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, where 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.