The Best Contemporary Women's Fiction: Six Novels

by Jenna Blum

  On that day Lord Tan paid close attention to the duck. Nong was a quality that could go too far. Timing was all.

  But Tan was a master who effortlessly synthesized knowledge. He always knew to remove the duck at its most sublime. When it was time for the meal to be served I went outside and stood in a row with the other apprentices, all of us in our flapping blue robes with white oversleeves. The Empress ate in the Hall of Happiness and Longevity. I could barely see it down the long brick walk. They were setting tables up in there now.

  Then came the call. Each of us took a lacquer box on our shoulders and set off in a foot-whispering line. In the hall we laid out the dishes in places chosen by the geomancers and protocol officials of the Western Kitchen. Everything was according to pattern, order, harmony. There were hot and cold dishes, roast fowl, soups, fish fried and steamed and braised, and all manner of sweet and salty northern-style pastries. From the far south came crabs preserved in wine and fresh cold litchi jelly. There was shark's fin sent by the king of the Philippines, and bird's nest from the Strait of Malacca.

  We set down the plates and withdrew as always. That day we did not return to the Western Kitchen but waited in another hall nearby, empty, wood-dusty, ringing with our footsteps and our chortling jokes. Then we trotted back and packed the food into the dragon-embossed lacquer boxes as usual. We tied them with green and red strings and fixed them to poles.

  Yet Old Li, the eunuch who always took my pole, walked up to me and stood there. "Boy," he said, "you know the Houhai District?"

  "Of course, sir," I said, for I had grown up there.

  "Then take this to the Gong family palace. Do you know the road?"

  "Like my hand. But honored sir, it is not my place to go there. It is yours."

  "Don't you think I know that? Curse fate! But it's urgent. I am being called back. You'll take it?"

  "Yes, honored sir." Before I had even finished speaking he swung his robes and walked away. His pole was still in my hands.

  I shrugged it on. It settled easily into the notch on my shoulder. Prince Gong's mansion lay near the lake. I knew the spot. I walked toward the back of the palace, for it would be best to leave by the Shen Wu Gate.

  Then it was out into the teeming city, my blue and white robes fluttering with importance, the imperial lacquerware bouncing with my steps. People moved out of my way. Crowds parted. I wore the colors of the palace.

  At the front gate of the Gong mansion the pole and boxes were recognized at once, though I was not. "Honored lord," I said to the gatekeeper, "Master Li could not carry these boxes today. I am an unworthy apprentice."

  The gatekeeper called to someone. A gate to the inner gardens opened and a beautiful girl came out with a servant. "Ah! Where's Uncle Li?"

  "He was detained."

  "You came instead?"

  "Yes, miss." I made a reverence.

  She put on an amused look and reached into her purse for coins. "What's inside?" she said.

  "Lord Tan made his glazed duck."

  "Ah! Wonderful." She handed me the coins.

  "Pleasure belongs all to me, miss. Thank you." I closed my fist around them. I bowed low and long, until she and the servant with the food had withdrawn.

  Quickly I slipped out to the street. I walked down along the lake with its waving fronds until I was under a pool of yellow light, beneath the buzz and hiss of a gas lamp. Only then did I unfold my hand to look.

  Five coins. They looked like—

  I bit one. Gold. I had never seen it before, but I knew. I closed my hand tightly again and kept walking, south, away now from the lake.

  When I reached Huang Cheng, to return to the palace, I should have turned east. Instead I turned west—toward my family. I would run like light itself. I would be no more than a moment late. Lord Tan would never know.

  When I came to my old neighborhood and turned panting around the corner to my own lane, the first thing I saw was my mother sitting outside the doorway on a stool, scrubbing a cabbage. "Zhao Sun," she said slowly, half stumbling with surprise and wonder. She used my milk name, the name they called me as a baby, which I had not heard for a long, long time. I made an obeisance, but it was stiff. "Liang Wei has returned," I said, and then she leapt to throw her arms around me.

