles, in miles of microfilm — the background I needed to write the briefing book for the president of the Sudan’s visit to China. I had done my homework. But standing on the stone terrace outside my room, fresh from my mosquito-netted bed, I saw that my homework had been the Zen-proverbial “finger pointing at the moon.” What I’d read about, what I had seen reproduced dozens of times in photographs and in paintings, was now reality, and right before my eyes. The “moon” itself. The improbable, impetuous limestone towers for which Guilin is famous.

  I looked at them as one should look at a vertical Chinese landscape scroll: from top to bottom, from far to near. In the distance, to the west, was Folded Brocade Mountain — layer upon layer of soft greens, grays, and violets, like so many quilts folded neatly, one piled atop the other. To the east, on the riverbank, the straight, proud shaft of Wave Restraining Hill was more than adequate to contain the Li River, which, due to the dry season, was almost at a standstill Nai-nai had her house built close to and equidistant from the two peaks for both aesthetic and practical purposes: both contain caves that were natural air-raid shelters when the Japanese bombed Guilin during the Sino-Japanese War.

  I gazed below me, to the middle ground. Folded Brocade Street, broad and winding, was already a cacophony of bleating truck horns and trilling bicycle bells, already a swollen current of drivers, cyclists, and basket-bearing or child-carrying pedestrians. I took in the foreground, the high, thick, whitewashed wall that surrounded Nai-nai’s half-timbered, two-story, brick-and-stucco house. Chinese Tudor, I thought, and dèjà vu. The resemblance to my childhood home in Riverdale was uncanny, though that house lacked this one’s thick outer wall, onto which was built a row of small rooms that traditionally had no place in a Chinese house: a storage room for coal, a privy, a washroom with a new shower, a kitchen, and a larder. Inside the house proper were a full bathroom and a half bath with Western-style toilets, a distinction Nai-nai’s house was the first in Guilin to possess.

  I performed my morning ablutions in the upstairs half bath, dressed, and descended the curving staircase. Tan-min was waiting for me in the dining room with my breakfast: a bowl of mi-fen — rice noodles — in consomme with roast pork and bok choy When I took a bite of bok choy, it tasted better than I remembered. It was, in fact, delicious. “A Guilinese specialty,” Tanmin said about the savory dish. Guilin dialect was thankfully closer to Mandarin than to hard-voweled Cantonese, with its impossible seven tones instead of Mandarin’s mere four. She and Jiaqiu had eaten breakfast earlier, she told me. As had Lizi, their son, and his wife, Nannan, and their son, Liqi. Except for Tanmin, the adults were all at work; the sole child, at school. It struck me that I was living just one generation shy of what the traditional Chinese family once considered ideal: five generations under the same roof. And that I hadn’t yet seen Nai-nai, having arrived too late the night before, when she was already asleep.

  Tanmin slipped into Nai-nai’s room, which was toward the back of the house, while I ate my mi-fen at the dining room table. I heard her voice, raised several decibels, as she prepared Nai-nai, who was clearly hard of hearing and lying in bed, for my visit.

  “Sit up,” I heard, followed by the creak of springs. “That’s better. Let me help you put your sweater on. Lay-zuh-lee is here to see you. Lay-zuh-lee. You remember Lay-zuh-lee. Your granddaughter. Mah-cee, Lay-zuh-lee, When-dee, Jeh-lee,” Tanmin chanted (approximating Marcy, Leslie, Wendye, Gerrie), plying Nai-nai with mnemonic clues.

