by Leslie Li
She indicated first the full moon, now at its zenith in the sky, then our teacups upon whose brimming surface it had cast a perfect, silver circle.
“Now is the perfect moment to drink our tea.”
And so we drank.
Steamed Sponge “Moon Cake”
5 extra large eggs, room temperature
1 tablespoon water
1 cup sugar
1 cup rice flour (or Swansdown cake flour)
1¼ tablespoons melted butter
If you live near a Chinatown, it’s easier to buy a tin of moon cakes than it is to make them from scratch. I’ve solved the problem through adaptation: as long as a sweet, baked dessert is round, such as the steamed sponge cake here, it is a moon cake. In addition, I prefer the firm but springy texture of this not-too-sweet dessert over that of “official” heavy, sugary moon cakes, whatever their filling.
Beat eggs, water, and sugar for 10 minutes in a mixer at high speed, or for 20 minutes by hand, till thick and creamy. Fold in flour, then melted butter. Line bottom of a 9-inch round cake pan with parchment paper. Pour batter into pan.
Fill bottom of wok with water. Bring water to rolling boil. Set pan on steaming rack and cover. Turn heat down to medium. Steam for 20 minutes. Cake is done if toothpick inserted in it comes out clean. Turn out cake and peel off parchment. Serve warm or at room temperature.
Serves 6-8.
SEATED ON A STONE
I have almost always lived on islands. Islands rising out of rivers, such as Manhattan, my current part-time address, and Paris’s Ile de la Cité, my postgraduate home. Or islands in the sea that are big in size, like Sicily, where I decamped after Paris; or in population density, like Hong Kong, where I resided as a child. But never have I been to, let alone lived on, a tiny uninhabited island.
Not until two years after I visited Nai-nai in Guilin, that is, where my monthlong stay instigated a writing jag that had petered out, interrupted too long and too often by paid work and family obligations, to an unbudging halt. It was then that Mirja, who I’d met years ago in Paris, where we both were attending the Alliance Française, invited me to spend a month with her and her family in the Finnish lake district. What if I spent a week of it in a rented cottage on an island with a population of one — me? Some twelve hundred islands comprise the archipelago of Turku in the Baltic Sea. Surely one of them would meet my simple but stringent requirements: sea and solitude. Infected by my enthusiasm at first, Mirja grew tentative upon second thought. She imagined I’d be prey to tanukis (“Raccoon dogs that are wild. Keep your door shut.”), vipers (“Venomous. Wear shoes outdoors.”), and sea snakes (“Don’t worry. They may be large but they’re innocuous.”). Her admonitions were well taken but not a deterrent. Frighten me she might, but prevent me from inhabiting my parcel of privacy in the sea she was powerless to do. She did, however, make one last-ditch attempt to deflect me from my course by suggesting, perkily, “How about an island in the middle of a lake?”
My pelagic home — a one-room log cabin with attached sauna — stood in a clearing that overlooked a swath of islet-studded sea. It had electricity but no running water or plumbing. Those conveniences were supplied by a hand pump some fifty yards behind the cabin and an outhouse about fifteen yards downwind. Twenty paces in front of my porch was a big flat lichen-encrusted slab of granite — my centering rock, I called it — where I ate my meals and spent many hours sitting, looking, being, and, eventually, writing. My island, like my cottage, was very small but it was large enough to deserve a name, Rustavi, which, translated from Finnish, means “fireweed” — the long, conical, lavender-pink flower that grows with abandon all over southern Finland. Disappointingly, Rustavi wasn’t a true island. A bridge, wide enough for a compact car, connected it to Rustavi Central, its mother island and the main one in this part of the archipelago. The owner of my cottage, Mr. Karjalainen, fearing that I might come down with cabin fever, had tied red ribbons around the trunks of several trees growing in strategic bends and forks in the dirt path to show me the way to civilization and back. A big, craggy man in his fifties, he had met me at the small port in Rustavi Central and, before taking me to my cabin, driven me to a small grocery store where I stocked up on a week’s worth of food: eggs, cheese, potatoes, sausages, onions, milk, bread, strawberries, jam, butter, canned tuna, curly red lettuce, carrots, tomatoes, lemons, olive oil. I was set. Not a care or concern to disturb or distract me. I could hunker down and write to my heart’s content.
