by Jenna Blum
This was around the time the League of Nations was de-286 feated in the Senate, and Jack Bliss, sitting in his wheelchair at the kitchen table with the newspaper spread open on his lap, told George and Louise heatedly that America's reputation around the world as a peaceful and democratic nation, a country with a mission for good, was dead now, had died with that vote. Louise said in dismay, "Oh Jack, I hate to think so." When George looked over at Louise, he wasn't surprised to see her mouth looking drawn-down and thin. He and Louise both worried a good deal over Jack, who was in pain much of the time and suffered from night terrors, dreams his parents couldn't imagine and therefore never spoke of. George didn't feel he had room in his life just now for worrying about what the rest of the world thought of the United States of America.
Not much more than a year after the war ended, Jack Bliss married one of the Glasser sisters and opened a business selling carpet sweepers and other household appliances; in the 1920s, George and Louise moved to town and gave over the running of the ranch to their son-in-law, Howard Hubertine. In those years just before the start of the Great Depression, a couple of money men from Pendleton bought Stanley's Camp and macadamized the road going up to the lake; on the ashes of the livery barn they built a two-lane bowling alley and a dance hall and a hotel, which for a few prosperous years brought crowds of townspeople from as far as Prineville and La Grande and Baker City for summer holidays. When things went downhill in the thirties, the government claimed the property and redrew the boundaries of the forest reserve to take in Stanley's Camp. And sometime in the late thirties a WPA crew built a dam at the outlet of the lake for power and to hold the spring runoff on the Little Bird Woman River, which served to irrigate a few farms in the upper valley and also quickly put an end to the fish runs. Stanley's cabins had been log-built with the bark left on, which made a sentimental picture, but they were run up from the bare ground without any sort of foundation, and the gaps between the logs stuffed with newspaper and pebble dash. After the hotel was built Stanley's little cabins were left vacant and went quickly to ruin, and by the time the dam went up, not much was left of those old cabins but crumbled heaps of litter in the bare outline of logs.
In 1938, after George died, Miriam Hubertine persuaded her mother to write a history of Elwha County, from Indian days to the end of the Great War. Louise's thin little book was called The Wonderful Country and dedicated "To My Dear Family and Friends," and it was published by the Times-Gazette in celebration of the county's fiftieth anniversary of incorporation. By then, Emil Thiede had twice been elected to the Board of County Commissioners, and Louise's chapter about the war years—the way the Thiedes among others had been made to feel isolated and despised—struck most people as a quaint and improbable fiction. Within a couple of years there would be an internment camp in the county, and a few hundred Japanese Americans living in made-over livestock barns, but not many people saw this as having anything to do with Louise's story about that earlier war.
In later years when Martha was an old woman—as old as the Woodruff sisters had been when Martha first came into Elwha County—one of her granddaughters pointed out to her that her life had overlapped with the lives of the famous Apache Indian Geronimo and the famous Western gunslinger John Wesley Hardin; that she had seen Buffalo Bill, in his fringed and beaded leathers and shock of white hair, when he came through Pendleton and set up his Wild West Show on the fairgrounds; and that when she was sixty years old and she and Henry were living on a ranch in northern Nevada she had stood out on her porch and watched that other show, the mushroom cloud from an A-bomb they were testing over there in the desert. And wasn't that just amazing to think about?
Martha was taken aback. All her childhood dreams went flying through her mind in a moment. She remembered how, in her dreams, she had galloped bareback across fenceless prairies through grass as high as the horse's belly. She had dreamed of living like the Indians, intimate with animals, intimate with the earth. Sometimes in those dreams, just as in the Western romances, she had no name, no family. For a while she had taken as her heroes the cowboys of those novels—lone horsemen, symbols of independence and freedom—who were not a bit like the cowboys she knew in her life, men whose only freedom was the right to quit at the drop of a hat and look for work on down the road.
It occurred to her now that the West of her dreams was not—never could be—the testing ground for atomic bombs; and she wondered how it had happened. She said to her granddaughter, without planning to say it, "You know, honey, I guess we brought about the end of our cowboy dreams ourselves." It was a startling thing to hear herself say, but then she thought: Here I am in my old age and just at the beginning of figuring out what that means, or what to do about it.
Acknowledgments
This book grew slowly from a seed planted years ago by Teresa Jordan in her oral history Cowgirls: Women of the American West. It's been a long germination, but I would now like to thank Teresa, and to thank "the rancher's daughter" Marie Bell, whose words recorded by Teresa quietly took root in my mind. This is not Marie's story, of course, but I have borrowed Marie's seed words almost verbatim for the opening lines of the novel.
I'm grateful to Soapstone and Fishtrap for residencies in support of this writing, and to the Harris family of Soda Springs, Idaho, for time spent on horseback and for stories around the supper table, especially McGee Harris's story about stranded cows and the horse that righted himself after drowning.
