Chinese Cooking for Diamond Thieves (8 page)

“Good snow ear,” I said, using the Mandarin word for the fungus,
xue er.
“Tastes like it's from Dongxiang.”

“It is,” Langston said. “Only it's
bai mu er.
”

This was our old, not particularly funny routine. Back in high school, cooking at his parents' house one day, we got into an argument. I insisted “snow fungus” and “white wood ear” were the same; Langston said they weren't. I turned out to be right. I never let it die.

After we finished, we cleaned up our breakfast dishes, and Langston showed me the apartment. The place he was renting was on the top floor of a brick apartment building built back around the time of the World's Fair in St. Louis, in 1904. More than a century later, it was near enough to Washington University to appeal to students looking for a cheap place to live. The landlord, Langston explained, was a local Chinese businessman. He'd figured out Chinese restaurant workers were just as able to pay rent as students and, unlike the students, didn't leave for three months every summer. If they had parties, they kept things quiet enough that neighbors up and down the street didn't complain. The entire apartment building, all three floors of it, was filled with Asians. Most were Chinese, either fresh immigrants or ABCs—American-born Chinese. Some were Vietnamese or Cambodian, Laotian, or Thai. Most worked at various Chinese restaurants within walking or biking distance. Langston's place was divided into his large bedroom in the rear, a small kitchen, and a living room with a fireplace that looked like it hadn't seen a fire since the World's Fair. Facing out onto the street was a front room that must have originally been some kind of parlor or sitting room. We were standing in the middle of it now.

“All yours,” Langston said. “We can put up a sheet or a curtain right here”—he gestured—“and block this off so you can have some privacy and sleep in late as I know you're accustomed to doing.”

I unpacked the Toyota and hauled my stuff upstairs. There wasn't much. Langston had a folding frame with a futon on it in the front room he'd told me was, for the foreseeable future, mine. I spread the futon on the wooden floor and put my sleeping bag on it. I arranged my clothes on a bookshelf built into one wall. I looked around. That seemed to be it, in terms of my personal property. I sat on the window ledge that looked out on the street below. Crusty mounds of snow the color of ashes were heaped along the curb. A couple of girls walked by, both in quilted parkas and very ugly big fur boots. A crow cruised by in a long glide. He landed with a single flap of his inky wings on the branch of a sycamore tree across the street. He was eye level with me. He glanced over my way, looking me over. Apparently I passed his inspection. He shrugged, shivering his black feathers, then settled down, watching, waiting. He looked like he was not intending to stay all that long there, but he was taking it all in, looking around to see what might be interesting for the time being. I knew how he felt.

Rule #31: Beginnings offer more options in life than do endings.

 

Langston used to cook at a place called the Eastern Palace. He'd gotten the job the way all Chinese cooks got them. His cousin knew a guy who was the brother-in-law of a woman who'd worked once at the Eastern Palace. Something like that. There was an expression: “Jangling the wok.” It meant that if you asked any one person in a Chinese restaurant to bang their metal spatula against the side of their wok if they knew or were related to any other person, chances were good the noise would commence and just go on and on.

Langston took me to the Eastern Palace the next afternoon. It was only about a block from the restaurant where he was now cooking, in a section of St. Louis ambitiously called Chinatown. It was more like China Street. The neighborhood was a section of street at the western edge of the city, about half a mile long, lined on both sides with Asian restaurants, grocery stores, and acupuncture clinics. Two different Chinese newspapers. There were cramped shop fronts selling insurance and cheap jewelry, and a couple of auto repair shops, where, according to handwritten signs that appeared stuck in the windows, Chinese was spoken and understood.

The Eastern Palace, Langston told me, catered to non-Chinese diners at lunch. There were enough businesses and offices within walking or quick driving distance to make lunch the real moneymaker. The Eastern Palace, along with a dozen other similar joints, served standard Chinese American lunch fare to everybody from accountants to shoe sellers. Dinner, on the other hand, when most of the lunch customers had returned to homes out in the suburbs, comprised almost exclusively Asian diners. There were two different menus for dinner: one in English, the other in Chinese. I'd worked in Chinese restaurants like this. I was always irritated by the two menus. A lot of Chinese restaurants were still treating non-Chinese customers as if they were eating back in the sixties, when moo goo gai pan and chop suey were considered exotic. There were dishes on the Chinese side of the menu that weren't included in the English version. I thought there were a lot of non-Chinese diners who would have been adventurous enough to try some of the authentic stuff, if it was offered to them. On the other hand, I hadn't seen many Chinese restaurants go broke. So maybe the owners knew something I didn't. Nobody in management had ever asked any of us in the kitchen how to run their places. That was probably for a reason.

