by Leslie Li
½ teaspoon granulated sugar
4 tablespoons water
1¼ tablespoons black soy sauce
2 tablespoons rice wine or sherry
1 teaspoon cornstarch
Cut bitter melon lengthwise. Scoop out soft center and seeds, and cut melon crosswise into thin slices. Bring water to boil. Add bitter melon and baking soda. Reduce heat to medium-low and simmer 3-4 minutes to reduce the bitterness of the melon. Remove bitter melon from pot, rinse briefly under cold water to stop cooking. Drain.
Heat wok over medium-high heat. Add oil. When sizzling, add garlic and scallions. Stir-fry until garlic is golden but not brown. Add pork, cornstarch, black soy sauce, and sugar. Cook, stirring, until pork loses its pink color. Remove with slotted spoon, pressing so oil drips back into wok. Set pork mixture aside.
Mix sauce ingredients together. Turn heat up to high. Add sauce mixture. Cook, stirring over medium-high heat until sauce thickens and bubbles. Add bitter melon, then add pork mixture. Stir-fry about 30 seconds. Serve hot.
Makes 6 servings.
Spareribs with Black Beans
1 pound spareribs, cut into 1-inch pieces
2 tablespoons salted black beans
2 cloves garlic, finely minced
1 tablespoon fresh ginger, minced
1 teaspoon dark soy sauce
1 tablespoon cornstarch
1 tablespoon rice wine or dry sherry
Trim fat from spareribs. Place spareribs in heat-proof dish.
Wash and rinse black beans 2-3 times. Mash together with garlic, ginger, soy sauce, cornstarch, and rice wine. Add to spareribs and mix thoroughly.
Place heat-proof dish with all ingredients on steaming rack. Add water to wok, cover, and steam for 30 minutes. Serve hot.
Makes 4 servings.
DASHAO
Already my brief but vital encounters with Jiunyang were bearing fruit on the tree of my joint biography-in-progress (the “joint” of which is a bit misleading: Nai-nai remained leading lady but Grampa was falling from equal prominence and becoming a supporting player). Hybrid fruit. I was melding her with Second Cook — the wife of Nai-nai’s First Cook when my grandmother lived in Hong Kong in 1949 — 50 — and together the two women were beginning to serve as the model for Dashao, Nai-nai’s cook and confidante for a quarter of a century and a character as essential to my book as she was important in Nai-nai’s life. Jiunyang I saw every day over that month. I needed to “see” Second Cook, whom I knew in Hong Kong but didn’t remember, in order to bring Dashao, whom I’d never met, to literary life.
What I did remember of Second Cook was her likeness in a few photos taken during the years when my grandmother lived in the penthouse of a sleek art deco building on Link Road. Her apartment overlooked Happy Valley racetrack, where on high-betting days we could hear the lusty roars from the stadium. Not that we ever went — Nai-nai, my older sister Marcy, and I — though we did pass it on our walks to and from a public park which I remembered, not for its proximity to the race course but for the life-sized stone animals that appeared, sometimes malicious, sometimes benign, along the graveled walks. I recalled two stone deer in particular, one standing, the other’s forelegs bent gracefully under her proud breast. Marcy, being older and taller, got to sit on the standing deer. I never understood the rationale in that, since I, being lighter and smaller, was the logical choice for Nai-nai to lift up and set on the higher animal’s back. This injustice, this loss of physical and psychological stature, caused me to pout and whine, to sometimes burst into tears as I straddled the prone deer, stamping my feet miserably and solidly on the ground instead of having them dangling along the other deer’s flanks, in midair.
My pulling a long face often shortened Nai-nai’s by a broad grin. Otherwise she imitated me. Mimicking my foul mood didn’t stretch her face any between forehead and chin, while it added inches to mine. (I would one day dislocate my jaw in this way.) When I cried, my mouth wide open, my father would laugh, similar to Nai-nai, and call me Joe E. Brown after the rubber-faced comedian, which of course only made me cry all the harder. After she’d had her fun with me, Nai-nai relented and lifted me onto the back of the standing deer, which my sister had vacated with her help and which now only had to bound away to make me eternally happy.