And thanks to Russ Johnson of Georgetown, Idaho; Corine Elser of Crane, Oregon; Gigi Meyer of Alfalfa, Oregon; Linda and Martin Birnbaum of Summerville, Oregon; Stella and John Lillicrop of Mitchell, Oregon; Samantha Waltz of Portland, Oregon; Becky Sheridan of Lakeview, Oregon; and especially Lesley Neuman of Rescue, California: for schooling me in the art and the hearts of horses.
THE LAST CHINESE CHEF
Nicole Mones
A MARINER BOOK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
BOSTON • NEW YORK
First Mariner Books edition 2008
Copyright © 2007 by Nicole Mones
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
For information about permission to reproduce selections fromthis book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mones, Nicole.
The last Chinese chef / Nicole Mones.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-618-61966-5
ISBN 978-0-547-05373-8 (pbk.)
1. Americans—China—Fiction. 2. Food writers—Fiction. 3. Cookery—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3563.O519L37 2007
813'.54— dc22 2006030469
Printed in the United States of America
Book design by Robert Overholtzer
VB 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The lines in chapter 15 are from the poems "Summons of the Soul" and "The Great Summons," in The Songs of the South: An Ancient Chinese Anthology of Poems by Qu Yuan and Other Poets; translated and annotated by David Hawkes (Penguin Books Ltd., 1985). Copyright © David Hawkes, 1985.
Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd.
1
Apprentices have asked me, what is the most exalted peak of cuisine? Is it the freshest ingredients, the most complex flavors? Is it the rustic, or the rare? It is none of these. The peak is neither eating nor cooking, but the giving and sharing of food. Great food should never be taken alone. What pleasure can a man take in fine cuisine unless he invites cherished friends, counts the days until the banquet, and composes an anticipatory poem for his letter of invitation?
—LIANG WEI, The Last Chinese Chef, pub. Peking, 1925
Maggie McElroy felt her soul spiral away from her in the year following her husband's death; she felt strange wherever she was. She needed walls to hold her. She could not seem to find an apartment small enough. In the end, she moved to a boat.
First she sold the
ir house. It was understandable. Her friends agreed it was the right thing to do. She scaled down to an apartment, and quickly found it too big; she needed a cell. She found an even smaller place and reduced her possessions further to move into it. Each cycle of obliteration vented a bit of her grief, but underneath she was propelled by the additional belief, springing not from knowledge but from stubborn instinct, that some part of her soul could be called back if she could only clear the way.
At last she found the little boat in its slip in the Marina. As soon as she stepped aboard she knew she wanted to stay there, below, watching the light change, finding peace in the clinking of the lines, ignoring the messages on her cell phone.
There was a purity to the vessel. When she wasn't working she lay on the bunk. She watched the gangs of sneakered feet flutter by on the dock. She listened to the thrum of wind on canvas, the suck of water against the hulls. She slept on the boat, really slept for the first time since Matt died. She recognized that nothing was left. Looking back later, she saw that if she had not come to this point she would never have been ready for the change that was even then on its way. At the time, though, it seemed foregone, a thing she would have to accept: she would never be connected again.
She stayed by herself. Let's have dinner. Join us at the movie. Come to this party. Even when she didn't answer, people forgave her. Strange things were expected from the grieving. Allowances were made. When she did have to give an excuse, she said she was out of town, which was fine, for she often was. She was a food writer. She traveled each month to a different American community for her column. She loved her job, needed it, and had no intention of losing it. Everybody knew this, so she could say sorry, she was gone, goodbye, and then lie back down on her little bunk and continue remembering. People cared for her and she for them—that hadn't changed. She just didn't want to see them right now. Her life was different. She had gone away to a far-off country, one they didn't know about, where all the work was the work of grieving. It was too hard to talk to them. So she stayed alone, her life shrunk to a pinpoint, and slowly, day by day, she found she felt better.
On the September evening that marked the beginning of these events, she was leaving the boat to go out and find a place to eat dinner. It was a few days after her fortieth birthday, which she'd slid past with careful avoidance. She found the parking lot empty, punctuated only by the cries of gulls. As she reached her car she heard her phone ringing.
The sound was muffled. It was deep in her bag. Living on the boat kept her bag overloaded—a small price to pay. She dug, following the green light that shimmered with each ring. She didn't answer her phone that often, but she always checked it. There were some calls, from work, from her best friend, Sunny, from her mother, which she never failed to pick up.
When she looked at the screen she felt her brows draw together. This was not a caller she recognized. It was a long string of numbers. She clicked it. "Hello?"
"Maggie? This is Carey James, from Beijing. Do you remember me?"
"Yes." She went slack with surprise. Matt's law firm kept an office in Beijing, and Carey was one of its full-time attorneys. Matt had flown over there more than a few times, on business. Maggie'd even gone with him once, three years before. She'd met Carey—tall, elegant, faintly dissipated. Matt had said he was a gifted negotiator. "I remember."
"Some year," he said, his manner disintegrating slightly.
"You're telling me." She unlocked the car and climbed in.
"Are you all right?"
