The Best Contemporary Women's Fiction: Six Novels

by Jenna Blum

  "Drink some tea," Gao Lan said, with a gesture to the table. The other two women murmured agreement, though they still did not touch their cups.

  "There is one more thing," said the American.

  "Haiyou yijian shi," translated Miss Chu.

  The widow wiped her face with the back of her hand in a movement she had obviously made many times before. Gao Lan felt for her.

  Then she opened the bag she had brought with her and withdrew an envelope, and from this she took a picture. She handed it across. "Have you ever seen this?" she said, and Miss Chu translated.

  Gao Lan leaned to the left to hold it under the light. She saw a street corner, people on the ground, a car on the sidewalk. She swallowed.

  "It's the accident." The widow's voice was thick.

  Gao Lan looked at it again. Her heart rushed up into her mouth. That was Matt. On the ground with the woman kneeling over him.

  When Gao Lan looked up her eyes were wet again. She handed it back. She didn't want to look at it anymore.

  But the widow stopped her. "Wait." She pointed to the picture. "See that woman?"

  "Yes."

  "Carey says that looks like you."

  "Like me? But how?" Gao Lan looked closer. "Maybe. In a way."

  "So you're saying it's not you."

  "How could it be me?"

  "You were not there?"

  Gao Lan stared as she listened to Miss Chu's Chinese. Her, in San Francisco? Kneeling over Matt at the moment of his death? "No. I haven't even been to Hong Kong. The farthest I've been from home is here, Beijing."

  The American looked at her again, then at the picture. A tightness faded from her face. "You're right," she said slowly. "I see. It's not you." She looked at Gao Lan for a long moment, then replaced the clipping in her purse. "Shall I call you when I hear from the lab?"

  "Please." Gao Lan gave her a card, no title, no company. Just her name in two Chinese characters and a cell number. "Get in touch anytime. Dark or light."

  "I will," said Matt's wife, and handed over her own card. Maggie McElroy. Writer, Table magazine. "Look, I didn't say and you didn't ask, but I want you to know something too. If Shuying is Matt's, you won't have any trouble from me. I'll take care of things."

  "Thank you," said Gao Lan.

  She stood up with them and walked them to the door, where she and the widow clasped hands for a second. "Three days, maybe four," Matt's wife said. "I'll call you."

  The next day, Saturday, Uncle Xie died. Sam called her about it in the morning. She consoled him, sharing the weight of it, as friends had done for her during her year. She also told him how sorry she was about the timing. It could hardly have been worse. Tonight was his banquet.

  "It's true," he said, "everything's crazy. So much so that I don't even have time to call more than one person with this. Just you. And isn't it funny that I'd call you? Someone I've known for only a week."

  "How can you say that? We've been to Hangzhou together. I've met your uncle."

  "He liked you. They all liked you."

  "That's why you called me," she said, "because I was there. I saw how much he loved you. And he believed in you, too. I'm sorry, Sam. I know it's a blow."

  "It is," he admitted.

  "And don't think of me as an interviewer. Not anymore. We've done that. I've written almost all of the article, leaving only one part blank, the ending. What I mean," she said delicately, "is that when we talk now we talk as friends. I don't write it down anymore. I don't use it. You can say what you want without worrying."

  "I wasn't worried," he said.

  "Just so you know."

  "Well, you might want to write this down," he said. "Something strange is happening in Hangzhou. It's beyond Uncle Xie. It's the whole city. It's very rare. The bamboo is flowering."

  "All over the city?"

  "It will be all over the province before it's done."

  "What does it mean?"

  "The end of an era."

  She thought about this for a second. "If there's a new era, Sam, I think it will be yours. I wish you luck tonight. I'm sorry about your uncle, but I also think if he's anywhere, watching, then this is what he wishes too. For a great meal. So good luck."

  "Thank you," he said. There was a silence and then, almost to his own surprise, he said, "I would like you to come."

  "This is your night. You don't have to ask me there."

  "I know. I ask because I want to."

  "What if I were in your way? It's too important."

  "That's exactly why I want you there, because it's important. I feel better when you're around."