  "Ma," I said, the single syllable strangling out of my mouth. She was so small! I was tall and strong; I had not realized how much I had grown. My skin was scrubbed, my queue plaited. I stood holding her in what had for a long time seemed to be only my apprentice clothes, but which now shone in this dark alley as brilliant robes of imperial silk.

  "Come," she said, and pulled me quickly in through the low, stooping doorway. As my eyes adjusted to the dimness of the clay-walled room, my little brother and sister appeared from the shadows, eyes large, barely believing. It was as familiar as a dream: the cracked basin, the faded flowers on the bedding. My mother's dented pans.

  I was glad my father was not there. I had another father now—Tan Zhuanqing. My life was his.

  "I can't stay." I gave Erhui and Ermo a squeeze. They were thin and not much taller than I remembered them—not flush with good food as I was. "Go outside," I told them. "Let me talk to Ma."

  When they had slipped out into the sunlight and dropped the quilted cold-weather robe back down behind them, I took her elbow, opened her hand, and dropped in one of the coins. "Do you know what this is?"

  "By the Gods," she said, "yes." She looked up at me. "Where did you get it?"

  "I earned it." I was as tall as the sky then, a man. I bent over it with her. "Is it enough for the winter?"

  "Yes. More than."

  "Then I will return with this much every year."

  Her eyes filled and spilled over with gratitude as she slipped it into a secret pocket she always kept within her clothes. Then she let out a small cry and dropped to grasp me by my knees.

  "Ma, stop," I said. I pulled her up, but my heart swelled with gladness. "I must go," I said. "Take care of the young ones."

  I ran back through knotted lanes and beaten-dirt intersections where as a child I had played and hidden and stolen crisp autumn pears and seed-studded wheat buns from the carts of vendors. It was the world to me then—neither good nor bad, rich nor poor. Old men lounged on marble steps as they always had, bulky wadding inside their socks for warmth. Small children wore clothes handed down, much mended. Old ladies walked in gray cotton with their hands behind their backs. And here I passed in bright silks, leather on my feet, gold coins gripped tight in my fist.

  At the Forbidden City I was well known by the guards and passed quickly through the gate. Avoiding the grottoes and gardens around which were arranged the private halls and apartments of the royal family, I took one of the outer passages back to the kitchen complex. These minor avenues connected an outer web of halls and courtyards, where lived relations and forgotten concubines. They did not matter in the palace, yet they could never leave.

  Finally I came to the kitchen. I passed the snack section, the pastry section, the meat section. Usually it was in this section that Master Tan worked. Today, though, my instructions were to meet him in another part of the kitchen. He was to give me a different lesson in nong, by making fermented mung bean curd. It was a difficult dish. Reach the rich, heady top point, and it was a dish so delicious one could not stop eating it. Ferment it too far—even a little—and it was repulsive. This was chao ma doufu, and we were going to make it in the vegetarian section, a place where they generally specialized in brightly nuanced, mock meat and fish dishes of bean curd and gluten.

  I was late, but not by much. If Lord Tan said anything I would throw myself on the ground. "Master," I would say, "I know. I beg you. Forgive this miserable child who is unworthy—"

  I stopped short in the door to the vegetarian section. No one was there. The counters were cleared and the ranges still cooling. Where was my master? He never came late.

  I walked back the way I had come. I passed the rice, bun, and noodle section, w
here many boys were at work. Some were making thick hand-cut noodles and others a fragrant porridge of lotus root and lotus seed. "Have you seen Lord Tan?" I called, for they were apprentices like me, and between us there were no formalities. No, they had not, and where had I been? "Nowhere," I said, and silently touched my finger to the four coins in my pocket. I would tell no one until I saw Peng and Xie.

  I returned to the meat section. It too was quiet. The great black ranges stood in a row, the glow in their fireboxes snuffed down to red embers. The woks were clean and back on their rack. "Master?" I said, and my voice sounded small and childish in the air.