"I'm surviving." What was this about? Everything had been over months ago with the firm, even the kindness calls, even the check-ins from Matt's closest friends here in the L.A. office. She hadn't heard from any of them lately.
"I'm calling, actually, because I've come across something. I really should have seen it before. Unfortunately I didn't. It's a legal filing, here in China. It concerns Matt."
"Matt?"
"Yes," Carey said. "It's a claim."
"What do you mean? What kind?"
Carey drew a breath. She could feel him teetering. "I was hoping there was a chance you might know," he said.
"Know what? Carey. What kind of claim?"
"Paternity," he said.
She sat for a long moment. A bell seemed to drop around her, cutting out all sound. She stared through her sea-scummed windshield at the line of palms, the bike path, the mottled sand. "So this person is saying—"
"She has his child. So I guess you didn't know anything about this."
She swallowed. "No. I did not. Did you? Did you know about a child?"
"No," he said firmly. "Nothing."
"So what do you think this is?"
"I don't know, honestly. But I do know one thing: you can't ignore it. It's serious. A claim has been filed. Under the new Children's Rights Treaty, it can be decided right here in China, in a way that's binding on you. And it is going to be decided, soon." She heard him turning pages. "In—a little less than three weeks."
"Then what?"
"Then if the person who filed the claim wins, they get a share of his estate. Excluding the house, of course—the principal residence."
To this she said nothing. She had sold the house. "Just tell me, Carey. What should I do?"
"There's only one option. Get a test and prove whether it's true or false. If it's false, we can take care of it. If it turns out the other way, that will be different."
"If it's true, you mean? How can it be true?"
"You can't expect me to answer that," he said.
She was silent.
"The important thing is to get a lab test, now. If I have that in hand before the ruling, I can head it off. Without that, nothing."
"So go ahead. Get one. I'll pay the firm to do it."
"That won't work," said Carey. "This matter is already on the calendar with the Ministry of Families, and we're a law firm. We'd have to do it by bureaucracy—file papers to request permission from the girl's family, for instance. It would never happen by the deadline. It won't work for us to do it. But somebody else could get the family's permission and get the test and let us act on the results. That would be all right."
"You mean me," she said.
"I don't know who else. It's important, Maggie. We'll help you. Give you a translator. You can use the company apartment. You still have Matt's key?"
"I think so."
"Then get a flight. Come in to the office when you arrive." He paused. "I'm sorry, Maggie," he said. "About everything, about Matt. It's terrible."
"I know."
"None of this was supposed to happen."
She took a long breath. He means Matt, hit by a car on the sidewalk. Killed along with two other people. Random. "I've wrestled with that one," she said. "So this child—"
"A little girl."
She closed her eyes. "This girl is how old?"
"Five."
That meant something would have to have happened six years ago. Maggie scrolled back frantically. It didn't make sense. They were happy then. "If you'll give me the months involved I'll go back through my diaries and see if he was even in China then. I mean, maybe it isn't even possible. If he wasn't there—"
This time Carey cut her off. "Winter of 2002," he said softly. "I already checked. He was."
The next morning she was waiting in the hallway when Sarah, her editor, stepped from the elevator.
"What are you doing here?" Sarah said. "You look terrible."
"I was up all night."
"Why?"
"Bad news about Matt."
"Matt?" Sarah's eyes widened. Matt was dead. There could be no more bad news.
"Someone filed a claim."
Sarah's mouth fell open, and then she closed it.
"A paternity claim."
Sarah went pale. "Paternity! Let's go inside." She unlocked the door and steered Maggie to the comfortable chair across from her desk. "Now what is this?"
"A woman filed a claim against him in China, saying she
has his child."
"Are you serious? In China?"
"Yes, and because of the agreements between our two countries, this claim can be ruled on in China and collected from there."
"Collected," repeated Sarah.
"Generously," said Maggie.
"What are you going to do?"
"Go there, right away. I have no choice. I've never asked you, in twelve years, not even when Matt died, but now I'm going to need a month off."
"Please! Doll! We run old columns all the time when someone has an emergency. You're the only one who's never asked for that. Don't even worry about it. And a year ago"—Sarah looked at her, eyes soft with unspent empathy—"I told you to take off. Remember? I practically begged you."
"I know." Maggie reached over and clasped her friend's hand. "The truth is, work kept me going. I needed it. I've always been like that. I'm stronger when I'm working. I don't know how I'd ever have made it through without it." She looked up. "I'm better lately. Just so you know."
"Good. By the way, your last check came back." Sarah showed her the envelope. "Do you have a new address?"
"I got a new P.O. box, one closer to where I'm living."
"Where are you living?"
"In the Marina," she said, and left it at that.
Sarah wrote down the new mailing address. "Thanks. Anyway, of course you can go, take a month off, we'll use an old piece. Don't even think about it. Maybe it'll be good for you, actually. You should make the best of it. Recharge."
Maggie spoke carefully. "Do you feel I need to recharge?"
