“No. My father stopped cooking when he went to America. I learned here.”
“How?”
“Well, first of all, I had always cooked. I learned the basics from my mother — brisket, chicken soup, challah. But four years ago I decided to change my life, and really learn to cook. I came here. I told you, my uncles. They’re incredible chefs, they’re older, retired — they taught me. Full-time. I spent the first few years basically cowering beneath them. They were rough. What you might call old-school.”
“Are those the guys I heard on the phone?”
“Two of them. That was Jiang and Tan, whom I call First and Second Uncle. Jiang Wanli and Tan Jingfu. There’s a third one, Uncle Xie, who lives in Hangzhou. Xie Er.”
“Are they your father’s brothers?”
“No. Xie is the son of a man who worked with my grandfather in the Forbidden City. Tan is the grandson of my grandfather’s teacher, Tan Zhuanqing, who was a very famous chef. Jiang grew up in Hangzhou with Xie; they were best friends. So we aren’t blood relations, but our ties go back for generations. Those kinds of connections are very strong here. Stronger than in the West.”
“And all three were chefs?”
“Tan and Xie were chefs. Jiang is a food scholar, a retired professor.”
“I knew I saw that name somewhere. I read a little introduction by him on a restaurant menu.”
“That’s him. He cooks, too; he says he doesn’t, but he does.”
“And they were hard on you?”
“Terrible! They called me names. They’d hound me, shout at me, slam utensils to the floor when I didn’t move fast enough — and then if I made something that wasn’t perfect, they dumped it in the garbage.”
“Ah!” She was writing, enjoying his words and the scratch of her pen on the paper. “And then your father. You say he just stopped cooking? Why?” She looked up.
Again he hesitated, his hand in midair with the cleaver. Then back to chopping. “It was too hard for him in America.”
“Still, I wonder why he didn’t teach you.”
For Sam Liang, answering this question was always hard. Everyone in China remembered his grandfather as a chef, fewer his father; still, everyone assumed his father would have been the one to teach him. In truth, Sam would have given anything for his father to have taught him, to have cared — even if he’d yelled at him, insulted him, and cuffed him the way his uncles did. But his father refused. He said no Liang was ever to cook again, certainly not his son. Chinese cuisine was finished. It was dead. Great food needed more than chefs; it needed gourmet diners. These people were as important as the cooks. But the Communists had made it illegal to appreciate fine food or even remember that it had once existed. They had the masses eating slop and gristle and thinking it perfectly fine. In America and Europe, too, Chinese gourmets were all but nonexistent. There were some left in Hong Kong or Taiwan, but that was it. So said Liang Yeh.
When Sam had tried to suggest to his father that things had changed, that a world of art and discernment and taste was being reborn in China and that going back might be worthwhile, the old man erupted. “Never return to China! Never set foot there! It is a dangerous place, run by thugs!”
In fact, even though Liang Yeh was pleased that Sam had graduated from Northwestern and become a schoolteacher, he really had asked only two things of Sam in life. One, never go back to China. Two, marry and have a son. On neither front had Sam delivered. He brought the cleaver back down again between the ribs.
The American woman seemed to read his silence. “So okay, your father didn’t teach you, your uncles did. But am I correct in saying you’re still cooking in the style of your grandfather?”
“Definitely.”
“And like him, do you feel you’re the last Chinese chef ?”
“Not the last,” he said. “Maybe one of the last. I think I’m more optimistic than my grandfather. He thought it was all over. He was convinced imperial style would die with his generation. My father’s generation thought the same. Yet there always seemed to be a few who kept it alive.”
“Why?”
“Because it was the highest thing. Not only did it incorporate all China’s regions, all its schools of cooking, it was a chef ’s dream