The Best Contemporary Women's Fiction: Six Novels

by Jenna Blum

"Why?" he said. "They'll know everything the instant they see you. You're here, in my room, it's not even seven o'clock, and look at you. Anybody can see it. You're brimming with it. You're a walking light source."

  "So are you," she said. He was smiling nonstop.

  He zipped his pants. "Just come out." And he turned and slipped out into the courtyard.

  She followed a minute later, stopped in the bathroom, then came out and there they were, a fussing, loving clot of old men. "Miss Maggie!" Tan called, waving her over with a smile. They were all beaming welcome. They all knew. She felt naked as she walked over and said good morning to them. She felt as if they had seen everything she and Sam had done. Yet they were happy. She was happy too, she realized. She relaxed.

  Sam had gone ahead to the kitchen and now called out that he was starting breakfast—in English, which was for her.

  "How was the temple?" she said to Sam's father.

  "Ah! So delicious! You have never eaten a vegetarian meal like this one. The gluten duck, the crispy pepper-salt oysters made from rice puffs—you must go."

  "Would I have to get up and pray?"

  "Naturally! Four-thirty in the morning! Why do you think we are home so early?"

  "I'll go if he goes," she joked, shooting a look toward the kitchen, where Sam was clanging pots.

  "We will all go," Liang Yeh said.

  Jiang and Tan were preparing the single table in the dining room, having pulled it over by the windows to drink in the morning light. They set five places and were steeping tea of various kinds. She tried to help them, but they batted her away and sent her on to the kitchen.

  Sam was at the stove. She slid onto her stool in her now-accustomed spot. The stool was hers now; it fit her body.

  "I feel so humbled by what happened," he said.

  "I do too. Humbled. Awed."

  She watched him while the rice cooked, happy even though nothing was certain. "What are you making?"

  "Congee. It's the simplest food, the most basic. But it takes care. It's like love." He looked straight at her; she could feel him looking right through her clothes to her body, to her heart. He gave the pot a stir. "First it must have that fragrance of fresh-steamed rice. Then the toppings." He gestured at the side counter, which was crowded with little bowls he had been preparing while the aromatic rice was cooking. There were tiny squares of crunchy pickle, slivers of greens, velvety cubes of tofu, tiny smoke-dried Hunan fish mounded up in a crispy, silvery tangle. There were peanuts, shreds of river moss, crunchy soaked fungus, and matchsticks of salty Yunnan ham. "You can take those in," he said.

  "Okay." It felt good bearing dishes for him, having a place in the pattern. She put all the side dishes around the rim of the inner wheel. She had seen the enormous tureen for the congee; Sam was warming it now, by the sink, with boiling water. She left room for it in the center of the wheel.

  He brought the tureen in. All the dishes around it made a pleasing circle. They sat down together. "Lai, lai," said Sam, Come, and they all passed their clean bowls to him. The first one he filled, he handed to his father. Then he served Jiang, the eldest, and then Tan. And then her. When he handed her the bowl and their fingers touched he looked into her with a gladness that was unmistakable. She knew they all saw it. That kind of feeling could not be hidden.

  She surveyed the condiments. She selected greens, pickle pieces, and the tiny fish. Following one more suggestion from Sam's eyes she took slippery cubes of fresh tofu too. There. He looked satisfied. She felt another satisfaction bloom. He cared what she ate. That was not something she had known before either. She and Matt had been servants of convenience. There could never in their house have been a meal like this.

  Chopsticks flew as they piled ingredients on top of their congee, and the Chinese conversation burst forth like birds from a box. She loved the sound of it. If she learned the language, if she understood it, would it still be so? Would she feel loosed from her old fetters whenever she heard it, freshly born? Maybe. Maybe more so.

  She mixed her congee with her spoon and tasted it. Oh, so good. She shivered. The salty and piquant flavors against the delicate fragrance of rice, the crispy fish against the tofu and the soft gruel. Sheer goodness. She caught Sam's eye and said one word, "Wonderful."

  The uncles agreed. "I would come back from the dead for this," said Jiang. "What is that poem? The one that calls back the soul to the table?"

  "Oh! From the Zhou Dynasty," said Tan.

  To their surprise, it was Liang Yeh who started to intone, in English.

  "O Soul, come back! Why should you go far away?

