“How?”
“Well, first of all, I had always cooked. I learned the basics from my mother – brisket, chicken soup, challah. But four years ago I decided to change my life, and really learn to cook. I came here. I told you, my uncles. They’re incredible chefs, they’re older, retired – they taught me. Full-time. I spent the first few years basically cowering beneath them. They were rough. What you might call old-school.”
“Are those the guys I heard on the phone?”
“Two of them. That was Jiang and Tan, whom I call First and Second Uncle. Jiang Wanli and Tan Jingfu. There’s a third one, Uncle Xie, who lives in Hangzhou. Xie Er.”
“Are they your father’s brothers?”
“No. Xie is the son of a man who worked with my grandfather in the Forbidden City. Tan is the grandson of my grandfather’s teacher, Tan Zhuanqing, who was a very famous chef. Jiang grew up in Hangzhou with Xie; they were best friends. So we aren’t blood relations, but our ties go back for generations. Those kinds of connections are very strong here. Stronger than in the West.”
“And all three were chefs?”
“Tan and Xie were chefs. Jiang is a food scholar, a retired professor.”
“I knew I saw that name somewhere. I read a little introduction by him on a restaurant menu.”
“That’s him. He cooks, too; he says he doesn’t, but he does.”
“And they were hard on you?”
“Terrible! They called me names. They’d hound me, shout at me, slam utensils to the floor when I didn’t move fast enough – and then if I made something that wasn’t perfect, they dumped it in the garbage.”
“Ah!” She was writing, enjoying his words and the scratch of her pen on the paper. “And then your father. You say he just stopped cooking? Why?” She looked up.
Again he hesitated, his hand in midair with the cleaver. Then back to chopping. “It was too hard for him in America.”
“Still, I wonder why he didn’t teach you.”
For Sam Liang, answering this question was always hard. Everyone in China remembered his grandfather as a chef, fewer his father; still, everyone assumed his father would have been the one to teach him. In truth, Sam would have given anything for his father to have taught him, to have cared – even if he’d yelled at him, insulted him, and cuffed him the way his uncles did. But his father refused. He said no Liang was ever to cook again, certainly not his son. Chinese cuisine was finished. It was dead. Great food needed more than chefs; it needed gourmet diners. These people were as important as the cooks. But the Communists had made it illegal to appreciate fine food or even remember that it had once existed. They had the masses eating slop and gristle and thinking it perfectly fine. In America and Europe, too, Chinese gourmets were all but nonexistent. There were some left in Hong Kong or Taiwan, but that was it. So said Liang Yeh.
When Sam had tried to suggest to his father that things had changed, that a world of art and discernment and taste was being reborn in China and that going back might be worthwhile, the old man erupted. “Never return to China! Never set foot there! It is a dangerous place, run by thugs!”
In fact, even though Liang Yeh was pleased that Sam had graduated from Northwestern and become a schoolteacher, he really had asked only two things of Sam in life. One, never go back to China. Two, marry and have a son. On neither front had Sam delivered. He brought the cleaver back down again between the ribs.
The American woman seemed to read his silence. “So okay, your father didn’t teach you, your uncles did. But am I correct in saying you’re still cooking in the style of your grandfather?”
“Definitely.”
“And like him, do you feel you’re the last Chinese chef?”
“Not the last,” he said. “Maybe one of the last. I think I’m more optimistic than my grandfather. He thought it was all over. He was convinced imperial style would die with his generation. My father’s generation thought the same. Yet there always seemed to be a few who kept it alive.”
“Why?”
“Because it was the highest thing. Not only did it incorporate all China’s regions, all its schools of cooking, it was a chef ’s dream like no other. In the Forbidden City’s kitchens you could create anything. They had the finest ingredients from all over the world. Hundreds of people cooked for one family.”
“So who became a cook?”
“Ah,” he said. “Not what you think. Not only certain people. Any person could do it. It was one of the weird democratic aspects of feudal China. Some chefs were rich and educated, some poor. Cooking was one of those jobs that relied purely on talent. Any man who excelled at it could get to the top. People respected great cooks. In fact, one chef in the eighteenth century B.C. was made a prime minister, his food was so good. His name, Yi Yin, is still spoken with awe thousands of years later. To this day, when people talk about negotiating matters of state, they say ‘adjusting the tripods,’ in honor of him and the bronze vessels of his time. You’ll see for yourself, the longer you stay here: we are ultra-serious about food.”
He talks of the Chinese and says “we,” she wrote. He has a dark face, indeterminate. If I had not known he was Jewish-Chinese I would never have guessed. He could be Greek, Afghan, Egyptian. He could be from anywhere. “So what kind of person was your grandfather before he became a chef?”
“A slave.”
“There was slavery that late?”
“China was feudal until 1911.”
“So he was owned by someone.” She wrote, Descendant of slaves.
“But he wasn’t born that way. He sold himself. It was either that or starve with his family.”
“Where was he from?”
“Here. Beijing. The back alleys. You should read the story.” He pointed his knife at the far end of the counter. “I set it out. It’s the prologue to the book. It was the first thing I put in English. You can take it with you if you like. Or read it here.”
“Really?”
He turned back to his ribs. “Either way. Right now I have to cook.”
“Should I go in the next room?” she said, even though she hadn’t seen any place to sit in there. Just the one table. No chairs.
“As you like.” He was gathering minced green onions in a mound.
Maggie watched him for a second. She liked the rhythms of the sounds he made, and the raw, unblended smells. Everything he thought and felt and said was condensed into the food under his hands. And it was comfortable here – which was odd to her, because she felt in most people’s kitchens the way she felt about homes in generaclass="underline" wanting to leave as soon as possible. Do her interview, get her notes down, and leave. “I guess I’ll stay,” she said.
He was focused now on cooking and gave only a distracted nod. So she leaned on her elbows and turned past the title page, The Last Chinese Chef, and started to read.
& & & My name is Liang Wei. I was born in the nineteenth year of the reign of Guangxu, the year they in the West call 1894, into the lowest rung of society. My family were alley dwellers. Five of us lived in one room, but we had city pride. We were folk of the capital. At least we knew we were better than millions of others.
My father was a vendor who went every day to the great open squares inside the Fucheng Gate, to sell glasses of tea to the men who streamed in alongside lines of camels and mule-driven carts. In the heat of the summer and the numbing ice of winter, he went. The caravans bought, or they did not. Too often not. As the years went on, his face became set with the etchings of his fate.
By my seventh year we were starving. The decision was made to sell one of the children. Usually a family would sell a girl, but the girl in our family was the youngest. Too young to sell. I said I would go. It was time for me to be a man.