Kitchen Chinese
Ann Mah
For my parents
“To eat well is to live well.”
—
CHINESE PROVERB
The North
The South
The West
The North
“…It was only in China, and indeed for a long time only in Beijing, that the special dish known as Beijing
kaoya
(in China), Peking duck (in English), and
canard lacqué
(in French) was prepared. [The] cooked bird has a shining golden exterior, attractively crisp, and a moist, succulent inside, the whole having a fine aroma and being free of excess fat.”
—
THE OXFORD COMPANION TO FOOD
M
y first meal in Beijing is roasted duck, or
kaoya
as it’s called in Chinese. Glossy and brown, with crisp skin and meltingly moist flesh, the bird is cut into over one hundred pieces, in the traditional way. We silently fill our pancakes, dipping meat and skin into the dark, salty-sweet sauce, adding slivers of scallion and cucumber, and rolling the packages up like cigars. I arrived in Beijing only two hours ago, and my head feels pinched with tiredness and jet lag, but I eat until my fingers are greasy and my jeans feel snug. When the pancakes run out, I eat the duck alone, dipping morsels of skin into the brown sauce, relishing the crisp richness.
My sister, Claire, watches me from across the table. We haven’t seen each other in almost two years, yet the sly arch of her eyebrows is still familiar.
“It’s delicious,” I say, smiling to hide my nervousness. “Almost as good as Mom’s.”
“Mom’s is better,” she replies. But I see her hands falter as she lights a cigarette. I try not to stare at the unfamiliar purse of her mouth as she exhales a plume of smoke. The cigarettes are a new accessory, but then again, everything seems a little different about my sister.
I devour almost the whole duck, savoring its familiar, gamey flavor, so evocative of the scraps I used to scrounge from my mother’s cutting board. The other dishes are stranger, and after one taste I ignore the cubes of tofu that drift within a deep puddle of bright red oil, and the plate of stir-fried mutton that releases an unwashed whiff. Around me, voices warble incomprehensibly in Chinese, faces grow rosy from beer, my sister, ever vigilant of her waistline, coolly smokes a string of cigarettes and watches me eat.
“Aren’t you hungry?” I ask.
“I had a huge lunch.” She slides her plate away. “How’s your jet lag? You should take a melatonin before you go to bed tonight. Or I have some Ambien if you’re really desperate. They say that’s what all the flight attendants take between shifts.” She flits from topic to topic, like she’s trying to avoid something.
“I’m pretty sleepy.” I swallow a yawn. “But thanks again for letting me stay with you,” I say, feeling shy under her gaze.
“It’s great to have you here,
mei.
” She uses the Chinese word for younger sister, something we never did as children.
After dinner we stroll among the narrow tangle of
hutong
alleys that make up old Beijing. The warm summer evening feels festive; families sit outside, trying to escape the close heat of their tiny, traditional courtyard homes. Men, their pants rolled to the knees, T-shirts pushed high to expose solid bellies, smoke cigarettes and turn to stare balefully at Claire’s tall and sleek figure.
Bicycles whiz perilously close to pedestrians, and everywhere the air is heavy with odors—garlic, grease, and other, grubbier, smells.
We wind our way through the slender alleyways, and suddenly the quaint, village atmosphere disappears, choked off by a vast avenue that teems with bicyclists and honking cars. Claire stops abruptly. “I’m supposed to meet some friends,” she says. “But if you’re too tired…” Her voice trails off.
“I’m exhausted. But don’t worry about me. I can find my way back to your apartment.”
“It’s your first night,” she says distantly, before hailing me a cab. As I climb in, she leans over me to give the driver directions, kisses my cheek, and closes the door. “See you tomorrow, Iz. Sleep well.”
As the cab speeds away, I see her chatting and laughing on her cell phone, her whole face alight with animation. I remember those abrupt mood swings from my childhood, along with something else: Claire has always hated Peking duck.
W
hy did I move to China? I still don’t know. But if I think back, I guess it all started one Friday night, the kind of New York winter evening that features seeping cold and flesh-freezing winds. As I sat at the kitchen table of my friends Julia and Andrew, sipping Prosecco and watching the sky turn to a deep, hopeful blue, I couldn’t help but wonder if I could blame the biting winds for freezing my life.
“I think I’m having a quarter-life crisis,” I announced, and pushed a bowl of pistachio nuts across the kitchen table.
“I think you’re a little old for a quarter-life crisis, Iz, unless you’re planning on living to a hundred and twenty,” said Julia gently. As my best friend, only she was allowed to comment on my approaching advancement into my thirties.