  All kinds of good foods are ready:

  rice, broom-corn, early wheat, mixed with yellow millet—"

  He could not remember the next line. Jiang murmured to him in Chinese, and he continued:

  "Ribs of the fatted ox, tender and succulent;

  Sour and bitter blended in the soup of Wu.

  O Soul, come back and do not be afraid."

  "Ah, the soup of Wu," said Tan as he ate his congee. Wu was the archaic word for the region around Hangzhou, which made the connection to their friend's death complete.

  "To Uncle Xie," Sam said, raising his teacup. They drank.

  After this Sam refilled their bowls from the tureen and the condiments went around again.

  "You are a great chef," Liang Yeh said to his son.

  "Thanks," Sam said, reddening. He caught Maggie's eye. This was the moment for him, she understood. More than the prize. More than the restaurant.

  "You are! I saw three nights ago. We all saw."

  "Yes," said Jiang and Tan, on top of each other. "We did."

  Under the table she touched his knee. He caught her hand and held it.

  Liang Yeh could feel the current between them. "Now, we must take your lady friend to the temple. What do you say? I am happy to go again this very week."

  "She's leaving in a few days," said Sam.

  "Leaving? No! She just arrived! Isn't that true?" He addressed himself to Maggie. "Didn't you just arrive?"

  "More or less," she said. "But I have to go back. I have a job."

  His face fell.

  Sam said, "Dad, it's okay."

  "I know." Liang Yeh raised a hand. "Because you will return." He touched Maggie's arm lightly. "Isn't it so? Won't you be back? Very soon?"

  All of them were watching her.

  She sneaked a look at Sam. His face was full and unafraid. Go ahead, he seemed to be telling her, say it. Tell them.

  "I think so," she said. "Yes."

  "Good. You see?" said Liang Yeh. His eyes crinkled with gladness as he took slivers of ham and greens and added them to Sam's bowl, and put another scoop of the crisp silver fish in hers. "Now eat, children. Another day lies ahead."

  Author's Note

  The Last Chinese Chef is a work of fiction, yet the Chinese culinary world that comes to life in its pages is real. I could never have captured it without the help of many Chinese who shared their knowledge, analyses, reminiscences, and recipes, nor could I have written it without the published works of literary gourmets, culinary thinkers, and food-obsessed poets dating back through the centuries.

  In a deeper sense my research began thirty years ago when I started doing business in China. Arriving there to buy woolen textiles in 1977, just six weeks after the Cultural Revolution had formally ended, I sat down to my first government-arranged banquet and found my mind and senses exploded by a cuisine more exciting, diverse, and subtle than any Chinese food I had encountered in America. Real cuisine was available to only a handful of people in China then, for the country's population was not only poor but traumatized by a long era of successive terrors that had turned many of life's pleasures, including food, into ideological evils. At a time when most people around me had limited choices and rationed food, I, as the guest of one of China's large state-owned enterprises, was given many opportunities in those first few years to experience a cuisine that was as fantastic as it was—to me, a
n inexperienced young woman trying desperately to figure out how to do business in a socialist country—incomprehensible.

  Over the next eighteen years, as I ran my textile business in China, I came to know this remarkable cuisine better. Working with provincial state-owned textile mills in different parts of the country and returning to school at night to learn Chinese, I slowly saw how guanxi—the net of relationship and mutual responsibility—grew from a succession of special meals. Each meal celebrated our guanxi and improved it. These meals, over almost two decades, formed my first education into the hidden language of Chinese cuisine—the codes of seating and serving, the messages conveyed by a menu, and the social signals that substitute for the concrete business conversations we Westerners are used to having at table.

  In 1999, a few years after I closed my textile business and saw the publication of my first novel, I began writing about Chinese food for Gourmet magazine. Here was the start of my second education in Chinese cuisine. Covering the food scene in major Chinese cities gave me the chance to interview chefs, restaurant owners, restaurant managers, sociologists, home cooks, and diners.

  Still, to write The Last Chinese Chef, I needed to know a lot more. Almost all of the characters in the book are food experts, and the eponymous book-within-a-book is a faux food classic. To create this world of erudite cooks and diners, and to create an excerpted food classic they would all admire, I had to learn what they knew. Fortunately, much has been written over the centuries on Chinese gastronomy. I digested a good deal of it in translation (my Chinese literacy is nonexistent) and also returned to China to interview more chefs and restaurateurs.