  She was silent. Then: "Are you sure?"

  "Yes. Please come, well before the panel. Come at six. My grandfather's house behind the red gate, soon to be my restaurant. You know. Liang Jia Cai."

  13

  When does the bamboo flower? A man may wait his lifetime for the answer and still not see it. The bamboo might flower only once in a hundred years. Once it begins, all the bamboo around it will flower too, for hundreds of miles, all over the region. All the bamboo will flower and bear seeds and then die. So it would seem that the bamboo flowering portends disaster. But many are the tales of famine, of men driven mad by starvation, and then suddenly at that moment the bamboo flowers. Bamboo rats gorge on the seeds and overpopulate; the starving people eat them and their lives are saved. Enough seeds work their way into the soil to begin the new plants, and the cycle of man and his food starts again. Thus the time of the bamboo flowering means both the end and the beginning.

  —LIANG WEI, The Last Chinese Chef

  Later that morning Maggie went into the office to tell Carey she had decided what she wanted to do.

  "I ought to have the results in two days, three at most," she said. "If she's Matt's, cooperate fully."

  "There's nothing else we can do," said Carey, and Zinnia nodded.

  "But if she's not, if she's the other guy's daughter, I want you to help Gao Lan. Zinnia told you, right? About him threatening her?"

  "She did," said Carey. "I still say that has nothing to do with you."

  "She's afraid of him," Maggie countered. "More than she should be, I think, but she is. She's taken that fear in. She's holding it dear." Like I did, with my grief, all last year. "She can't approach him. Somebody needs to intervene."

  "What did you have in mind?"

  "You telling him what's up with his responsibilities, that's what. Only a man can do it. And a lawyer. In twenty minutes you could talk some sense into his head."

  "I'm still not sure it's our province."

  "If I pay you by the hour and ask you to do it, will it be our province?"

  He raised his hands. "Okay. I get it. Okay."

  She and Zinnia traded glances of satisfaction.

  "But get the test back. Okay? Call me. Call anytime." Then he gave his wicked smile. "Because as you know I'm up until all hours."

  At lunchtime Maggie stopped at a Chongqing-style Sichuan restaurant, and ordered savory, chewy strips of eel fillet cooked with pungent shreds of pepper and soft whole braised garlic cloves. As soon as she tasted it she knew she would not be able to stop eating it, and so she continued to pluck up the succulent bits until she had eaten most of what was on the plate. While she ate, she let her mind go. She thought about what had been wrong in her life, what had been right. Matt had been right. She still felt that way, even now, after Gao Lan. So he had slipped. She also knew he must have suffered for it. Nothing burdened Matt more than a confession unmade. Poor soul. She suddenly wished that he had told her while he was alive so she could have forgiven him. She would have forgiven him, just as she forgave him now. Their love had been greater than one mistake.

  She remembered the day a month or two before he died when they were both getting ready to leave again on their trips. Usually they looked forward to their travel. On this day, though, she woke up knowing that she did not want to be away from him. She did not feel the customary pull to her freedom, to thei
r separation, to a quiet, private house or a hotel room. She wished they could both stay home.

  There were no presentiments. She had not the remotest inkling of the fate that would take him a few weeks later. She only knew at that moment that she loved him differently, that she did not want him to leave. She thought about this as she ate the bag of candy corn he'd left for her on the bureau.

  That night she knocked on Sam's red gate precisely at six and over the wall heard the now-familiar phit-phit of his cloth shoes as he crossed the court to open it. She saw the anxious sheen of sweat on his cheekbones.

  "Big night," she said softly. His apron was already marked, and sweat was gathering on his T-shirt underneath. She wanted to hug him, just a quick squeeze of sustenance, but she stood her ground and let her support show in her eyes. It would not be right to step across that line and put her arms around him. Nothing should upset his equilibrium tonight. Besides, she was doing a story on him. And she still had that last, all-important paragraph left to write, the one about tonight.

  "We're on schedule, at least."