Recalling this interlude in my childhood reminded me of the photographs taken of Nai-nai’s servants. There they were, in black and white. Sho-lan, grinning, hair-plaited, siming-jacketed, no more than fourteen or fifteen, held Wendye in her arms. Sho-lan, who was blamed for having spoiled my sister by picking her up whenever she cried or threatened to, which happened so often that the two of them appeared as one — a set of asymmetrical, unchronological Siamese twins. Sho-lan, our amah whom Wendye monopolized, upon whom we later conferred the unkind but apt sobriquet Pie-face. Her broad face was a single plane decorated, as a child would draw on a sheet of paper, with eyes, eyebrows, nubbin of a nose, mouth — features that lay flush with that shadowless surface. Next to Sho-lan and towering above her, First Cook (his name having escaped my mother’s memory), as scrawny and tall as Sho-lan was round and squat, his gaze good-natured and sheepish, his protruding Adam’s apple pendulous beneath the slanting shelf of his receding chin. It was First Cook who, alerted by my mother’s scream that something was amiss, had come running from the kitchen armed with a broom. My mother had peeked in on me in the nursery and found a giant spider the span of a hand on the wall above my crib. It was swat, and swat again. No more spider. Unfortunately, First Cook was not on hand the night I was bitten by a similarly outsized mosquito. I scratched and scratched until it bled — not a good thing in steamy, subtropical, summertime Shanghai.
My mother: “It was wartime (between the Nationalist troops and the Communist revolutionaries) and penicillin was in very short supply, and very expensive. Only a few hospitals had it, and then for the war-wounded. Or you obtained it on the black market at an even more outrageous price. Your infection was spreading rapidly. And you wouldn’t stop scratching. You were delirious. You had a raging fever. We had to tie your hands to the bars of your crib. We could actually see the infection spreading, moving up your leg. If we didn’t get penicillin — thank heavens for Grampa — before it reached your heart . . . well, thank heavens for Grampa.”
And rounding out the portrait, there was Second Cook, First Cook’s wife, almost as tall and bony as her husband. A long head, a square, almost lug jaw, large, intelligent, skeptical eyes practically challenging the camera, wide, firm mouth shut tightly in discretion or suspicion, possibly disdain. A handsome woman. In the photo of Second Cook, I saw Dashao in words. She “dictated” them to me, this lanky stand-in for Dashao, whose photo didn’t accompany Nai-nai when she came to the United States nine years after the success of the Communist Revolution. By then, maid and mistress had been separated by an ocean and a quarter of a century — the same number of years Dashao had spent in faithful service to my grandmother.
Unlike with Jiunyang, it wasn’t through shared if diluted bloodlines that Dashao entered my grandmother’s service as a maidservant and left it as a friend and confidante. China made widows out of women who were once wives, women displaced if not from actual home and hearth then certainly from a decent position in a rigidly patriarchal society where a husband was required for status, authority, inclusion, and where the lack of one was a stigma, a literal shame, and a sufficient cause for ostracism. Dashao was one such woman when she arrived at Nai-nai’s door.
Strangely enough, both Nai-nai and Dashao had much in common. Like Baba, Nai-nai’s father-in-law, Dashao’s father had also been a teacher who had failed the imperial examination at the end of the Qing dynasty (a.d. 1644 — 1912). He was also enlightened enough, as was Baba, to want his daughter to be literate and was literate enough himself to teach his daughter to read and write. Like Nai-nai, Dashao learned sewing and needlework from her mother, became a skilled seamstress, and supplemented her family’s income with her handiwork. She, too, married an officer in the
Nationalist Army, but her husband was killed in the provincial wars, leaving her a widow at twenty with two infant sons, both of whom died not long thereafter, one in a bombing raid, the other from smallpox.