Kustavi Tangential, as I dubbed my exclusive island, was austere but in no way was it deprived. The antithesis of an island paradise oozing with nature’s bounty, my northern retreat was all dull gray granite and twisted scrub pine. Isolated by a sea whose color was that crayon-box shade, Prussian blue — militant, opaque — my temporary address was a mere dot, a spit of land burnt clean of any luxuriance and every excess. What was left was the absolutely essential, the strictly fundamental. Just like my life there would be.
A pared-to-the-bone island isn’t just a place to experience solitude, a key ingredient in the writing life; it is a metaphor for solitude. Alone on an island, you run the risk of self-discovery. But that is precisely its lure and challenge: by getting away from it all, you come face-to-face with yourself. Having led a somewhat peripatetic existence, I’d prided myself on having a rather adventurous spirit, even on being a trailblazer of sorts. That delusion evaporated on my very first trip to the water pump. Blinded by a surfeit of lightheartedness, and oblivious to the fact that three other paths radiated out from it, I chose the wrong trail home and found myself lost in the woods. As darkness descended, I had a panic attack with all the fixings — the flight of logic, the labored breathing, the thud of heartbeat against breastbone. Finally, after anticipating attacks by tanukis, vipers, and sea snakes, I regained enough presence of mind to follow the path back to the pump, where the second trail I took led me safely home. “If anything can teach you humility,” wrote the Finnish author and longtime lover of islands, Tove Jansson, “it is living with the sea close at hand.”
So could the expectation that I’d get cracking immediately on Nai-nai’s biography-in-progress now that I’d carved out a week of silence and solitude in which I would do nothing but write. I didn’t take into account that it might take me the better part of that week just to get my bearings. One source of disorientation was the paradox of simplicity. Making do with little, I discovered, was more than an exercise in self-sufficiency, it was a source of self-enrichment. What little there was was more than enough. The loaves and the fishes that I’d bought at the grocery store seemed to multiply the more that I consumed them. My simple meals tasted like regal banquets for all the effort and preparation they required (Therein lay the paradox. Simple did not mean easy. Simple meant time-consuming. Time-consuming meant time away from resuming work on my grandmother’s biography): water from the pump to boil the potatoes and sausages, to wash the vegetables, not to mention the dishes afterwards and, later, myself. A cup of coffee, for all the displacements (and thus time lost to writing) I underwent to obtain it, was transformed into high tea. Taking a sauna bath was a major production: two trips to the water pump with a bucket in each hand both times, tearing and crumpling the sheets of newsprint, lighting it along with the kindling, placing the logs just so to create an updraft, waiting a good twenty minutes before they burned like blazes, by which time I was more than ready to come clean in this baptism by fire.
Which is precisely the point. Everything that I did, as simple and basic as it was, took time, the one thing my secluded island (though not I, considering my purpose) had plenty of. And because it took time, which required patience, everything was imbued with a presence — a present-tenseness — that lent to the act a spiritual significance, the grace of a ritual (and the imposition of guilt that I was not doing what I’d come to do). In fact, after my panic attack disabused me of the notion that I possessed the faintest spark of an Alexandra David-Neel or a Freya Stark, I planted myself
on my centering rock facing out to sea, exerting a passive resistance against the centrifugal pull of another life-threatening episode of high adventure or of mere restlessness. My renunciation rewarded me most amply. Like Mohammed’s mountain, my island came to me. Above me, a seagull hovered on white boomerang wings, its Brancusian form held in place by the steady breeze: a perfect tension between matter and energy Before me, the glacial erratic — geological émigré deposited by the Ice Age on the granite islet across from me — basked in the sunlight serene as a sphinx. Rock upon rock, it reminded me of Old Man Hill in Guilin, which was a hill atop a larger hill. The Old Man sat facing out to sea with his knees pulled up to his chest, much the way I now sat on my centering rock surrounded by remnants of my half-eaten breakfast, my untouched notebook, my capped pen.