  "I'm glad." They walked around the screen and she noticed her spiral evergreen, appealingly placed near a small stone table with four stone stools. She felt a surge of warmth. "I know it's going to be great. I can feel it."

  "Your lips to my kitchen gods." They walked up the porch steps to the dining room, and he pulled back the door for her.

  "I keep thinking about your father," she said, "that he came. Is he going to come up to Beijing now?"

  "He says he will. He may get here tonight. We're not sure. Everybody's so sick with sadness about Xie."

  "I hope you can set it aside."

  "We're trying."

  "Does he like being back, your father?"

  "He loves it! You should have heard him go on. How the Zhejiang Food and Restaurant Association met him with flowers—just because he was a Liang. I told him he deserved it. Look what I did in here."

  She followed him across the dining room, lit with silk lotus-shaped lamps, set with one exquisite table for the panel. "Beautiful," she said. The room was not bare, as it had been before, but warm with purpose. There were enormous candles in tall stands, which she knew he would light later. Divans were built into the walls. Doors closed off small private rooms. The outside world had fallen away. She had the strange sense that they could be standing here at almost any time in history.

  The kitchen was different from the serene dining room, shouting, chaotic. On every surface were bowls and baskets and plates of fresh ingredients, every sort of vegetable and herb and paste, chopped and minced and mixed. There were freshly killed chickens and ducks. One of Sam's old uncles—these were the other two, the ones she had not met—groomed one of the birds, turning the warm, fresh carcass around in his lap.

  "Do you know my Second Uncle Tan?" Sam said.

  "Ni hao." Tan dipped his head.

  "And this is Jiang, First Uncle," said Sam.

  "Hello."

  "The writer!" said Jiang in English. "Very good. Come in!"

  "I'm only going to watch," she said. "And please know I'm sorry for your loss." Sam translated this, and both uncles thanked her. "They're your assistants?" she said to Sam.

  "Each chef is actually allowed three assistants. I'm using only two. As you know, my Third Uncle couldn't travel. These two have been terrific."

  "I'm sure," she said, and surveyed the room, the brilliant sheaves of chives and greens and shoots, pale mounds of cabbage, glistening white bricks of tofu. A blue-and-white bowl held raw fish heads, pink flesh, silver skin, brilliant shiny eyes. Oh, the soup, she thought, excitement picking up. From Hangzhou.

  Sam was packing a round mold in front of her. In the bottom went a geometric slab of dark-brown braised pork, upside down on its fat and skin. Around the pork he pressed rice mixed with ginkgo nuts, dates, lotus buds, silver fungus, pine nuts.

  "Eight-treasure dongpo pork," he said. "My version of a classic." He pressed foil around it, whip-tight. "I'm going to steam it two hours. The brown sauce suffuses everything. I am going to drain off some of the fat before I serve it, though—and you wait. You'll see. We'll have an argument over it."

  Across the room Tan had finished with the chicken and was now preparing to carve vegetables, turnips and large, pale daikon radishes. "He's great with a knife," Sam said, looking at his uncle. "He taught me. Now watch this."

  Sam picked up Tan's warm, fresh chicken and positioned it on his chopping block. He applied a small, sharp knife to the rim of the chicken's body cavity, working his way in. He separated the skin from the carcass with love, one millimeter at a time, teasing the two apart without creating the slightest nick or tear. She barely breathed. In a minute he had the entire skin off the chicken, in one piece, and he held it up, grinning.

  "Oh, bravo," she said.

  "How about it?" He was proud of himself.

  "You should have been a surgeon."

  "No! I should have been this, just what I am. Okay. We call this the chicken's pajamas." He laid it aside. "You watch. You're going to see it later."

  "Can they take the skin off like that?" She looked at the uncles.

  "No," Sam said. "They can't do it. Neither of them. Not many chefs can. You have to be able to feel it." He switched to Chinese and shouted something to Uncle Jiang, who was at the next station mincing ingredients Sam would combine to stuff into the chicken skin: cabbage, exotic dried mushrooms, tofu skins, chives, and minced salt-cured ham from Yunnan.

  "You should add rice to the stuffing," Jiang said in Chinese.