  While I could never list every person in China who has taught me something about cuisine over the last thirty years, certain people gave so generously of their time as to deserve special note. Vivian Bao shared her knowledge of Shanghainese cuisine, helped me connect with chefs in various places, and related her personal memories of China in 1958, the year Liang Yeh made his way from Gou Bu Li in Tianjin to the coast of Fujian Province. Yu Changjiang, a sociology professor at Beijing University with a special interest in restaurant and food culture, opened my eyes to the deeper meaning of food in China, helping me connect cuisine to patterns of ideology, history, and the contemporary Chinese economy. Anthony Kuhn, then of the Los Angeles Times, took me to meet Yu Changjiang and translated some of his academic papers so I could study them.

  Many restaurant owners and managers took time from their busy lives to help me understand their world. In Beijing, Yu Jingmin (of Fang Shan), Li Shanlin (of Li Jia Cai), Li Jun (of Mao Jia Cai), and David Tang (of the China Club) each gave me an education. In Shanghai, Walter Wang, manager of Xian Yue Hien, and Dr. Wang, a home cook who demonstrated Chinese concepts of healing through food, were both helpful, and I thank Willie Brent and Jocelyn Norskog Brent for taking me to meet them.

  In the San Gabriel Valley east of Los Angeles, Henry Chang (formerly of Dong Lai Shun and Juon Yuan, San Gabriel; now owner and chef of Chang's Garden, Arcadia) worked hard to give me a complete view of his career and has always been generous with recipes. The pork ribs steamed in lotus leaves—the ones Sam's Uncle Xie has him make over and over until they are right—are his creation. Wang Haibo, from Shanghai (chef and owner of Green Village, San Gabriel), and Chen Qingping, from Chongqing (chef of Chung King, Monterey Park), taught me much. Linda Huang (owner of Chung King) joined Henry Chang and Wang Haibo in helping me understand the difference between Chinese cuisine and Chinese-American cuisine, and between the Chinese and the American diner.

  My research trip to Hangzhou, home of China's literature-based cuisine, would never have succeeded without the help of Dai Xiongping, who introduced me to chefs and restaurant owners. Restaurant tycoon Wang Zhiyuan explained his formula for success in the new China and led a tour through the cavernous kitchens of Xin Kai Yuan. Wu Xunqu, a chef at Lou Wai Lou for forty-six years, explained the history of the city's literary cuisine and then parted with his famed recipe for beggar's chicken—though not, he cautioned, the complete recipe, for certain secret ingredients had to stay secret. Retired chef Xu Zichuan opened the door to his home and his memories. His daughter Xu Lihua, manager of Shan Wai Shan, introduced me to her restaurant's famous fish-head soup, which is prepared and served by Sam in the pages of this novel.

  Outside the realm of food, I owe special thanks to two friends. Zhan Zhao candidly shared his knowledge of the subworld of modern China in which love in many forms, and at many levels, is for sale, even helping me pinpoint where Gao Lan would live. Tom Garnier's knowledge of seamanship made it possible for me to frame Liang Yeh's coastal voyage from Tianjin to Fujian Province more accurately.

  Published works were critical to me, especially in understanding Chinese cuisine over time. Among classical written sources, I relied most heavily on the works of Yuan Mei (1715—1797), often considered the greatest of all Chinese food writers; Li Liweng or Li Yu (1610–1680), an erotic novelist, opera producer, and epicure who explored the value of the rustic in haute cuisine; and Yi Yin (at the dawn of the Shang dynasty, dated at 1766 B.C. by a Han chronology but now thought by many to have been about 1554 B.C.), the first great Chinese gastronome. Reading excerpts from The Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine (third century B.C.) helped me see the philosophical framework behind early theories of curative foods. The lines recited in the novel's last scene are taken from two poems of the Zhou Dynasty period (twelfth century B.C.–221 B.C.), "The Summons of the Soul" and "The Great Summons," translated by David Hawkes. Food passages from the novel THE SCHOLARS by Wu Ching-Tzu (1701–1754) gave me insight. Even Confucius wrote about food, and some material from the Analects was helpful to me. I also learned much from the poet Po Chu-I (772–846) and from the poet, calligrapher, and rhymed-prose food essayist Su Dongpo or Su Shi (1037–1101), who connected cuisine to the aesthetics of classical literature and was an important influence in the growth of Hangzhou's literary cuisine. The famous pork dish dongpo rou, named for him and based on his recipe, appears on Chinese menus all over the world.

