Kitchen Chinese

by Ann Mah

  —YAN-KIT SO, CLASSIC FOOD OF CHINA

  “In the Ming dynasty, banquets often started at 11 A.M. and would last for six hours or more.”

  —A. ZEE, SWALLOWING CLOUDS: A PLAYFUL JOURNEY THROUGH CHINESE CULTURE, LANGUAGE AND CUISINE

  Sitting at my desk, I scroll through the names in my cell phone, considering each one. There’s Claire, but she went with me last month. Lily? Picky eater. Ed…not picky enough. Geraldine is detoxing with a raw foods diet. Jeff left for Shanghai right after I returned from Pingyao, but even if he were here, he’s made it clear he wants nothing to do with Beijing NOW, which he considers amateurish (“small peanuts,” was how he described it, but I think he meant potatoes).

  Honestly, I never thought it would be this hard to find people to eat out with me. Before I had this job, I would have jumped at the chance to dine with a food critic.

  “It’s not that I don’t like you,” protested Gab last week as we ate lunch together in the conference room. “I like you. I like going out to eat with you. Just not on your review dinners.” He ripped the paper cover off a cup of instant noodles, releasing a cloud of steam.

  “But why?” I demanded. “It’s a free meal.”

  “Only when we don’t exceed the three hundred kuai limit,” he pointed out. And it’s true. Beijing NOW’s tiny budget means we usually end up paying most of the bill out of our own pockets. “Besides,” he continued. “Eating out with you is like a tour through Roget’s Thesaurus.”

  “I had the exact same problem when I was the restaurant critic,” piped up Geraldine, pushing away her Tupperware of sun-warmed barley mixed with shredded seaweed.

  “What did you do?” I asked eagerly.

  “I switched jobs!” She laughed.

  Still, I’ve got to find someone. As I scroll through the contacts in my cell phone one more time, I hear a little pop from my computer. Ooh, e-mail. I click on the tiny envelope in the corner of the screen.

  To: Isabelle Lee

  From: Dwayne Keeg

  Subject: New friends

  Dear Isabelle,

  I am Dwayne.

  Your mother is friends with my mother.

  I will be in Beijing this weekend. I would like to invite you out for dinner. Please let me know when you are available.

  Sincerely,

  Dwayne

  I read the message a few times, looking for clues. Strange e-mails from young men who reference my mother can only mean one thing: setup. And after my mom’s last matchmaking attempt—a starched corporate attorney who kept translating words off the Italian menu (“Now this is al dente. Al dente means ‘to the tooth.’ Now this is linguine. Linguine means ‘little tongues.’”)—I vowed never to be fixed up by her again.

  But…maybe this is just a friendly gesture, a family get-together. Besides, I could take him to Empress Impressions and kill two birds with one stone…

  “Isabelle, when’s the weekly restaurant review going to be in?” bellows Ed from across the room.

  “You’ll have it by Monday,” I promise as I type a quick reply to Dwayne, assuring him that I’d love to meet him for dinner. I’ll just need to coax someone into coming with us.

  Shit!” I stare at my e-mail in dismay. My date with Dwayne is rapidly approaching and I still haven’t found a third person to give me cover. I thought Geraldine might acquiesce, but she just sent me an e-mail saying she’s off to some silent hot yoga retreat.

  “What’s wrong?” Claire wanders into the living room and perches on the arm of the sofa.

  I groan. “It’s Mom. She wants to set me up with one of her friend’s sons. We’re going to dinner tomorrow but I can’t find anyone else to go with me.”

  “Why do you want someone else to go with you?”

  “So that Dwayne doesn’t think we’re on a date, obviously.”

  “Ah, yes. Safety in numbers.” She nods. “Who is it? One of Mom’s typical setups?”

  I click on Dwane’s e-mail and show it to Claire. Her eyes scan the screen of my laptop. “You replied to him?” She laughs. “He got the one-click response from me. Delete!” She mimes clicking her computer mouse.

  “Wait a second. He wrote to you too?”

  “Yep, the exact same e-mail. I guess he didn’t care which one of us he ended up with.” She turns back to the computer. “I. Am. Dwayne,” she intones. “He sounds like a caveman. You, Isabelle. Me, Dwayne. Go. Eat. Dinner.” She raises her eyebrows and continues to read out loud: “‘My mother is friends with your mother…’ Well, Mom certainly didn’t pick him for his literary style.”