  No one. But I felt something. I felt him. I continued walking toward the back room where the meats were hung and where long banks of prep counters were lined with endless bowls in blue and white filled with all manner of sauces and condiments and accent vegetables, all fresh minced to perfect uniformity.

  Then I noticed something.

  There were shards scattered on the floor, blue and white; someone had broken a bowl. I froze.

  There were his feet. He lay curled around himself as if still in agony, both hands pressed to his chest. I didn't need to touch him. I didn't need to feel for his pulse. I knew he was dead; I could tell. The light of knowledge had gone out of him. All he knew had escaped into the air. I glanced around frantically, as if somehow I could find it and gather it back. It's in books, he would say to me if he were here, go find it. But he was gone. He was empty and inert.

  I dropped and kowtowed to him three times. After the third time of pressing my forehead to the cold tile floor, I rose and began a long and agonized wail for help, not stopping until I heard the jumbled footsteps, the eunuchs and the kitchen workers, the scuffing and clattering. Their faces, their eyes when they stumbled in and saw him, were pale and sick and horror-struck. It was as if civilization itself had died. It was the beginning of the end. All of us knew it somehow, and all together we lowered ourselves to the floor before him. Men and eunuchs crowded into the doorway, ten deep, twenty, and when they saw, they too fell to the ground.

  The call was going out. I heard a bell clanging. Suddenly I knew, from deep inside me, that he was going to have one of the greatest funerals the capital had seen in decades, with a banquet lasting three days for his family, his friends and admirers, the princes and the great scholars and the high officials. And I would prepare his glazed duck.

  ***

  When Maggie finished she sat for a moment in silence. This man in front of her was part of a pattern that went back in time, across generations; he was connected. Not merely to a single person, such as a spouse—she knew how quickly that could be torn away—but to a whole line. No, she thought, a civilization. She watched him move around the kitchen as if from a distance, from a boat offshore, from a life that would never be like his. Not that she felt envy. She had made it one of Maggie's Laws this past year not to covet the lives of others. She had learned to guard against such feelings in order to continue to have friends, to have a life; almost everyone she knew still possessed what she had lost, which was normalcy and love. She didn't know yet about this man's private life, but now that she'd read the prologue, she did see he had something else, something that clung to him like a light. It was a connection over time, insoluble.

  As a state of mind, a multigenerational sense was new to Maggie, or at least foreign; she was from L.A., where many people, including her own responsible but solitary single mother, had come from someplace else. People made their own lives; that was what Matt had always said. He'd done it. He placed himself in the world. He spent lots of time on jets and married a woman who did the same. And in his mid-thirties, after years of loving her because she was the peripatetic observer and writer he had come to know, he began vexingly to still love her but to wish that she were different. Then the moment he felt it, he had to tell her; that was the way he was. He started waking her early in the morning with his hand on her abdomen, on the warm spot in her center. Think about it, he would say in her ear.

  What? she'd ask, sleepy, but then she'd open her eyes and see his gaze and know. She loved this about him. Even when they didn't agree—as happened, halfway through their marriage, with children—he was a natural river of honesty. She had learned with him to be honest in return, and so she told him the truth, which at first was some version of "I don't know." Let me work a little more, she would say. Let me think about it. They both knew it was not what they'd agreed. Still, she'd consider it. Give me a year. In this way they bumped along.

  She watched the chef drop the shrimp into a sizzling wok and swoop them around with his arms. She took up her pen and wrote, He has a shape like a marmot. It felt good to write, not to think about Matt. Now he was adding something to the wok—what?—which made the shrimp fragrance climb. She didn't want to break the spell by asking. He turned the shrimp onto a plate and cranked off the hissing ring of flame.

  Only then did he turn and see that she'd finished. "Hi," he said.

  "I love this." She touched the pages. "Can you tell me what happened to them?"

  He wiped his hands on his apron. "First the dynasty fell. That was 1911. They had to leave the palace. They all opened restaurants, Peng and my grandfather Liang Wei here in the capital and Xie in Hangzhou. They did well. My grandfather wrote The Last Chinese Chef and it was a sensation. Everyone prospered, for a while."