Dashao bade me take up my pen and resuscitate her back into being. She had me describe her plight to my grandmother, who is interviewing her for the position of maidservant: “When I was a child and living in the house of my parents, I witnessed the wedding procession of a wellborn maiden to a dead man. They had been betrothed since infancy, but soon after their engagement, he died of tuberculosis. I was touched by the pomp and dignity of the ceremony, and I vowed that if my husband-to-be died before I did, I would be an honorable widow and never again marry. Little did I know that my husband would be taken from me so soon after our wedding. And when he was, I wished I had been so lucky as to marry a groom who was deceased, for then I wouldn’t have had to be lonely without him. I wouldn’t have had to grieve on three separate occasions within five years: first, when I left my family to be wed; second, when I learned of the death of my husband; and third, when I buried my two sons.”
Nai-nai conducted the interview thoughtfully and thoroughly. Not only was she looking for indications of the candidate’s qualifications but also, equally if not more important, clues to her character. She had already formed a good first impression of Dashao, who had arrived with a letter of recommendation and the greeting, “My humble respects to the august mistress of the house.” She also exhibited propriety and the bearing of someone superior to the position she was seeking, as if she were at home in luxury, familiar with wealth. When Nai-nai asked Dashao how she was able to support her two sons after the death of her husband, the prospective servant replied, thus explaining the reason for her ease: “Madam, I worked in this very house. General Lu Jung-ting was warlord of the whole province at the time, and I found employment as one of the many maidservants in his enormous household. I received no pay — just two meals a day and a roof over my head and the heads of my two children. When I heard that the wife of the man who had defeated General Lu was now living in his house and looking for a maidservant, I came straightaway.”
And straightaway was how my grandmother hired her, with commensurate fiduciary compensation in addition to room and board, as her personal servant, her son’s nursemaid, and, when she discovered what turned out to be Dashao’s trump card, their cook as well. That position had figured strongly in the “rice wars” that raged between Nai-nai and Dejie for the gustatory affections of my grandfather, and it initiated a strong alliance between mistress and maid against my grandfather’s second wife, to whom Dashao had taken an immediate aversion.
Dashao had me take up my pen again and write down the following: Just one week after the first “rice war,” Dashao entered Nai-nai’s room and announced, “Guo Yi Tai-tai (Dejie) stopped me in the hall the other day. It was in the corner of the hallway at a time of day when no one passes. She asked me to work for her so that General Li could eat my good food every day”.
“And what did you reply?” my grandmother inquired.
“I told her that I was already employed, that I worked for you and my young master, and that I was very happy with my job.”
“And did she accept your answer?”
“She asked me how I would have responded if General Li had put the same question to me. I told her if General Li wanted to eat my food, then he should be the one to tell me so.”
The era of the New Life Movement — a socioreligious movement that combined aspects of Christianity and Confucianism — was in full swing at the time. It included the improvement of personal conduct and the cultivation of virtues such as courtesy, service, honor, and honesty for the betterment of oneself and society. It was a movement that Dejie, who was in thrall to Chiang Mei-ling, Chiang Kai-shek’s Christian wife, was quick to support
“Except a man be born again,” Dejie quoted to Dashao, whom she had decided was in particular need of salvation, especially since the servant’s snub, “he cannot see New Life.” Dressed modestly in a long-sleeved cheongsam despite the hot, humid summer’s day, and with a King James Bible in the crook of her arm, she had stopped Dashao in the hallway. “I saw you watching that gaudy funeral in town yesterday when you should have been running errands for your mistress. Don’t you know that such expensive celebrations are wasteful and superstitious?”
Dashao shrugged her shoulders. “I like lighting joss sticks and firecrackers and burning spirit money. Now that I work for a wealthy family there are lots of things it would be improper for me to do but, thank the gods” — a heresy which made Dejie clench her jaw — “enjoying funerals isn’t one of them. At the temple fairs and outdoor theatricals, I’m forced to sit in a special section reserved for the well-to-do and their servants, far from the stage and the excitement. I must be on my best behavior not to shame my mistress or make her lose face because of me. Sometimes I think I would rather trade places with the beggar women. They have a front-row seat, practically right up onstage. They have no face to save, and so they can have a grand time, laughing, chattering away, slapping their knees, without fearing what others will think of them. Even if I’m having a good time, it wouldn’t do for me to show it.”