  “He’s single and she knows his family. According to Mom, that’s all us young kids need to fall in love. You know what she’s like.” I stiffen my spine and lift my chin in an approximation of our mother’s upright posture. “‘You girls,’” I shake my finger. “‘You need to think about settling down and having some kids before your father and I go senile. Aiya’!” I heave a heavy sigh.

  Claire giggles, before straightening her face and adopting the same upright stance. “‘I know a nice young man,’” she says in our mother’s clipped tones. “‘Why don’t you go out with him? Just one date. It won’t kill you! He’s very nice. Chinese.’”

  We both dissolve into laughter. “Ugh. She’s so annoying,” I grumble. “She’d marry us off to the first two Chinese guys who came along.”

  “Chinese? Any guy. As long as he has a good job. You know how she feels about Jewish men…”

  “‘They’re so smart,’” we both chorus.

  “Why don’t I go with you?” Claire suggests.

  My eyes widen in astonishment. “Really? You’d do that for me?” I say gratefully.

  She shrugs. “Sure. You know my mission in life is to thwart Mom’s matchmaking.” She laughs, but I’m not sure if she’s joking.

  I slip my arm around her slender shoulders and give her a little squeeze. “Thank you, thank you, thank you!” I cry with relief.

  College, career, marriage, grandchildren. Like most Chinese parents, my mother has always expected these things of her daughters. And, like most Chinese parents, her hopes have soared high—the college should be prestigious, the career well-paid, the husband Chinese, and the children fluent in Mandarin. Oh, and we would live next door to her and Dad, so they could see their grandchildren every day. Obviously things have not quite worked out this way.

  Fiercely competitive, my mother and her friends engage in a continuous game of one-upmanship, pitting their progeny against each other like pawns. For years Mom was the queen in the corner of the chessboard, sweeping aside everyone else’s accomplishments with Claire’s academic achievements at Harvard and Yale Law. But then Auntie May (we call all of our mom’s female friends “auntie”) announced her daughter’s engagement to one of the Google founders, and started knitting booties exactly three months after the wedding. And then Auntie Teresa, who had been in disgrace ever since her daughter, Connie, moved to San Francisco and came out of the closet, gained ground by revealing that Connie’s girlfriend was pregnant via in vitro, and they’d bought the town house next door to her. Scarcely a year later Auntie Daisy moved to New Jersey to live with her son—perfectly sweet, though he’d only graduated from community college—because he and his wife wanted their children to grow up speaking Mandarin.

  My mother now stands alone among her friends as the only one with (a) two unmarried daughters, and (b) zero grandchildren. She watches from the sidelines as her friends cluck about the size of their daughters’ engagement rings and red egg parties. She remains silent as they swap notes about Chinese banquet halls or sigh with mock exasperation over their precocious grandchildren. And she conspires to somehow, by hook or by crook, find us husbands. She’s asked all her friends, visited a fortune-teller, and created profiles for us on Match.com. Claire claims she’s even consulted a famous Taipei matchmaker. I wouldn’t put it past her.

  Of course, I’m partially to blame for the pestering. I haven’t introduced my parents to a bo
yfriend in eons, so long that they’re convinced I don’t date, that I’m not interested in men, or they’re not interested in me. If I did produce someone nice (e.g., Chinese), perhaps Mom would stop with the blind dates, the make-overs, the unsolicited fashion advice. In fact, the last time she criticized my unruly mane of hair—“Men don’t like messy!” she’d insisted. “Believe me! I’m a hair professional!”—I was tempted to whip out my cell phone, speed-dial Richard, and demand that he hop the next Metro North train to Westchester, to hell with his fear of suburbs. But then I remembered what happened the last, and only, time I introduced a boyfriend to my parents.

  I was nineteen, which explains why I was dating a frat boy. Blaine and I met in “Geology of Earthquakes,” a freshman lecture designed for jocks (him) and liberal arts majors afraid of science (me). He saw the Greek letters on my sorority sweatshirt, invited me to a date party, poured me whiskey sours and told me I was mysterious and beautiful; one thing led to another, and for the first time in my life I fell madly in love.