  "Until?"

  "Communism. The new government closed the restaurants down. They kept a few places open for state purposes. My grandfather's was one of those liquidated. That turned out to be lucky, because a few years later they were jailing people who ran imperial-style restaurants.

  "That was what happened to Xie. His place in Hangzhou was one of the ones they left open. But later, having his restaurant was what got him sent to prison. He died there. But he'd had a son in the thirties, who grew to be a great chef too. This is my Uncle Xie in Hangzhou—the one I call Third Uncle."

  She looked at her notebook, checking the names. "What happened to Peng?" she asked.

  "Peng's fortune was not shabby." He pronounced the name back to her the proper way, pung. "He was admired by the Communist leadership, especially Zhou Enlai. No matter that he cooked imperial—he was that good. They wanted to keep him. They gave him a restaurant in the Beijing Hotel, Peng Jia Cai. He became their imperial cook. In the 1950s that place was the be-all and end-all. He was amazing. Even my father said that of the three of them, he was the best."

  He put down a plate of pink shrimp under a clear glaze. No additions or ingredients could be seen, though she had watched him add many things. The aroma seemed to be sweet shrimp, nothing more.

  He took one and held it in his mouth, dark eyes flying through calculations.

  Her turn. She put one in her mouth and bit; it burst with a big, popping crunch. Inside there was the soft, yielding essence of shrimp. "How do you make it pop like that?"

  "Soak it in cold salt water first. That's what I was doing when you first came in."

  "It's great," she said.

  "Good," he corrected. "Not great. I can still detect the presence of sugar."

  "T "

  I cant.

  He smiled. "Remember I told you we strove for formal ideals of flavor and texture? This dish is a perfect example. One of the most important peaks of flavor is xian. Xian means the sweet, natural flavor—like butter, fresh fish, luscious clear chicken broth. Then we have xiang, the fragrant flavor—think frying onions, roasted meat. Nong is the concentrated flavor, the deep, complex taste you get from meat stews or dark sauces or fermented things. Then there is the rich flavor, the flavor of fat. This is called you er bu ni, which means to taste of fat without being oily. We love this one. Fat is very important to us. Fat is not something undesirable to be removed and thrown away, not in China. We have a lot of dishes that actually focus on fat and make it delectable. Bring pork belly to the table, when it's done right, and Chinese diners will groan with happiness."

  "That's different," she
said, scribbling. "What else?"

  "That's just flavor. We have texture. There are ideals of texture, too—three main ones. Cui is dry and crispy, nen is when you take something fibrous like shark's fin and make it smooth and yielding, and ruan is perfect softness—velveted chicken, a soft-boiled egg. I think it's fair to say we control texture more than any other cuisine does. In fact some dishes we cook have nothing at all to do with flavor. Only texture; that is all they attempt. Think of bêche-de-mer. Or wood ear."

  Maggie considered this. As a concept, texture was not new to her. Many of the greatest dishes she had experienced on the road delivered their pleasure through texture: fried oysters, with their dazzling contrast of inside and out; the silk of corn chowder; the crunch of the perfect beach fry. But all of these relied on flavor too. "You must do something to give them a taste, surely?"

  "Yes—we dress them with sauces. But plain sauces, way in the background. Anything more would distract. The gourmet is eating for texture.

  "Once you understand the ideal flavors and textures, the idea is to mix and match them. That's an art in itself, called tiaowei. Then we match the dishes in their cycles. Then there is the meal as a whole—the menu—which is a sort of narrative of rhythms and meanings and moods."

  "My God," she said, writing rapidly.

  "Everything plays in. The room. The plates. The poetry." He plucked up another shrimp with his chopsticks and chewed it thoughtfully. "The problem is, this shrimp falls short of true xian. Xian is the natural flavor. If it doesn't taste natural, the chef has failed to create it."