But she had to try to come up with something now. “The piece doesn’t have to be about the restaurant. A profile of you would be fine.”
“A profile of me? Whose restaurant is not opening?”
“Not like that – ”
“With what just happened I can’t say it seems like a good idea. I hope you understand.”
“That could be a mistake.” Her mind was whirling, looking for strategies, finding none. “Really.”
“Please – Miss McElroy, is it?”
“Maggie.”
“Accept my apology. And please tell your editor too, I’m very sorry. I had no idea this was going to happen.”
“I know,” Maggie said. “Do you want to at least think it over? Because I’m going to be here for a few days.”
“I’ll think if you like. But I don’t see how I can give you an interview about a restaurant that is not going to open. Or how I can do a profile when something like this has just happened.”
“I understand,” she said. She was disappointed, but she also felt for him. A lot of attention had been trained on this opening.
“Enjoy your trip.”
It was an American thing to say, polite, faintly strained, distancing. He wants to get rid of me. “Take my number in case.”
“Okay,” he said. He took it down dutifully, and thanked her when she wished him good luck. Then they said goodbye, smiled into the phone, and hung up.
2
Three qualities of China made it a place where there grew a great cuisine. First, its land has everything under heaven: mountains, deserts, plains, and fertile crescents; great oceans, mighty rivers. Second, the mass of Chinese are numerous but poor. They have always had to extract every possible bit of goodness and nutrition from every scrap of land and fuel, economizing everywhere except with human labor and ingenuity, of which there is a surfeit. Third, there is China’s elite. From this world of discriminating taste the gourmet was born. Food became not only a complex tool for ritual and the attainment of prestige, but an art form, pursued by men of passion.
– LIANG WEI, The Last Chinese Chef
Sam Liang turned the phone off and replaced it in his pocket before he turned to face his First and Second Uncles, Jiang Wanli and Tan Jingfu, who stood glaring at him. They were older by thirty-five years, friends of his father and, with Xie Er in Hangzhou, the nearest thing he had in China to clan relatives. They’d also been his guides in the kitchen and his ties to the past. From every conceivable angle, they had unlimited rights to harangue him.
“Was that a female person?” demanded Jiang in the Chinese they always spoke.
Sam sighed. “Yes.”
“I trust you invited her to meet you?”
“No, First Uncle.”
“The times I’ve told you to try harder are more than a few! Have we not talked of this? Yet whenever an opportunity crosses your path with a female person, you show your white feather!”
“Uncle. That was a business call. Anything else would have been inappropriate.”
“Huh!” Tan raised a finger. “My English is not so poor! She was from the American magazine. A writer. Probably a food specialist!”
“Exactly right,” said Sam. “And the restaurant is off for now. There is no story.”
“You are not trying very hard,” said Jiang. “You should do an article with her. It would bring you attention.”
Tan leapt in. “You could have at least suggested the two of you drink tea! You could have discussed the matter as a civilized person.”
Sam understood. A civilized person meant a Chinese person. After the first few years of instructing him in the kitchen – the two of them barking directions, shouting at his mistakes, harrumphing their approval when he cooked well – the two old men had turned to teaching him etiquette. They showed him the web of manners and considerations that held together the Chinese world. Unfortunately, he had been raised in America; he was possessed of willful foreign ways. And he was only half Chinese. Luck was with him that the other half was Jewish, as Jews were admired for their intelligence, but still, here in China, it was bad to be only part Chinese. This was always the first thought of Sam’s detractors.
Those critics called him an outsider even though he was old-school. They didn’t seem to care that he was one of the few still cooking in the traditional way, that all the other top cooks in China were showcasing some modern edge. But he had determined to do what his grandfather had written and his uncles had taught him. He knew cooking well was the best revenge.
“I wish you had invited the female person to meet you,” Tan said.
“Yes, Uncle.” Sam did not argue. In their minds, being single at his age was almost an affront to nature. It was something they felt a duty to correct. He had long ago understood that the best way to love them was to let them interfere. Let them scold him and insist upon meetings with the female relations of their acquaintances. These meetings were at best a waste of time and at worst painful – and not only for him. What he’d quickly realized was that the women didn’t want the introduction any more than he did. They too were there only to appease elder relatives.
Certainly there were beautiful, intelligent Chinese women to be met in the internationalized top layer of Beijing society, but so far Sam had not found the connection he wanted. Part of it was them. For Chinese women who liked foreigners, he was not foreign enough. For those seeking a man who was Chinese, he was too foreign. His status placed him somewhere below all of the above on the instant-desirability scale.
It had not been like that at home in Ohio. There, his dark, high-cheeked face had seemed exotic to women, especially corn-fed girls with athletic strides and sweet smiles. The women here were lovely too, but different, sinuous, cerebral, fine-skinned. They were cultured. He found them fascinating. It was never hard to begin affairs with them. What was hard was to connect.
That, he sensed, was his fault; he wanted a connection that was complete. Here, he could never get over feeling that he was using only half of himself, the Chinese half. Everything from before, from America, now hid unseen. And he wanted to be seen. At home in the West he’d had a similar feeling, only it was the Chinese part of him that lay dormant. He’d had the idea that coming here would change things. No. He was still half.
“You could have talked to the American about the book,” Tan said.
Sam shook his head. “Respectfully, Second Uncle, I don’t see them doing an article about a book that came out in 1925 – oh, and in Chinese.”
“You are translating it.”
“It’s not done.”
“You’re no further?” said Jiang.
“I ought to be more hardworking,” Sam said, which was the evasive and Chinese thing to say. Actually it was his father who held up the translation. Now retired from the post office, Liang Yeh spent most of his time in a dark room with books and the things he remembered. Sam couldn’t get him to do his part, which was rendering his own father’s formal, premodern Mandarin into a rough English-and-Chinese mix Sam could understand.
He had not told Tan and Jiang this, preferring to let them admire the old man. To them, Liang Yeh had triumphed. He had made his way to America. He had established a family. They didn’t know that Sam had been largely raised by his mother, the no-nonsense and tireless Judy Liang, née Blumenfeld, while his father was mentally remote. Exile was in the heart, and Liang Yeh carried it with him everywhere. He seemed determined to never let it go. In time exile became his most important aspect, his shadow, closer to him in a way even than his family.
Therefore, when complaints were raised about the slow translation, Sam took the blame. It eased a needy and chronically sad part of him to hear his father praised, and he did whatever he could to leave his uncles’ good opinion intact.