We went in the rear door off the alley, into the kitchen of the Eastern Palace. It was, like the kitchens of every Chinese restaurant where I'd worked, small. The average American living room was bigger. Under the soft buzz of fluorescent lights, three guys were working. One was scrubbing a wok the size of a kid's sledding disc. Another was turning a chunk of beef into mouthful-size strips. The third was clattering a spatula against another wok where a thick cloud of steam was boiling up. I'd never been here, of course. But it all looked familiar.

Langston introduced me to Jao-long, who told me to call him Jim; and Kuo, who told me to call him John; and to Li, who said I might as well just call him Li since he couldn't figure out any way you could Americanize a name like that to make it easier. Then Langston took me into the owner's office and introduced me to Ting Leong, who didn't tell me to call him anything. As we stood at its door, he sat in his office, peering at a shopping list like it was the directions for defusing a bomb strapped to his own waist. His attention on the task was completely focused. Finally, he looked up at us. He was skinny, in dark pants with a short-sleeved white cotton shirt and under it a white wife beater. A long strand of silver and black hair was thoughtfully swirled over the bald spot on the crown of his head. His glasses were so smudged I didn't think he could see me all that well. Apparently he saw I wasn't Chinese, though. He turned to a woman, and the Cantonese was so rapid it was hard to even make out words—and it wouldn't have done me any good if I had been able to catch them. I heard
gwai lo,
the Cantonese equivalent of
laowai,
except instead of “old foreigner” it mean something like “foreign devil.”

“You look for work?” he said to me in English once Langston had introduced us. He was in his late forties, I was guessing. He crossed his skinny arms and absently rubbed both elbows with his palms.

“Exactly,” I said.

“You wash dishes?”

“I do,” I said. And I did. Or at least I was about to. Leong wheeled his chair around and reached to a shelf behind him. He tossed me an apron and pointed back through his office door into the kitchen toward the sink.

“Knock you-self out.”

 

I washed dishes all through the noon and dinner shifts. I must have done okay; Mr. Leong told me to show up the next day. I did. And the day after, and about 2,768 dirty plates later, rendered clean and sparkling under my ministrations, a week had gone by and I had enough money to pay Langston for my half of the rent with a little extra left over. It wasn't something I'd want to make a career of. Still, it was nice to be back in a Chinese restaurant kitchen again. Being in a Chinese restaurant kitchen for me was like going back to my bedroom in my parents' house in Andover. I'd spent a lot of time in both. I was comfortable there. I felt at home.

There are Chinese restaurants in almost every city in the United States. Places the size of a public restroom that are exclusively for take-out, with steel grates and bulletproof-glass-fronted counters—all in dark places. Places that are giant, extravagant halls, with indoor streams and opulent architecture and menus that are pages long. I've never been to any of them, but I'm betting there are little prairie hamlets in South Dakota and tiny burgs in the swamplands of central Florida and wide-spot-in-the-road towns in the New Mexico desert that all have Chinese restaurants. Szechuan and Cantonese and Hong Kong style, and even some places devoted to the more esoteric of China's cuisine—Hakka, Honan, Fukien. Americans, millions of them every day, eat Chinese food made and served in these restaurants. With all those thousands of restaurants and millions of people eating in them, it's kind of interesting to consider that very few of those people have been in a Chinese restaurant kitchen. No reason why they should, really. If it's a choice between a trip to Epcot Center or a visit to a Chinese restaurant kitchen, go with the Epcot option. Still, a Chinese restaurant kitchen is a different world. And sure, most diners don't go into the kitchens of any kinds of restaurants where they eat. It's just that a typical Chinese restaurant kitchen is different from, say, a French restaurant kitchen. Or an American diner's kitchen.

