Lunch? Maggie thought. “All right. I’ll wait.” She didn’t want to wait, she wanted to move. Her Table assignment had already bombed. She couldn’t let the DNA test go down the drain too.
“Let us talk after the lunch. Oh – call me Zinnia. That’s my English name.”
“Zinnia,” Maggie repeated. “And your real name is?”
“Chu Zuomin.”
“That’s nice,” said Maggie, “but I’d mangle it. Okay. Zinnia.” She rose. “Here.” She passed across her business card with her cell number circled. “That phone’s on all the time. I’ll be waiting.” She paused on a breath. “By the way, besides Carey, is there anyone else still here, now, who knew my husband?”
“I think no,” said Miss Chu. “Only Carey. He will be back late tomorrow.”
“Tell him I came in,” said Maggie.
On the street she saw herself in a glass window, face shadowed, her steps moving through the Chinese crowd. She heard a beeping from her phone. She took it out. When she got back to the U.S. she would turn it off for a week at least. Zinnia, already? No, a text message from Table. She opened it.
How’s everything going? Thinking of you, sending hugs. Sarah.
Guilt tightened around Maggie’s neck. She should answer. She should tell Sarah that the Sam Liang story was off, that his restaurant was not opening and he had canceled. She would send an e-mail or a text message. She stared at her phone screen. She really shouldn’t wait any longer.
First, though, she had to eat. It had been a long time since she left L.A., time in which she’d eaten very little besides the candy corn.
She had brought the apartment’s guidebook. In it she scanned her sector of city restaurants until she found a courtyard house, close by, that served nineteen kinds of dumplings. This sounded good to her, and healthy. She needed to eat. She waved her hand for a taxi.
At the restaurant she was given a table in a lantern-strung court and a menu in English, with pictures. Many of the small creations looked like the Chinese dumplings she’d had at home, though with exotic fillings. Others were fantastical, sculpted creations made to look like miniature durian fruits and white-tipped peonies and plump, fantailed fish with red dots for eyes. Each was a marvel. But she was too hungry for the exotic ones and so she chose a plain dumpling, something substantial, filled with eggplant, cilantro, and dill.
The shape was familiar, yet the dumpling sounded different from anything she’d ever had before, and it sounded good. The truth was, she had never really liked Chinese food. Of course, she’d had Chinese food only in America, which was clearly part of the story. She’d always heard people say it was different in China. Yet even three years before, when she had visited with Matt, they had eaten at more Italian and Thai places than Chinese.
The trouble with Chinese food in America, to her, was that it seemed all the same. Even when a restaurant had a hundred and fifty items on the menu, she could order them all and still get only the same few flavors over and over again. There was the tangy brown sauce, the salted black bean; the ginger-garlic-green onion, the syrupy lemon. Then there was the pale opal sauce that was usually called lobster whether or not lobster had ever been anywhere near it.
The menu in her hands held a square of text, framed by an ornate border in the style of scroll-carved wood. At the top it said A BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO CHINESE FOOD. For tourists, she thought, and started to read.
No matter which way you look at history, the Chinese people have been more preoccupied with food than any other group in the world. Compare our ancient texts to the classical works of the West: ours are the ones dwelling endlessly on the utensils and methods and rituals of food, especially the rituals. Food was always surrounded by coded behaviors that themselves carried great meaning. Consider, too, the economics of dining. Take any dynasty; the Chinese were spending more of what they had on food than any of their contemporaries around the world. China has always revered good cooks, and paid them well. Even the most archaic descriptions of early towns tell of restaurants and wine houses jammed along the earthen streets or riverfronts, doors open to the smells of food and sounds of laughter, banners flapping to announce the delights within. Wu Ching-Tzu, in his eighteenth-century novel The Scholars, described these places as “hung with fat mutton, while the plates on the counters were heaped with steaming trotters, sea slugs, duck preserved in wine, and freshwater fish. Meat dumplings boiled in the cauldrons and enormous rolls of bread filled the steamers.” Still today, few things to us are more important.
It was signed by a Professor Jiang Wanli, Beijing University. What he was describing certainly didn’t sound like the food she knew from home. Moreover, the air around her was undeniably bright with good smells and the sounds of chattering pleasure. Each table was filled. Waiters strode past, steamer baskets held high. Bubbles of laughter floated up. Slowly she took in the shrubs, the tasseled lanterns, the cranked-open latticework windows that revealed other dining rooms filled, like this courtyard, with loud, happy, mostly young Chinese.
Could the food in China be truly exceptional? It was possible, she thought now. Well then, she would eat; she would keep an open mind. Of course, writing the article about the chef would have been the perfect way to find out more. Again she felt the stab of regret that he had canceled, so sharply this time that her hand crept into her pocket and lingered on her cell phone. Should she really let it go? No. She should call him again. One more time.
She scrolled through the recently called numbers to his, took a breath, and hit SEND.
It rang, and she heard fumbling. “Wei,” he said when he got the phone to his mouth.
“Mr. Liang? It’s Maggie McElroy again.”
“Hi.” Pause. He was surprised. “How are you?” he said.
“Fine. Thanks.”
She could hear a scramble of voices behind him. He half covered the phone, hissing, and then came back. “Sorry. My uncles are here.”
“I’m interrupting.”
“No. They want me to talk to you.”
“Why?”
“They’ve figured out you’re a female person.”
“Ah.” Funny, she thought. She had somehow forgotten how to even look at it in that way. “Actually I’m calling one last time about the article. I don’t want to overstep, but – I had to ask you again, since I’m here. Won’t you give it some thought?”
“Look – ”
“I don’t have to write about the restaurant. There are so many things. The book. Aren’t you doing a book?”
“Translating, with my father. We’re doing it together. It’s a book my grandfather wrote.”
“The Last Chinese Chef,” she supplied.
“You know,” he said.
Naturally. You’re my assignment. “We could write about that.”
“I’m sorry, but it’s the wrong time. I should do that when the book comes out.”
“True,” she admitted.
“Also,” he said, “I’m swamped.”
She was getting the signals, but she never heard No. Not the first time, anyway. “Swamped by what?”