  Blaine had all-American looks and an all-American story. He was the first person in his family to go to college—his father worked in a coal mine in western Pennsylvania—and he had a boisterous laugh and a slight, but jagged, chip on his shoulder about privileged, upper-middle-class sorority girls. I was intrigued by his broad-chested confidence and hardscrabble childhood—so different from my own—and when my parents made their monthly visit to Manhattan for dim sum, I brought him along.

  It was Blaine’s first trip to Chinatown, and as we strolled hand in hand down Mott Street, I watched his face carefully. He seemed fascinated by the cramped streets, the long-necked roasted ducks hanging in shop windows, the sidewalks lined with rows of fake Gucci purses. As we entered the crowded dim sum hall, I squeezed his hand and our fingers remained entwined until we located my parents, sitting at a crowded round table.

  “Mom, Dad, Auntie, Uncle, everyone…this is Blaine,” I said shyly. “Blaine, these are my parents, Grace and Tom Lee, my aunt Marcie, uncle Gray…” I went around the table, trying to ignore their expressions of surprise. I had mentioned a boy, but not a boyfriend, and I certainly hadn’t told them he was white.

  “Howdy!” Blaine exclaimed, sitting and draping an arm across the back of my chair. “Grace, Tom, I’ve heard a lot about you. It’s great to meet you!”

  I cringed. None of my friends ever called my parents by their first name. But my parents seemed to take it in stride.

  “Would you like some tea?” asked my mother, pouring us each a cup from the china teapot.

  “Nah, I’ll just have a beer,” he said, gesturing to the waiter. “Can I have a beer?” He pantomimed drinking from a bottle. “You know, beer?”

  “Um, I think he speaks English,” I muttered. “Are you sure you don’t want to stick with tea?” No one else was drinking beer.

  “Are you kidding, babe? Beer’s awesome with Chinese food.”

  To his credit, Blaine ate. And ate, and ate, and ate. He devoured dumplings, upending the small steamer baskets onto his plate. He loaded piles of noodles onto his plate, demolished half a dish of spare ribs and a heap of fried rice. My mother and Aunt Marcie kept ordering more and more food, and it kept getting scooped up by Blaine’s fork and disappearing down his gullet.

  Finally, four beers, three pairs of dropped chopsticks, and twelve baskets of shrimp xiumai later, Blaine pushed his chair away from the table and exhaled deeply. “That. Was. Awesome!” he exclaimed, stretching his arms and depositing a hand on the side of my thigh, squeezing it suggestively. “Babe, we’re going to have to work some of that off.” He grinned.

  Four pairs of eyes swiveled toward us and I saw shock in all of them. Had my family ever alluded to sex before? Maybe once, when I was going through puberty and my mother bought me a box of sanitary napkins and told me about my period. But that was it. I was still embarrassed to watch R-rated movies with them.

  “Um…” I blushed and muttered something about having to meet my roommate at the library. Blaine and I left soon after.

  I felt sure my mother would give me an earful, but she didn’t mention Blaine until I came home for the weekend, a few weeks later. I was on my way to bed when she beckoned me into the tiny front room she used as her office.

  “Isabelle, come here. I want to talk to you.”

  I winced. I thought I knew what was coming. She sat at her computer, balancing a heavy dictionary on her lap.

  “There’s a word I want to know,” she said seriously, pointing to the open page. She squinted at the book. “I can’t read it without my glasses. Can you have a look?”

  I followed her finger. “‘Callow,’” I read aloud. “‘Immature or inexperienced. Untried, raw, green, naive, puerile. A callow youth.’” I fell silent.

  “Callow,” my mother repeated thoughtfully.

  What was she trying to say about Blaine? Was she going to ask me about my sex life? I squirmed under her gaze and my heart started to beat too fast. I licked my lips and wondered how I could escape to my room. “Um, I’m feeling kind of sleepy…” I feigned a yawn.

  But it seemed my mother had expressed everything she wanted to say, relying on subtext to convey the rest of her message. “Give me a kiss,” she said, holding up her cheek. “G’night, sweetheart. Love you.”

  I went up to my room, my cheeks burning with a shame and anger that I swallowed rather than express.