Just then, a stately schooner, sails bellied with the wind, slid like some ghost ship out from behind the alien boulder and into heart-stopping view I didn’t wave. Neither did the sailors on her spanking deck. Exhibitionism has its place, but not on my austere stationary island nor on their majestic mobile one. I picked up and uncapped my pen, set my opened notebook on my knees, and, perhaps because I was in present tense, far from the heat and noise of human interaction and in the process of digesting my Western breakfast of black coffee, scrambled eggs, and buttered toast with strawberry jam, I began to write their polar opposite: the renao- and Chinese-food-filled Spring Festival as Nai-nai celebrated it in the past. The year was 1933. The place, Canton. The time, the beginning of the two-week period of shopping, socializing, and feasting that constituted Chinese New Years of old, so different from the pale, truncated version we celebrated in Riverdale when I was a child. I wrote:
During Spring Festival, my grandmother was faced with the near-heroic task of settling the household accounts. She had to pay merchants what moneys she owed them and receive what moneys were owed her before Lunar New Year, for by dawn of that day, no one could demand payment until the next Lunar New Year a full year away. Already, the city was ablaze with lights. Some of the illumination was provided by lenders, lantern in hand, out searching for borrowers who had not repaid their loan. Often the lantern-bearers headed for the temples, where the debtors in question hid among the merrymakers mesmerized by troupes of actors and acrobats.
Seated at her desk, Nai-nai was studying her ledger while Dashao moved the cedar chests and closets away from the walls and urged the manservant Liu-wu to help her.
“Old Aunt, why do you sweep each room with inward strokes of the broom?” he asked.
“Not to sweep the family’s wealth out the door,” Dashao replied. “I’ll never forget my mother encouraging me each and every New Year, ‘Be careful to sweep each inch of the room, my daughter. The speck of dust you miss might fly into your eyes and blind you.’ There!” she announced with pride. “The house is spotless. The coming year will be better than the last. Now you can start repainting the red gates, whitewashing the outer walls, and repa-pering the windows. And be quick about it. Everything must be finished within a fortnight.”
“Do you want me to be as crooked and bent as old Wenti when I’m just a quarter of his age?” the manservant replied. “Have some pity on me!”
“And what of me?” Dashao set her hands on her broad hips. “I must prepare enough food to satisfy the appetites of both man and god for more than two weeks, and I must do it all on the first few days of Spring Festival, since no knife or cleaver may be used until the festival is over. Do you think I want to be accused of cutting into the family’s wealth by wielding a sharp instrument?”
“What you’re asking me to do in the time you’re asking me to do it would take three men at least,” Liu-wu said, sulking.
“A single diligent man would do,” she replied. “And while you’re at it, console yourself by thinking about my obligations. Making the sweet, steamed glutinous pudding, nian gao. Stuffing the rice-flour skins with chopped pork, shredded scallions, and slivered ginger to make jiaozi And for a few of the dumplings, filling them with peanuts for long life; dates or chestnuts for the imminent arrival of a son; gold or silver coins so that one might never lack for money; or perhaps a nugget of jade to bring good fortune to whoever finds it in his bowl” She said this with a wink, suggesting that he might be the lucky recipient Then she gave Liu-wu a playful shove. “Start with the outer gates. Then Li Tai-tai can buy pictures of the door gods to protect us against evil spirits. Next, whitewash the walls so she can hang the red paper couplets along the doorways. The sooner you begin, the earlier youll be done.”
As soon as Liu-wu shuffled out the door, Nai-nai closed her ledger and, together with Dashao, went to see the wispy-bearded old man who had studied under a master calligrapher in Peking. He now owned a shop in the center of Canton that sold the finest-quality rice paper, sable brushes, and inkstones. From him my grandmother bought pictures of the two heavenly guardians to paste on both sides of the main entrance of her house, and couplets printed on strips of red paper which read: “Ten thousand generations,” “May all your wishes be fulfilled,” “Happiness, high position, and long life.” Because she was a country girl at heart and wished to be reminded of home, Nai-nai also bought paper streamers that bore the inscriptions: “Clear water ripples over the rocks” and “How beautiful are our rivers and mountains!”