That was hardly the end of their mutual antagonism. When Dashao shuffled, Dejie told her to pick up her feet. If her bun was less than a tight and perfect knot, she told her to fix her hair. If Dashao cooked more than four dishes and a soup for Nai-nai and her son Yau Luen, Dejie accused her of being frivolous and wasteful. When Dejie came upon Dashao scrubbing her face and hands, drying them, then repeating the procedure two more times, the servant greeted yet another admonition this way: “Didn’t you tell me that I must bathe once a week, wash and boil my vegetables before eating them, and wash my hands and face three times a day? I thought I’d get the last rule over and done with all at once so I would have time to do my chores.” When Dejie came upon Dashao scolding the serving boy for being slow or lazy Dejie chided, “If you were Christian, you would be more charitable in your dealings with others. If you become a Christian, you’ll grow a good heart, save your soul, and go to heaven.”
To which Dashao replied, “I’ve seen Chinese who are Christian and Chinese who are not. The good actions of one are no better than the good actions of the other. And the same holds true for the bad actions: they are no worse. As for heaven, what do any of us know about what awaits us after death? Who’s to say that your Christian heaven is any better than our Chinese spirit world?”
On another occasion, Dashao was sitting in the courtyard mending a pair of Nai-nai’s cloth shoes. She was holding the needle very close to her eyes so she could thread it when Dejie, under the nearby willow tree, raised her eyes from her Bible and, seeing Dashao’s effortful squint, remarked, “In the Christian religion, in order to enter the kingdom of heaven, the rich of this earth will have to pass through the eye of a needle, but the poor of this world will wear a gold crown set with as many precious stones as the number of people they’ve converted to Christianity Those with the most gems in their crowns will sit closest to God the Father.”
Dashao dropped her hands into her lap and burst out laughing. “No wonder you’re so anxious to convert people! All I know is what is here and now. And what I see is the rich of the world passing through thresholds whose doors are held wide open for them, while we poor must slip round to the back entrance and pound with all our might for someone to open up.”
“There are rich who believe, and there are poor who believe,” Dejie countered, undeterred.
Dashao wet the end of the thread with her tongue. “The rich think it’s fashionable to dress in Western clothes and eat Western food. Why wouldn’t they think it fashionable to believe in Western religion as well? As for the poor who believe, their faith is seasonal When the harvest is bad and there’s little rice to be had, they believe, and the Christian missionaries give them rice. When the harvest is good and their bellies are full, they revert to burning incense in front of the a
ncestral tablets.”
Dejie threw down the hefty King James in sheer frustration. “You should be ashamed of yourself — sewing in the courtyard for all to see when today is the Sabbath, the day of rest. If you must sew for your mistress, can’t you at least sew in the privacy of your own room?”
Dashao pulled the thread through the needle’s eye and knotted the two ends together. “What difference does it make if I sew here in the courtyard or alone in my room, since your God sees everywhere?”
“It’s better that you’re not a Christian,” Dejie said, picking up her Bible with an angry swipe and rising to go inside. “You’d make a very bad one.”
“Now there we are in complete agreement,” Dashao said, slapping her thighs in confirmation. “For one, I cannot tell my hands to be still on the Sabbath any more than I can any other day when there’s work to be done. They simply wouldn’t listen. For another, Christians, so you tell me, always tell the truth. When I go to market, how could I tell a merchant who wants fifty cash for an article that I have only forty cash, when that is not true? My mistress Li Tai-tai entrusts me with the family budget What kind of manager would I be if I paid all that the merchant asked?”
How Dashao felt about Dejie’s New Life Movement was also how she felt about Western food, especially after Da Mama — my paternal great-grandmother — developed a fondness for French cuisine, a taste she had acquired from the days she lived in Shanghai. Now she had brought it with her to Hong Kong, where her family had moved so that my father could receive a good education, a Western one at that.
“Eating in a Western restaurant is much more hygienic than eating in a Chinese one,” Da Mama explained, hoping to whet her family’s appetite for a new gastronomic experience. “A waiter serves each person at table his own portion on his plate. The diner’s eating utensils touch only his own food.”