  Blaine and I broke up a few months later—he cheated on me with a Spanish student while studying abroad in Barcelona—but our relationship had changed the day he met my parents and it never recovered. My mother’s disapproval of Blaine tarnished everything, making our dorm room romance seem tawdry and juvenile. I wanted to ignore her, but my parents’ opinion mattered too much to me. Fearful and resentful of their censure, I didn’t introduce them to my next boyfriend, a long-haired, chain-smoking anthropology major. Or the next one, a Wall Street junior analyst, who I practically lived with. Or the next one, a sharp-tongued financial journalist, but we barely lasted three months anyway. As the years passed, maintaining silence about my love life became a habit I didn’t want to break.

  As a result, my mother assumes I’ve been single for the past ten years. And now that I’m hurtling into my thirties, her anxiety grows with each passing month and wasted egg. Two wasted eggs, actually, considering that Claire is also single.

  She began the parade of eligible bachelors a few years ago, a string of pleasant young men with good jobs, straight teeth, and not an ounce of sex appeal among them. In the beginning they were uniformly Chinese American, but as we became older—and our mother became more desperate for us to settle down and bear her grandchildren—other ethnicities were added to the mix: American-born Korean, Japanese, a few Jews. At first it was amusing, but as the dropped hints piled up to Mount Everest proportions, I began to chafe under my mother’s disappointment and concern. A conversation about something as innocent as shoelaces could instantly turn into a thicket of oblique suggestions. “You broke a shoelace?” she’d said the other day on the phone. “You could get a new pair in a men’s shop. They have dark shoelaces. And you never know who you might meet there!”

  Back in New York, a younger, more yielding Claire used to go on dates with these guys, eating polite bites of chicken breast at echoing midtown restaurants before chastely kissing them good-night on the cheek. But then one day something changed. In the months before she moved to Beijing, she started to thwart her dates, never saying no, but instead inviting other friends to go with her. “I’m getting together a group of people to go bird-watching,” she’d say, effectively squelching any romance on offer at the crack of dawn in Park Slope.

  Faced with the same parade of nice young men, I simply said no. As in: “No, I do not want to be set up for the prom.” Or: “No, I will not play mahjong with Uncle Clifford’s son.” Or: “No, I will not take tango lessons with the I.T. guy from Dad’s office.”

  “You can lead a horse to water,” my mother w
ould grumble, “but you can’t make it drink. Aiya! I’m getting old!” At this, I would roll my eyes. My mother, prone to dramatic displays, was surely exaggerating. I’d meet someone, someday, and he’d be intelligent and witty and charming, and, most importantly, he wouldn’t be introduced to me by my mother.

  Except, I haven’t met him yet. And, in recent years, afraid of turning into a lonely spinster with a penchant for traditional Chinese medicine, no has started turning into yes.

  After thirty minutes of waiting, cradling our cell phones, peering out the front door, and craning our necks to stare at every other customer at Empress Impressions, Claire and I finally locate I-am-Dwayne (as she insists on calling him) sitting at a table in the corner. A table that, I might add, is occupied by two people, not one.

  Dwayne’s thin moustache almost hides his surprise when I introduce Claire, but neither my sister nor I can conceal our astonishment at meeting Dwayne’s companion.

  “You didn’t tell me he was bringing his mother,” Claire hisses at me as we move to a larger table.

  “I had no idea!” I insist.

  “Ladies, let me introduce you all properly.” Dwayne’s weedy voice rises above ours. “Mother, this is Isabelle and Claire Lee. Isabelle, Claire, my mom, Dorothy Keeg.”

  “Please, call me Mrs. Keeg,” she says, patting her iron gray curls into place.

  “It’s so nice of you to join us,” I say as we settle into our relentlessly upright carved Ming chairs.

  “It’s such an unusual dining room,” says Mrs. Keeg. “So Chinese.”

  “Well, we are in China,” says Claire. I shoot her a look, but she has an innocent expression on her face.

  One of Beijing’s ritziest eateries, Empress Impressions advertises itself as an authentic imperial dining experience, serving a menu of the venerable Empress Cixi’s favorite dishes (camel’s hoof, anyone?) with a royal price tag to match. Entering the dining room is like being transported into a modern interpretation of an imperial palace. Carved beams soar overhead, and a colorful school of koi dart around the pond that flows beneath the Plexiglas floor. The waitresses are all dressed to resemble the eunuch staff of the Qing court, ambiguously sexless, their hair cropped short. Though it’s eight o’clock on a Saturday evening, the restaurant maintains a quiet hush, born not of decorum, but emptiness. We’re one of three tables, I note. Not a good sign.