“It’s my job,” I said glumly. “If I’m not photocopying, I’m babysitting. Today, I’d finally finished making copies of Nina’s articles from the past six months—”
“Your boss’s clips?” Julia interjected. “Why didn’t you send them to the copy shop?”
“Nina said no one could match my photocopying talent. Apparently I make the cleanest copies in the entire company.”
“You should mention that at your next review,” Julia said with a smile.
“Anyway,” I continued, “I’d just lugged everything back to my desk, when Nina shows up with Nicky. Her son. She didn’t have time to take him home between his Jungian and Freudian therapy appointments and so she asked me to keep an eye on him.”
“
How
old is he?” asked Andrew incredulously.
“Six.” I sipped my wine. “He ran straight into the men’s room and I had to coax him out. I went in there and saw Rich taking a leak. I’m not sure who was more surprised.”
“Isabelle, Rich is a bastard.” Julia calmly refilled my glass.
“I know he’s a little…unreliable.” My voice sounded uncertain, even to me. “But he’s…interesting. He knows a lot about art and books and wine, he speaks fluent French…”
“And you work together. He dumped you in the conference room, for God’s sake.”
“Come on,” I objected, “we’re still…seeing each other.”
“You mean, sleeping together. Iz, you deserve more. You’re not going to get over him until you cut him out of your life.”
“We both work in journalism, we have the same friends. He’s everywhere!”
“What you need,” Julia twirled the stem of her wineglass, “is an adventure. Someplace different, where you can totally get away.”
“Yes!” said Andrew, wrestling the cork out of a fresh bottle. “Like Paris! Everyone speaks French there.”
For a moment I imagined myself living in Paris, strolling down a bustling avenue, thin and chic, with a slender scarf wrapped around my neck…
“Nooooo, not Paris,” said Julia, interrupting my reverie. Seeing the look of protest on my face, she continued, “I’m sorry, Iz. But what would you do? You don’t speak French, and you’d never get working papers. The French are notorious sticklers about that sort of thing.”
The three of us sat contemplating this unhappy fact, and I started to realize the preposterousness of Julia’s idea. I couldn’t just go off on some overseas adventure. What about my friends? My family? My career? After five years of slaving over a hot photocopier at the glossy women’s magazine,
Belle
, I was finally on the verge of making the leap from fact-checker to staff writer. In just a few days I was meeting with our editor-in-chief to discuss a job in the features department. After so many years of embarrassing fact-checking calls, paper-pushing, and midnight pizza runs for the deadline-dazed production crew, I felt sure the time had come for our editor-in-chief to finally take notice of me, finally start calling me Isabelle, not Irene. I started to speak, but Julia got there first.
“I’ve got it!” she said, her face alight with enthusiasm. “Beijing!”
“What?” I managed to screech before choking on a sip of wine. My thoughts spun, but I had to finish coughing before I could continue. “How did we go from the City of Light to the City of Smog?”
Julia ignored me. “China is totally hot right now. You could finally start writing articles under your own byline, instead of just fact-checking someone else’s work…Just like you’ve always dreamed of.”
“I hardly think that’ll pay the bills—”
“You speak Mandarin…”
“Only kitchen Chinese,” I protested.
“What’s that?” interjected Andrew.
“Just basic conversation,” I explained. “Simple words I picked up in the kitchen, spending time with my mom. I hardly have the Chinese vocabulary to work as a journalist.”
“You’d have no trouble getting a visa,” Julia continued, undeterred. “And you wouldn’t be totally alone. You could live with your sister.”
“My
sister
?” I couldn’t keep the incredulity out of my voice.
“Yes, your sister. Claire. Doesn’t she work for some high-powered law firm in Beijing?”
“I haven’t seen Claire in almost two years. I really don’t think I can just show up on her doorstep.”
“I didn’t even know you had a sister,” said Andrew.
“We’re very different,” I said flatly. “She has a dynamic career as an attorney and my parents think she’s perfect.”
“Claire cares about you, Iz,” Julia said. “She just has a funny way of showing it. I bet she’s lonely.”
Suddenly, the baby monitor crackled to life and the kitchen filled with the demanding cries of a hungry infant.
“Feeding time,” said Julia as she scraped back her chair.
“I’ll go,” said Andrew, kissing the top of her head as he brushed behind her.
“So…China.” Julia turned to me with a smile.
“You’re not trying to get rid of me, are you?” I joked, but sadness seeped into my voice.