  I heard some rustling noises, after which Tanmin scurried into the dining room, smiling encouragingly, to lead me into Nai-nai’s room. The shades were drawn; the room was in semi-darkness. It smelled strongly of Tiger Balm, weakly of urine and subtropical mustiness. Gradually, my eyes adjusted to the change in light. Nai-nai was sitting in the wheelchair that Marcy and I had bought for her in kindly Hong Kong and had shipped to Guilin. The chair looked too big for her, though it was the smallest model we could find, collapsible, tidy. Despite the heat, Nai-nai was wearing her tea cozy hat and a gray wool cardigan over her flannel nightgown. She was smaller and thinner than I remembered. She was, I told myself, ninety-six years old, after all. I knew she didn’t recognize me, despite Tanmin’s encouraging and loud repetitions of “Lay-zuh-lee. You remember Lay-zuh-lee.” I, too, had changed, after all, but I knew that wasn’t the reason. I bent down and kissed her on the cheek, breathed in the scent of Tiger Balm, my cheek brushing slightly against the tea cozy’s black velvet. Now that I had the Chinese words, I wanted to say, but I did not say: Did Daddy really take baths in a rice storage jar when he was little? Were there really tigers in Guilin then? And did a tiger really chase Daddy when he was little? What was Daddy like, when he was a boy? Was he smart? Was he so smart that he didn’t have to study that hard and could spend a lot of time playing tennis? He said he studied all the time at college, but the one college photo I have of him, he’s on a tennis court wearing white flannels and swinging a racket. That he studied all the time, was that a made-up story? Was the tiger?

  Tanmin accompanied me to, but did not climb, solitary Single Beauty Peak, whose summit towers above the campus of Guangxi Teachers College, which was once the palace grounds of a fourteenth-century prince, nephew to the emperor. I was winded when I finally reached the top, but the view was more than worth the flight of 306 high-riser stone steps. Single Beauty was Guilin’s sheerest climb, highest peak, and, because there was no other promontory nearby to obstruct the view, best vantage point from which to see for miles and miles. From here, and in the blue-gold haze of late morning, I saw that the Chinese word for “landscape,” shan-shui— literally “mountains and water” — was, likewise, to be taken literally Rimming the horizon, hundreds of jagged, denuded crags or rounded, plant-lush peaks soared straight up without warning from the verdant plain. The sluggish Li River, stippled with rickety houseboats and fishing boats made from lengths of bamboo lashed together, wended its jade-green way among them. Closer by were Fir Lake and Banyan Lake, both embroidered with walkways, flowerbeds, and pergolas. No wonder Guilin had for centuries been the destination of Chinese painter-poets in quest of immortality, the kind achieved by setting down on silk, paper, or stone the “fragment of eternity” to be found there. A Chinese art historian once told me that four elements were necessary to a Chinese garden: rocks (or mountains), water, plants (trees, particularly), and buildings. Viewed from above, Guilin was one grand garden, on a grand scale.

  As I descended Single Beauty Peak, the Edenic qualities of the city as seen from above transformed to the Brueghelesque the closer I came to ground level. Never had I seen, not even in small-town Sicily, my address for half a year, life lived so openly, so completely in the public eye as in Guilin. Private life extruded from the doorways, spilling out onto the streets. Everywhere I saw Guilinese cooking and eating their midday meal, washing their dishes as well as their clothes, hanging the latter on ropes strung between trees to dry. Tanmin and I turned down another larger, more commercial street, where seamstresses hunched ov
er treadle sewing machines making or repairing clothing, and cobblers affixed shoe soles and heels. Bed quilts were dragged out of a house for a thorough wash and rinse. Even the storefronts had no fronts: al fresco barber shops, restaurants, pharmacies — testament to China’s infatuation with free enterprise and Deng Xiaoping’s responsibility system.

  Once we crossed the threshold of Nai-nai’s compound the frantic activity and sensory overload ceased. The dining room table was set with six bowls and sets of chopsticks. On a side table was a tureen of bitter-melon soup. At the center of the dining table, platters of pork sauteed with more bitter melon, see yao gai chicken, guy-lan in oyster sauce, and a big pot of boiled white rice. I thought of Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast, where the banquets appeared as if by magic. Who had prepared this collation, and, by the steam rising from the various dishes, right on cue? Jiaqiu came down the stairs. Lizi, Nannan, and their son, Liqi, entered, nodded, smiled, then settled into their chairs. Tan-min insisted I do the same.

  “And Nai-nai?” I said.

  “She’s already eaten,” Tanmin replied, and ladled some soup into my bowl. “Chi fan.”