When they returned home, Dashao reminded her mistress: “Li Tai-tai, in two days, the mat sheds go up in the center of the city and the flower vendors will set up their wares. Why not ask our landlady Sze Tai-tai, to accompany you to buy flowers? And don’t bother asking Yifu if she wants to go along. If it involves spending money shell be the first in line.”
“It will give Liu-wu an opportunity to drive the car and dress up in his chauffeur’s uniform,” Nai-nai said. “Hwang Tai-tai might like to join us. We’ll make a party of it. We’ll go the day after tomorrow.”
The twelfth month of the Chinese lunar calendar is known as the bitter month, but on the day that my grandmother chose to visit the flower market, Canton was filled with bright sunshine. A mild breeze blew through the city, perfuming every street and corner with the fragrance of fresh blooms and ripe fruits. Happy and excited, Nai-nai, Hwang Tai-tai, Sze Tai-tai, and Yifu piled into the roadster. With Liu-wu at the wheel, they headed for the center of town. But the closer they got to their destination, the thicker the crowds, until the car was barely able to move.
“Oh, this is impossible!” Yifu said, throwing up her hands in frustration. “Let’s get out and walk!”
Since they were mere blocks away from the flower market, her companions agreed. Directing Liu-wu to stay where he was so they might find him again, the four women hooked arms, then waded out into the raging sea of pushing and shoving shoppers. The cries and noises of various tradespeople filled the air. Each was hawking his own ware or service, and each had a specific call or sound to distinguish himself from the rest. The barber struck his tuning fork with a short steel rod. The hat seller shook a harness of bells. The puppeteer proclaimed the start of his show with a crash of cymbals and a thunder of gongs. The toy seller shook toys strung from the top of a long stick.
“Buy little man!” he sang to a reluctant child. “They’re lifelike! They have eyes and arms!”
“Green-glazed beauties! Old jars for new!” another merchant cried.
And another: “Try my confection of sugar, oil, and flour! It’s plaited like a horse’s tail decked out for New Year’s Day!”
The jar and the horse-blossom sellers triggered the voices of the crab-apple vendor, the soup and the turnip vendors. Everywhere there was the cacophony of renao, the heat and noise of human relationship and enterprise.
“Only two strings left! Crab apples red and shiny as rubies!”
“Sour prune soup! Just one bowl will satisfy you!”
“Turnip roots that taste as sweet as pears!”
And amid all this, troupes of actors, Cantonese opera singers, and rubber-limbed acrobats demonstrated their skills and vied for a
ttention with the city’s beggars, who, like their competition, considered theirs a profession like any other. After all, didn’t beggars adhere to strict rules and regulations, protocol, and hierarchy? Hadn’t they learned how to appraise a potential benefactor on the spot, to address him with the title “Great Master” or “Your Ladyship,” as Nai-nai was addressed at that very moment by a very old and stooped beggar, whom she rewarded with one kuai.
“Turtle, crawl to your door,” he sang, “your wealth will soon soar.”
“Madam took pity on me,” intoned another, to whom Sze Tai-tai had given one kuai. “Sons and grandsons you’ll soon have.”
Beggar women and children surrounded them weeping at a certain pitch and rhythm, as befitting a Chinese opera singer. When Yifu ignored their pleas, one woman shouted in her face, “Don’t give me money? I don’t care. Save it for your coffin!”
The male beggars shouted wildly and demonstrated their sores and deformities, competing to see who might outdo the other in eliciting sympathy or evoking horror. Nai-nai and her companions linked arms and managed to push past the wailing crowd that had gathered. Every street was claimed by a certain category of beggar, each known by a distinct, highly descriptive name: Sword Slappers, who hit their chests with the fiat sides of two long swords until the flesh there was a series of red welts; Nail Headers, who used a brick to tap nails into their skulls when a chosen patron refused to part with a few coins; One-Eyed Dragons, who pretended total blindness when in fact they had the use of at least one eye; Rollers, whose hands and feet were completely deformed and who would howl pitifully and thrash about in the mud; Moving Carts, paralyzed beggars who lay on carts pulled along by an ambulatory colleague; and Rock Carriers, male beggars who carried female invalids on their backs.
Arms still linked, necks straining to catch glimpses of their destination as well as the activities swirling around them, the four women both pressed on and were swept toward the mat sheds of the flower market.