  Modern sources on Chinese cuisine were also important. Chief among these was the remarkable Chinese Gastronomy by Hsiangju Lin and Tsuifeng Lin. This exceptional book helped me grasp the formal goals of taste and texture as well as principles of menu development. I am indebted as well to the scholarly essays on cuisine through Chinese history by K. C. Chang, Michael Freeman, Frederick W. Mote, and Jonathan Spence, collected in Food and Chinese Culture, edited by K. C. Chang. An academic paper titled "Tasting the Good and the Beautiful: The Aestheticization of Eating and Drinking in Traditional Chinese Culture" by Da'an Pan was also helpful, as was the book Chinese System of Food Cures by Henry C. Lu.

  Though this is a novel, and almost all of the characters are imagined, some actual historical events and personages make appearances within its pages. Tan Zhuanqing, Liang Wei's master in the Forbidden City, was a very famous chef in his time as well as an admired scholar; his name is still frequently invoked in Chinese cooking circles. Peng Changhai, Liang Wei's youthful compadre in the palace along with Xie Huangshi, was a real-life apprentice in the palace; the restaurant he went on to found, based on the cuisine teachings of Tan Zhuanqing, was considered one of Beijing's greatest restaurants in the 1950s. The Empress Dowager really did have a late-life lust for the little broom-corn cakes (xiao wo tou) she ate on the road during the royal family's flight from the Boxer Rebellion. She also, according to culinary legend, did commission her chefs to create the flat sesame cakes stuffed with minced meat (shao bingjia rou mo) after she saw them in a dream. I am grateful to the kitchen staff at Fang Shan, the imperial-style restaurant in Beihai Park in Beijing, for showing me how to make them.

  The eponymous book excerpted throughout this novel—the 1925 food classic written by Sam's grandfather—is a fiction: it does not exist. The ideas it expresses are based on the classical sources noted above. The Children's Rights Treaty is also an invention; there is no such treaty. Several restaur
ants mentioned in the book are real, though: Fang Shan, Gou Bu Li, Lou Wai Lou, and Shan Wai Shan.

  Readers who would like to taste the food in this book (almost every dish described is in the repertoire of a contemporary Chinese chef), who wish to cook the food themselves (some of these chefs gave their recipes), or who simply want to know where to find great food as they travel to China, are invited to visit my Web site, www.nicolemones.com.

  Acknowledgments

  This book would never have come to fruition without my exceptional editor, Jane Rosenman. Her patience, knowledge, and good nature were topped only by her unerring, almost uncanny ability to see the book's strengths and help me maximize them. My agent, Bonnie Nadell, saw the potential in this book from my very first enunciation of its concept and supported it all the way, from the first stages of research to the last page. Katya Rice's thoughtful manuscript editing improved the book greatly. The Houghton Mifflin team is the stuff authors' dreams are made of, especially Taryn Roeder and Sanj Kharbanda.

  I will always be indebted to Ruth Reichl for encouraging me to write about Chinese cuisine for Gourmet and for her willingness to publish articles that place Chinese cuisine in the wider context of culture, history, mindset, and patterns of emigration. My editors at the magazine, Jocelyn Zuckerman and Amanda Agee, helped me learn to do better work. In large part it was through the research and writing I undertook for them that I gained the knowledge and confidence to write this novel.

  Many friends have been supportive, but Barbara Peters of the Poisoned Pen in Phoenix, Arizona, deserves a special thanks. She has always encouraged me, even writing to me between books to urge me to keep going. Every writer knows the moments of selfdoubt. She helped me move past those, and I often found myself writing with her in mind.

  My great friend Evelyn Madsen accompanied me on a research trip to Shaoxing and Hangzhou, bringing her good humor and excellent palate to a whirlwind schedule of restaurant visits, chef interviews, and scouting jaunts for scenes. It is my policy to go everywhere my characters go, and she made it more fun.