  “Chi fan,” the others repeated.

  We bowed our heads over our bowls. In the avid silence of eating, I heard, just barely, someone humming and shuffling about in the outdoor kitchen, or larder. The ghostly prestidigitator who had prepared this very real meal.

  I sat on the front porch after my postprandial nap, a daily household custom. The others were still sleeping. Nai-nai, who slept for much of the day and night and of whom I’d seen the least in actuality — brief morning greetings such as we exchanged the first day of my visit — I saw symbolically all around me. I was struck by how much her house in Guilin resembled my childhood home in suburban New York City. Like the rose garden in the front yard, its dense, heady fragrance intermingling with the lighter perfume of the osmanthus tree nearby. Like the vegetable garden — rows of tomato, bok choy, bitter melon, and Chinese string bean plants — dominating the backyard, where I spied a chicken coop, an improvement in self-sufficiency over our New York residence. I took in these relics or remnants of the tiny but obstreperous woman who once controlled, if not our lives, at least our mealtimes — occasions at which she no longer presided, and surely no longer prepared, though the dishes I’d been served at every meal since my arrival assured me she was present in every bite. The bok choy, of which I gladly took second helpings, the succulent spareribs, with black beans and soy sauce, that literally slid off the bone, even the la-jiao tasted of Nai-nai’s cooking.

  By the Tang dynasty (a.d. 618-907), cooking in southern China — unlike in the north, where the superior position of men granted them a monopoly on all the arts — was a specifically female endeavor. If a northern woman was admired for her golden lotuses, her tiny broken and bound feet, a southern woman was honored for her skill in the kitchen. Small wonder that Nai-nai, when she lived with us in New York, was happiest boiling, steaming, roasting, pot-stewing, stir-frying, deep-frying, salting, pickling, or drying food in her kitchen, and planting, weeding, hoeing, and watering in her vegetable gardens! If she was unimpressed by the specialties offered in Chinatown’s restaurants, she pored over the selection of produce offered in its shops. And why not? During the Qing dynasty (a.d. 1644 — 1912) the scholar Yuan Mei declared that the credit for any fine meal must be divided two ways: sixty percent to the cook and forty percent to the person doing the marketing. Nai-nai, then, could rightfully claim one hundred percent of every meal she made; in addition to food preparer and purveyor, she was food producer as well.

  I peeled myself from the wicker chair and walked behind Nai-nai’s house, where someone in a loose shirt and baggy pants was bent over a tomato plant in the vegetable garden.

  “Chi le fan le ma?” she asked, when she saw me. She was tiny, though not as tiny as Nai-nai. Her face was cross-hatched with many fine wrinkles, though her hair, blunt-cut to her chin and held away from her high-boned cheeks by long hairpins, was jet black. Her age was difficult to guess. I was mistaken. She was not bent over a tomato plant but hunchbacked, with one shoulder blade that looked like it had buckled and been thrust up and away from her spine, which was askew.

  “Chi le” I assured her. “Ni ne?”

  This bit of civility serving as an introduction between two people may be translated, literally, as: “Have you eaten yet?” “Yes, I have. And you?” Figuratively, what we had exchanged was: “How are you?” “Fine. And you?”

  I asked her her mingzi, her given name. Jiunyang, she said, and explained that she was a distant relative of my grandmother. She was also, clearly, the invisible chef, Nai-nai’s caretaker, vegetable gardener, and, by the limp fowl at her feet, its neck broken, chicken-coop tender.

  “You are Lay-zuh-lee,” she told me. “Are your baths hot enough?” In addition, she was also responsible for the pails and kettles of boiling water (only cold water ran out of the faucets in Nai-nai’s house) that I found in the downstairs bathroom next to the tub, its surface moss-green from an omnipresent mold that elbow grease might have effaced but that Guilin’s raging humidity would only replace in a matter of hours. This was the same mold that coated the leather soles of my shoes which, once scraped off with walking, reappeared the following morning. My cotton clothes, washed the night before, never dried completely, not even days afterwards, but at least they didn’t grow short green fur.