“Oh, Iz. No. We’d miss you so much. It’s just—” She sighed a weary, sleep-deprived sigh. “I love Andrew and Emily. I love our life together. But everything happened so fast—you know, shotgun wedding, and then the baby six months later.” She hesitated. “This is my life now,” she said, gesturing around the cluttered kitchen. “But sometimes I wish I could have one last adventure.
Not everyone gets to live overseas…and I think I’ve missed my chance.”
“You mean, you want to live vicariously through me.”
“Exactly.” She giggled. “I’m practicing for when Emily gets older.”
“But
China
?” I crossed my arms and looked at my friend, her topknot of golden curls, the clear blue eyes that matched her cashmere sweater. “I’m not some banana who needs to search for her roots,” I said slowly, not sure she’d understand.
“Banana?”
“You know—yellow on the outside, white on the inside.”
“Oh, Izzy Iz.” She sighed impatiently. “Just because you visit China doesn’t mean your life is turning into some Amy Tan novel. Besides,” she added, a familiar sparkle in her eyes. “Just think about the food!”
I laughed. Julia was one of the few people who shared my near obsessive interest in food. We pored over cookbooks the way some women scrutinize fashion magazines, and spent hours talking about leaving our jobs and opening a combination cookbook shop, test kitchen, and café, an idea that made Andrew break into a sweat with its impracticality.
Julia and I met on my first day at
Belle
, when she helped me free a mass of wrinkled paper from the overheated photocopier and gave me a Band-Aid for the seeping paper cut on my index finger. We became friends the way colleagues usually become friends—through gossiping about our coworkers—but cemented it with a shared interest in food, books, and the Barney’s shoe department.
Now, Julia is a literary agent, with nerves that live up to her last name, Steele. She needs them to negotiate multifigure advances for her stable of best-selling authors. Sometimes, when I watch her cuddle her chubby daughter, I’m amazed by her ability
to juggle work, marriage, and motherhood. In less than two years Julia has morphed from a single saketini swilling girl-about-town, to someone who quotes Sponge Bob Square Pants. But Julia and Andrew give me hope that true love exists. That there’s someone out there for everyone. Plus, they’ve promised me the attic in their dream home, just in case I don’t find him.
“Maybe we could teach a Chinese cooking class in our bookshop’s test kitchen!” said Julia excitedly as Andrew returned, bearing a smiling, rosy-cheeked Emily in his arms.
He groaned. “Not the cookbook shop idea again! I swear our bank account diminishes five percent every time you even utter those three words together.”
Julia held her arms out for the baby. “You’re just jealous you didn’t have the idea first,” she said, firmly swatting Emily’s small bottom.
“Huh!” Andrew snorted, but his gaze lingered upon her affectionately before he turned to wrench open a kitchen drawer. “I don’t know about you guys,” he said, rooting through the mass of overflowing paper. “But all this talk about China has given me a craving for takeout!” He unearthed a folded paper menu and held it up triumphantly.
“Ooh! General Tso’s chicken!” I exclaimed.
And so, Julia called Mee’s Noodle House with our usual order and we opened another bottle of wine while waiting for the delivery. Later we scarfed peanut noodles and sweet and sour pork and the topic of China didn’t come up again. After all, life in New York had its challenges, but with such good friends, good food, and a job that might finally become rewarding, why would I ever want to leave?
O
n Monday morning, stacks of paper threatened to overtake my cubicle. Yellow Post-it notes flapped from the pages, each scrawled with my boss’s untidy handwriting.
Invoice immediately!
…
Xerox—3 copies,
…
To art dept., ASAP!
Suppressing a sigh, I gathered up everything, dreaming of the day when piles of paper wouldn’t mushroom overnight on my desk. A day when I’d have my own office, complete with a door, so my colleagues wouldn’t know when I was making a gynecologist’s appointment.
Heaving the reams of paper off my desk, I spotted a red folder at the bottom of the pile. The mere sight of it made my neck muscles clench. A red folder could mean only one thing: urgent fact checking. Urgent, like the article was supposed to be fact-checked last week, but my boss, Nina, neglected to give it to me until today. Urgent, like I would need to have every quote confirmed and every detail quadruple-referenced by early afternoon. Urgent, like Nina would be stopping by my desk every fifteen minutes to check on my progress.
Sure enough, she had slapped a note on the front of the folder:
RUSH! Fact-check and to production by 2:30
P
.
M
. Thx!
Repressing the urge to scream, I started scanning the article, a juicy, tell-all profile of Jolly Jones, Hollywood’s newest rags-to-riches-to-rehab starlet. I began making notes, so absorbed in my work that I didn’t notice Richard strolling down the hall until he’d stopped in front of my cubicle.