  "No," Sam insisted. "No rice until the end." Because then there would be the glutinous rice in the pork mold, profound with the rich mahogany sauce and its eight treasures, and the dongpo pork itself. That was rice enough.

  Maggie could not understand these bursts of Chinese, but she could see Sam's Second Uncle Tan get up on the other side of the kitchen and move to lift the cover off a large stoneware crock. He hefted this and tipped it to fill a cup, which he then drained, quickly.

  "Xiao Tan," Jiang reproved him.

  Tan raised his hand. He didn't want to hear it. "My old heart," he protested.

  "Mine too! How do you think I feel, with Little Xie gone from this world! The same as you. I burn inside. But right now we need our wits. We must help Nephew."

  "I have my wits," Tan grumbled, but he capped off the jug and returned to his vegetables. He was ruddy, glowing, visibly happier for his drink. Maggie watched it all.

  Sam watched it too. "Tan's been up half the night," he explained. "My father called him and woke him up the second it happened."

  "So hard for them. And you."

  "Yes. Thanks."

  But she could still feel unease in the air. Sam and Jiang didn't like Tan's drinking. It would be better for her to get out of the kitchen and take a walk before the panel came. "Do you mind if I look around?"

  "Go," said Sam. "Go anywhere."

  So she slid off her chair. Sam was bent over his cooking. She traded nods and smiles with the uncles and pushed open the heavy door. She liked how hard it was to push. She liked some things heavy, a fire poker, bedcovers, keys on a piano. Matt had been heavy, much larger than she. A protective weight on top of her.

  In the dining room, the standing wood lamps made pools of light against the pitch of the fitted rafters and the black tile floors. Tall windows were cranked open to the courtyard, where garden lights glowed among the potted flowers and wood filigree.

  She peeked into the small private rooms. Two had round tables and chairs. One had a piano. A piano! The sight of one always brought back the warm feeling of her mother's apartment. She wondered if it was in tune.

  She walked across the courtyard. The light was starting to fail. The second dining room was here. This one was done differently, with white walls and contemporary art, and also doors to private rooms.

  She looked into the smallest, north-facing room. It had not been restored. This was where he had lived while the
place was being done. The high wooden ceiling was weathered, its paint half flaked off. The walls were seamed with cracks. Black-and-white subway tile, pieces of which were missing, covered the floor.

  She turned out the light and crossed to the last, south-facing room. This was where he lived now. It was a warm room; it contained a life. The bed was rumpled. A laptop blinked on the table. Clothing lay in folded stacks beneath the window.

  He had said to go anywhere, but here she was intruding. This was his private place. She did not enter, just stood in the doorway and looked.

  Like the other rooms, this one had high rear windows. They were screened and hung open on chains. Through them she could see patches of rooftops and sky.

  She leaned on the door frame. It was comfortable. There was a stillness to China in unexpected places, and once again she had the curious sensation of being anywhere in time. She felt relieved of her life, of the world she knew, stripped away from herself. It was a strange place, far from her home. She really didn't belong. So why did the surprise thought keep rising like a bubble inside her that it might be nice to stay?

  She backed out of Sam Liang's room. As she crossed on the path she could hear the Chinese voices from the kitchen. The interplay of sounds was like abstract music to her. When she pushed open the door to the kitchen she saw that Jiang was disagreeing with Sam about something. Tan was off by himself carving furiously. He already had made birds and animals. He looked slightly melted.

  "Perfect timing," Sam said to her. "They'll be here soon."

  "Were you arguing with him?" she said when Jiang turned back to his task.

  "He thought I was using too many crabs."

  "Is there such a thing? Ever?"

  He laughed.

  "I didn't think so," she said, triumphant. "What's the dish?"

  "Spongy tofu. It's a simple, plain dish—but the sky-high imperial version. The thing about tofu is, if you boil it rapidly for thirty minutes it will fill with holes. It becomes a sponge, ready to squirt its sauce when you bite into it. Now the average kitchen might dress it with green onion and oyster sauce. You know, whatever. Not me. I am making a reduction sauce from thirty crabs."