  “Yes, thank you,” I said. “Very hot.” “Shi, xie-xie. Hen re.”

  I told her that nevertheless I would prefer to bathe outdoors instead, in the al fresco shower stall. I told her that my father took his baths outside as a boy, in a big earthenware rice jar half full of water.

  “Tell me when you want to take your shower, and I’ll supply buckets of hot water so you can soap yourself with it, then rinse with the cool water from the shower. You can usually find me in the outdoor kitchen, or around the vegetable garden or chicken coop, when I’m not taking care of your grandmother.”

  I told Jiunyang that her garden looked just like the one Nai-nai used to grow behind our house in New York, that at one time there were nine people living at our house and that, astonishingly, she’d fed us all from less than an acre of land.

  “It’s your grandmother who taught me how to cook . . . that is, cook the dishes she liked, the way she liked them,” Jiunyang said. “At first, after she returned to Guilin, she did most of the cooking. I helped her. She also planted this garden. I helped her here, too. Then, bit by bit, she handed over both jobs to me. Before I came here from the countryside, I didn’t live in a place like this.” She encompassed Nai-nai’s compound with a sweep both of her arm and her gaze. “Not many people do, you know. When your grandmother came home, there were five families living in this house, and it was very run-down. But your grandmother is a venerable personage. The wife of Li Zongren. The families moved out. The house was repaired. Her nephew, Jiaqiu, and his family were sent for, to take care of her. I came later.”

  I’d passed Jiunyang’s bedroom, hidden among the storage rooms on the third floor. It was unlike the other family members’ rooms, unlike my room. It was tiny, without windows or a terrace. In it was a rudimentary bed with a peni-tentially thin mattress. Piled at its foot were all of Jiunyang’s possessions: a few sticks of rickety, rustic furniture, a few wooden boxes and cardboard cartons, a threadbare quilt rolled up and tied with twine. A room befitting a distant relative, a poor relation.

  “But why ‘astonishingly’?” Jiunyang asked me, rather astonished herself She picked up the wrung chicken at her feet. “I feed the seven of us with half a mou (one-sixth of an acre). It’s not the amount of land you own. It’s the amount of work you put into it.”

  She sniffed in satisfaction, then walked off, toward the outdoor kitchen: there was dinner to prepare, a portion of which drooped pathetically from her hand. Her remark corroborated what I’d read: not only does the southern Chinese diet support the highest population density on the least land but sou
thern Chinese crops have the most nutritional value for the least land. So it seemed only fair that so much bounty on so little acreage should require such intensive labor. Little wonder that in New York Nai-nai rose with the sun to tend to her vegetables and retired from her labors only when it had started to set.

  I heard water running in the outdoor kitchen. Jiunyang had turned on the tap above the bath-size stone basin. At ninety-six, Nai-nai was no longer a fixture in the kitchen — hers in Guilin or ours in New York. Nor did she putter about in the vegetable garden. Or forage along the roadside for gow-gay. She had, however, passed on her recipes to Jiunyang: beef and tomato with oyster sauce, pork and bok choy, which Jiunyang sometimes bastardized by substituting bitter melon. Nai-nai had even divulged to her successor the secret of her excellent la-jiao, which warmed the palate without searing the tongue, whose subtle but spicy heat was without the burn of store-bought chili sauce. In fact, I could tell no difference between Jiunyang’s meals in Guilin and Nai-nai’s in New York. There was a disparity, though, one that had nothing to do with taste. It was this: Jiunyang’s cooking under Nai-nai’s tutelage, besides whetting my appetite, evoked memories which otherwise would have remained dormant. By anointing my tongue with familiarity, she awakened my mind to recall.

  Stir-Fried Pork with Bitter Melon

  1 pound bitter melon

  6 cups water

  ½ teaspoon baking soda

  3 tablespoons peanut oil

  2 ½ teaspoons garlic, minced

  2 scallions, minced

  8 ounces lean pork, thinly sliced (about 1 cup)

  1 tablespoon cornstarch

  2 teaspoons black soy sauce ½ teaspoon sugar

  Sauce: