Chinese Cooking for Diamond Thieves (7 page)

“Hey back,” I said.

“You a friend of Wenqian's, yeah?” he said. He was only about ten feet away now. He bounced lightly and came up over the curb onto the sidewalk just a few steps away. He had a quick, jerky way of speaking. That, and the way he chopped up his words, made him sound, even speaking English, like he might have come from Hong Kong.

“Who?” I asked.

“Oh,” he said, nodding. “You a ass-smart too, yeah?”

“It's ‘smart-ass,'” I said. “Not ‘ass-smart.'”

“Yeah?” He seemed excited. His eyes had a feverish shininess. It was like he was trying to pump himself up. I had a feeling, suddenly, that whatever that something might be, it was probably not in my best interest.

“Yeah,” I said. “And I'm just a semi-smart-ass.” I didn't have any idea what he was talking about. I knew he was closing the distance as he talked, still smiling. He kept his hands in his pockets. He probably thought I was going to be cautious. Maybe I was supposed to think he might have a weapon in one of them. The way he was talking, he was either mentally screwed up some way, or he was trying to fluster me. My guess was the latter. My father spent some time with me when I was in high school, talking about the way you can get into trouble on the street.

“Bad guys aren't as stupid as most people would like to think,” my father said. “They are good, very good in some cases, about picking a target or a victim. They size up their targets, look for any weaknesses, and they try to get as close as possible if they are going to attack. It cuts down on the intended victim's chance to run away.” He explained bad-guy strategy in these situations. When they start to speak to you, so low you can't hear them, you tend to automatically lean forward or even take a few steps closer to try to hear them. Every step they can get closer to you, the target—like every step a lion can manage to sneak in on an antelope—narrows any chances you have to make a getaway.

The Bald Warm-up Suit was expecting me to play the part of the antelope. Or at least to be caught off-guard and confused. I wasn't. I didn't say anything. I came closer, walking directly at him. But I came a lot faster than he expected. The lion was still in the middle stages of his stalking, and the antelope was suddenly coming on, suddenly right on top of him. The lion wasn't prepared for that. I stepped in close. He stopped. I didn't. I kept my forearm parallel to the ground, my fist vertical, and I moved my body with the motion of my arm. He whipped his hand out of his pocket to try to intercept it. He was too late. Didn't matter. My forearm was going to slide over his arm no matter what he did to try to stop it. I hit him right in the solar plexus, squarely. Not hard. Hard enough, though.

Just like getting robbed or assaulted in real life usually isn't like it is in the movies, hitting someone isn't usually like it is in the movies. Most of the time if you try to hit someone, unless you've done it a lot before, either the bones or the ligaments or the tendons in your hands are going to give. Maybe even break. Or your wrist is going to collapse. I'd done it a lot, though. I'd hit a big heavy swinging bag so long and so often that my wrists weren't going to give. Unless I got unlucky and hit a hard spot, a bony place, or unless Baldy was wearing a suit of armor under that warm-up jacket, nothing on me was going to break either.

He staggered back. He doubled over at the waist, trying to raise his hands up to his midsection. He was trying to get his breath, with even less success, making soft breathy noises. In a combination of sitting and falling, his butt landed on the pavement.

“Hurts more than you'd think it would, doesn't it?” I said in Mandarin. “Try to straighten up.” I switched to English since I didn't know the word for ‘diaphragm' in Chinese. And if he was a Hongkie, chances were good that he might not understand Mandarin anyway. Most people from Hong Kong speak Cantonese. “Your diaphragm is spasming,” I said. “You have to straighten up to stretch and relax it.”

He looked up at me, still bent over. His eyes were a little gauzy. His lips were chalky.

“In a little bit, after you get your breath back,” I said, “you're going to feel a real deep need to go to the bathroom.”

“Huhhh?” It wasn't so much a statement as a groan. Even so, it sounded more coherent than the whooshing noise he'd been making.

“I don't know why,” I said. “I don't know what the exact physiology is. But trust me, you will. Probably ought to get going to try to find one.”

He looked up at me, still stunned. Whatever he'd planned, he hadn't planned for it to go this way. But he wasn't giving up.

“You shit-dumb,” he said.

“Dumbshit,” I said. He didn't seem to hear me. Or maybe he didn't appreciate my impromptu lessons on proper English usage of the vulgar vernacular. He straightened a bit more. But he was still breathing gingerly, from high in his chest—I could see him heaving under his warm-up suit—and his voice was wavering.

“Shit-dumb,” he repeated. “You think this all going away? You think she going to get away with this? We just forget about it? We not go easy now. Somebody die? We no care! You die, shit-dumb? We no care.”

He suddenly put his hand on his abdomen. I could see his face flush.

“Like I said, you're going to need a toilet.” I didn't know what else to say. I was such a shit-dumb I couldn't figure out what he was talking about.

Down the street, a corner a couple of blocks away, I saw a patrol car slowly make the turn and head toward us, cruising leisurely along.

“Those cops will probably know where the nearest restroom is,” I said. I pushed my chin in the direction behind him. “Why don't you hang around here a minute and ask them?”

He glanced up at the car, still a block off, then back at me. He was as confused as I was. I still didn't have a clue why he'd been coming at me. The difference was that his stomach hurt a lot more than mine did. He started walking away, as quickly as it looked like he could—still a little stiffly and still a little bent over—and disappeared around the corner behind me.

It wasn't the first time I'd hit someone. It was the first time I'd hit someone and wasn't exactly sure why. Some guy asking me if I was a friend of Wenqian's. Which is a Chinese girl's name. A guy who was coming toward me with some intent that wasn't in my best physical interest, I was pretty sure. Sure enough to have jacked him first. And then all the stuff about “her” not “get away with it,” about not giving up, about “not go easy now.” And especially the part about somebody dying—and more specifically “you” dying. Which was directed at me. It
was
the first time I'd had that experience.

I glanced up the street. The cruiser had paused. The driver was talking to a woman who leaned over to hear what he was saying. I put my back against a phone pole. My knees felt like they didn't want to lock, no matter how I tried to make them. The muscles in my thighs were suddenly quivering. If it wasn't for the pole, I'd have been sitting down about where I'd put Mr. Bald Warm-up Suit just a few minutes before, on the sidewalk.

The woman stepped away from the cruiser and waved to the cop. He kept driving down the street toward me, then eased up and stopped. The passenger's window rolled down. I stepped away from the pole and took a couple of steps toward the car. I was happy my legs seemed to be holding me. And a little surprised they were.

“That your Toyota there, Massachusetts?” the cop in the passenger seat asked me. He jerked his head in the direction of the car's tag.

“Yes, sir,” I said. I'd picked it up the day before.

“You're parked in a limited-time spot. You got someplace you can move it?”

“I do, officer,” I said. “To St. Louis.”

Rule #70: Snow fungus and white wood ear are the same—and, yes, that is important.

 

I could have called Langston Wu before I got to St. Louis. It would have been polite. I was planning to stay with him, after all. Maybe even move in, if he had the room. On the other hand, Langston showed up at my house unannounced one afternoon back when we were juniors in high school. He brought a bag full of live eels with him. My mother, I thought at the time, was actually considering killing him when she came into the kitchen and there was Langston dumping a dozen squirmy, slimy gray eels into her granite sink. Langston was the sort of guy who appreciated the spontaneous. I couldn't think of anything much more spontaneous than showing up at his front door in the middle of the morning, asking him if he'd like a roommate. Immediately.

That's where I was, twelve hours, more or less, after I'd left Buffalo. At his front door. Langston opened it at my second round of knocking. He was wearing a sweatshirt inside out and a pair of running shorts. His black hair stuck up at a bunch of odd angles all over his head, like a collection of exclamation points, like he was a cartoon character drawn to express only surprise. Which, at that hour of the morning, he was.