All restaurant kitchens have their own setups and layout. They have their own specific rhythms, their own slang; they have their own customs and hierarchy. Right now, in that hierarchy in any Chinese kitchen, I was a
sheng shou,
a “new hand.” That meant, more than anything else, I kept my mouth shut. I watched while I worked. I learned how things went on in that particular kitchen. I listened to the guys talking. Chinese cooks never shut up. In some restaurant kitchens—I'd talked with enough cooks and restaurant workers to know—the energy comes from smoking or from a snort of something or a shot of something with a century-plus proof. In Chinese kitchens, the energy is most often supplied by talking. Chinese chefs rag one another. They rag until they run out of things to rag about. At least for the moment. Then they start talking aloud to themselves. Then they regroup and rag each other some more. It helps the time pass. It keeps everybody engaged. Nobody has time to daydream or drift off.

I didn't join into the talk at the Eastern Palace. I wasn't a cook, at least not in that kitchen. Not yet. Dishwashers don't rate. My second night there, I was joined by Thuy, a JOB—“Just Off the Boat”—immigrant from Vietnam who'd come over, he told me in broken but understandable English, after his father lost their Saigon business in a dice game. Unless Thuy or I fell behind and caused the three chefs to run short of plates or bowls, they didn't even notice we were there. If we did run behind, they noticed right away. Not in a good way. I knew that from experience. I'd done my own share of yelling at dishwashers. So I didn't say anything. And I kept up. During the lulls, I watched Kuo (“Call Me John”) cook. He was the head chef, the most senior in the kitchen, and he answered only to Mr. Leong. Even Mr. Leong was respectful when he spoke with Kuo. In a Chinese kitchen, the owner might be the guy who pays the bills and the salaries, hires and fires. The head chef, though, runs the place.

As a chef, I came to the conclusion fairly quickly that as a fellow chef, Kuo was okay. I was better.

Rule #81: Between substance and appearance, know when to focus on which.

 

I'd been sharing the apartment with Langston for a week. We slept in the first morning we'd had off on the same day. We made a leisurely breakfast, then Langston said, “Okay, big brother. We've put it off long enough. Let's see what you've still got.”

“Isn't so much what I've still got as how much you've lost,” I said.

We changed into sweatpants and a couple of layers of long-sleeved shirts. We went downstairs and out into the alley behind the apartment building. My breath came out in a puff of steam that hung in the still, cold air. The sky was the color of an old nickel. The wind dragged torn clouds slowly over it. It was a winter sky that threatened snow. I stood still, sinking down to get my balance, letting my knees relax, trying to center the mass of my body over the spots right behind the balls of my feet, the spot traditional Chinese medical anatomy calls the “gushing spring.” Then I began dribbling a pair of imaginary basketballs, faster, faster, until the palms of my hands were just a blur. It forced the blood to begin to circulate, along with my
chi,
my energy. I felt my arms tighten with the movement, then slowly start to relax. I stopped shivering.

For a while we stretched, bending over, swooping down, cranking our trunks in big circles, making wide patterns with our swinging arms, just moving gently, carefully. Then, still working separately, we moved slowly through the basic forms we'd both been trying to perfect for almost ten years. Splitting, drilling, pounding, exploding, and crossing, stepping in straight lines, shifting back and forth, weaving, always moving ahead, always taking territory from an opponent, then turning, and going back the other way. We moved deliberately, exaggerating the actions, punching, slapping, dropping our bodies close to the ground, then coming up again, always attacking. We weren't trying to stretch and loosen our muscles so much as we were trying to get our ligaments and tendons to respond. Chinese fighting arts are divided between
waigong
and
qigong:
external and internal arts. External arts, like
gungfu,
emphasize the same kind of physical movement and training that Western sports like boxing and wrestling do: the muscles, the “red.” Internal arts, like the
xing-i
Langston and I did, worked on strengthening the “white,” the ligaments and soft tissue. Instead of contracting muscles to make power, the idea is to relax, to be soft and pliant, right up until the moment of impact. It's like the difference between getting hit with a sledgehammer and getting hit with a whip.