My father used to say he detected a smirk on the face of Tan Zhuanqing when he prepared xiao wo tou for the Empress. Like many Chinese dishes, xiao wo tou has a second layer of meaning beyond how it looks and smells and tastes. Indeed, in the decades that followed, among food people the dish acquired a certain connotation. To cook xiao wo tou, to serve it, even to refer to it, was to speak of China’s Marie Antoinette. Ci Xi cared nothing for her people. Her reign brought a system that had endured thousands of years to its end. Father taught us that when we made xiao wo tou we were making reference to the worst kind of imperial disregard for the common people, and so we must be extraordinarily careful where and when we served them. Delightful and rustic mouthfuls, they were also powerful political statements and could bring about a chef’s downfall. Be careful, he told us.
I never made them outside the house. In fact, after I went to work in the restaurant at sixteen, I never made them again.
When I began in the restaurant in 1951, the government was getting ready to close down the industry. Liang Jia Cai was a favorite of everyone, even party royalty. They loved dining there. They always commanded the best tables. So our place was one of the last to go.
I made the most of my few years at Liang Jia Cai, adding eight dishes that became top sellers. People started to say that the Last Chinese Chef would have a successor after all. I gave an interview in the new state-run pictorial magazine. Father was pleased. He worked with me every day to show me as many of the old dishes as he could remember.
In 1954 our door was closed. They chose a final few restaurants to stay open for officials and guests of state, and shuttered the rest. At first Father was livid that ours was not one of the few left open. Yet we were lucky. A few years later, to run an imperial-style restaurant, even one sanctioned by the Communist state, would become very dangerous. This fate he was spared.
When Liang Jia Cai was closed I was transferred to Gou Bu Li in Tianjin. It was a lucky placement, for Tianjin was not far, only 120 kilometers, and I could visit my parents often in their last years. The restaurant itself was one of the most famous eating places in all of China, but it was a dumpling house. There were few more proletarian foods. Even the name, which grew from the nickname of the original chef and meant A Dog Ignores It, gave the feeling of roughness. I was told they served many types of dumplings before liberation, but when I was there they made only their original steamed stuffed bun, filled with either meat or cabbage. That was all right. A great dish can be made with a cabbage. The best food can rest on the simplest ingredients. And there is nothing higher in its way than a fragrant, light-as-a-cloud meat bun. I made these day after day, week after week, for four years. I lived in the commune attached to the restaurant. We cooks had all been transferred there from other places, without families; we lived in the work unit. We slept in a long, low room with two lines of bunks. It was the best place in the world for me to hide.
My parents died within a year of each other and I had no one in the world except Jiang and Tan and Xie; though sworn brothers we were separated by both time and distance. I lost myself in the great kitchens of Gou Bu Li, which were divided into massive stations for each stage of production. There were the great floury, stone-topped dough surfaces, ringed with workers kneading, mixing, then turning out the perfect circles of half-leavened dough. There were the rows of supersized chopping blocks where the filling was minced and seasoned. There were the wrappers and crimpers with their gigantic shallow bowls of filling and their stacks of wrappers, constantly replenished. There was the cooking: the racks and racks of enormous bamboo steamers, each holding eighty, a hundred, a hundred and fifty baozi. I kept my head down. Like so many people at that time, I grasped that the key to survival was invisibility. My only goal was to live. I kept to myself.
Others were not so lucky. First Xie’s father went to prison. Then old Ah Heng, my father’s home cook, was denounced. I was drawing every breath in fear. I was a Liang, son of the famous Liang who’d written The Last Chinese Chef. It was only a matter of time. I trembled every day, waiting.
The first sign was a change in the red-character poster that had long been displayed in the kitchens. The old poster exhorted us to serve the masses with exemplary dumplings. Who would not want to do that? But then this vanished, and a new one appeared, filled with a denser text. I recognized it immediately. It was a passage from the writings of Chairman Mao.
Sumptuous feasts are generally forbidden. In Shaoshan, Xiangdan County, it has been decided that guests are to be served with only three kinds of animal food, namely, chicken, fish, and pork. It is also forbidden to serve bamboo shoots, kelp, and lentil noodles. In Hengshan County it has been resolved that eight dishes and no more may be served at a banquet. Only five dishes are allowed in the East Third District in Liling County, and only three meat and three vegetable dishes in the North Second District, while in the West Third District New Year feasts are forbidden entirely. In Xiangxiang County, there is a ban on all “egg-cake feasts,” which are by no means sumptuous… In the town of Jiamu, Xiangxiang County, people have refrained from eating expensive foods and use only fruit when offering ancestral sacrifices.
I looked at the bottom – “Mao’s Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan,” March 1927. Thirty-one years before. But I knew exactly why it was being posted now. Everyone knew. We were used to messages sent through historical symbolism. It was a signal. There was a shift. Those who had known privilege were in danger.
If you went by what comrades were willing to say, everyone at Gou Bu Li came from a peasant or worker background. We were all completely proletarian. But everyone knew it was not true. Each learned to keep silent about his or her own past while avidly listening for clues or simmering talk about everyone else.
So I waited. I watched. I knew something was going to happen.
When it came, it was in the form of an order for food. I was in the kitchen, in the thrum of almost one hundred cooks, at my station, which was for wrapping. Wrapping was the most difficult, the most pleasing, the most subtle part of making Gou Bu Li’s baozi. Each glossy-white bun had to be in the shape of a tight-budded chrysanthemum, closed at the top with no less than eighteen pleats. Mine were perfect. I worked with care. I kept my eyes down.
One of the waiters from upstairs approached. “Comrade Liang?”
“I am he.” I did not interrupt my pleating rhythm.
“There is a special order from a table upstairs.”
I looked up. There were no special orders. Just baozi, pork and cabbage. “What is it?”
“They made me repeat it. They said they wanted xiao wo tou.”
“Ei? Say that again.”
“Xiao wo tou. They said it was your specialty.”
“Nonsense,” I said. “Never heard of it. Don’t know what it is.” Though I did, exactly.
“They said you would know,” he said.
He was young, the skin on his face tight as a plum. “Listen,” I said, “you go back. Tell them you are sorry, we don’t make that at this restaurant. What are you standing there for? Go!” And I watched him scuttle off.
I did not see the boy again that night. When we finished I cleaned my area quickly and returned to the bunk room in time to roll up my few articles of clothing and hide them under my pillow. My hukou, my household registration, which gave me the right to exist in China, a home, a place in the pattern – this I left in its sewn-in pouch in my inner pocket. Later I would have to find a way to get rid of it.