“Tucker?” He rubbed his hand over his hair and made it stick up even more. “What the hell are you doing here?” He looked sleepy. I assumed he was working in a Chinese restaurant. I couldn't picture Langston doing anything else. If he was—if he was working in any kind of restaurant—he was keeping late hours. People who've never worked in eating places, and who go there just for meals, don't realize how much of the work goes on after the last diner has left for the evening. Restaurant workers keep vampire hours. A restaurant doesn't just shut down, not even after the last dish has been washed, the last stained, wrinkled linen whipped off the table and tossed into the laundry hamper. There is always something else to do: prepping for the next day, scrubbing a sink, worming a piece of wire into the gas port of a stove to clear out the gunk that accumulates inside. Then there's the decompression hour, where workers gather someplace to nibble and drink and complain about their jobs. By the time most chefs and other restaurant workers get to bed, it's closer to morning than to anything like night. It was already past nine now. For a working chef like Langston, that would have been the best part of his sleep.

“You know,” I said. “Happened to be in the mood for some fish maw soup and realized I was out of snow fungus. Thought I'd pop over here and borrow some.”

“Don't have any,” Langston said. “Got plenty of
bai mu er,
though.” He stood aside and gestured for me to come in.

I did.

“You eat yet?” he asked.

I shook my head. I followed him into the kitchen. He took a plastic tub of rice from the refrigerator and dumped some into a pot, then poured in water and set it on the stove, lighting the burner underneath. He filled a kettle with water and lit another burner. I sat at the table. He sat across from me and folded his arms across his chest. I could see scars, old burns and a couple of new ones, on his forearms. Cooks in Western restaurants have scars like thick red smudges where their arms come down accidentally on the side of a pan. Chinese cooks like Langston—and me—have kitchen scars that are fine ribbons, either scarlet or tan, depending on their age, where our forearms have encountered the thin, searing edge of a wok. I had my own collection, most of them healed into shiny streaks by now. It had been a while since I'd gotten any new ones.

He pushed against the table so he was balanced on the back legs of the chair and looked at me. “You're on.”

I told him the story of my life, skipping the parts he knew. Since we'd known one another since second grade, that meant I could leave out most of it except the past week or so. I left out the part about Corinne Chang. I thought that part might be superfluous. I still wasn't sure what it was all about anyway, and I didn't feel like going into it, even with someone like Langston, who was a good listener. He sat and did just that and didn't interrupt.

“So,” I finished, “not having any other immediate prospects educationally, socially, or professionally for the moment, I thought I'd come out here and see if there were any restaurants looking to upgrade their kitchen staff.”

Langston nodded. “And you, being a
laowai
with pretensions and a deep, probably neurotic need to try to be a part of a culture that neither needs nor wants you in the club, thought I might get you in the kitchen door of some place.”

“Exactly,” I said, reflecting on the fact that was the second time in less than a week I'd had ethnic slurs used to my face. Corinne had called me a “big nose.” Which was mildly offensive but was really just an old term for Westerners, who, when they first appeared in China, seemed to have bigger noses than the Chinese were used to seeing. Langston was calling me a
laowai,
an “old foreigner.” I'd never known why it had become a standard Mandarin term for a Caucasian. It could be an insult. It usually was. But sometimes it was just a description. And even when it was used insultingly, a lot of my Chinese friends and coworkers like Langston used it more to tease than anything else. Any way it got used, it didn't bother me. If you were going to be a white guy hanging out in Chinese kitchens, you had to put up with a certain amount of cultural insensitivity.

The rice was bubbling in the pot now, thick, viscous enough that a pair of chopsticks would stand up in it. Langston leaned into the open refrigerator and pulled out a bowl of leftover chicken stew studded with feathery knobs of silver jelly-like fungus and stirred it into the rice. He poured the hot water from the kettle into a teapot. I found a couple of bowls in the cupboard and put them on the table with two teacups. Breakfast was served.
Zhou,
rice porridge that we both liked Cantonese style, with a sprinkle of pickled and slivered bamboo shoots Langston retrieved from the refrigerator. It was the breakfast I'd mentioned to Corinne that first morning back in New Hampshire. It was even better than I'd imagined it then.