dance. The winner would be the last one standing. Would it be the old or the new? Some jazzy avant-garde local or this guy, who came back to take up where his grandfather had left off? Whatever happened, it was alive. She hadn’t had this kind of feeling about an article in a while. Please, she begged him silently.
“Let me think.”
“I’ll come to where you’re working — only when you say.” She stopped. This was as far as she could go.
Again she heard the little bubble of whispered Chinese behind him. “Shh!” he said, and came back. “Okay. They’ll kill me if I say no. And you’re right. It would be good for me.”
She waited on the edge.
“But you have to forgive me. I can’t dress nicely and meet you in restaurants and hold forth. Not now.”
“Why would I want to do that? I’ll just come and watch you work. You talk when you can. I’ll listen.”
“All right. Let me think — I’m basically going to be slaving every minute in order to get this together. Tomorrow? You want to come tomorrow?”
“Okay.” A smile rose around the corners of her mouth. Again the same strange feeling, of something good.
“Afternoon? Two?”
“Fine,” she said.
“Call me when you’re getting the cab. I’ll tell the driver where to go.”
“Okay,” she said, and just before he disconnected she heard him talking to his uncles, switching back to Chinese with them in mid-thought, without a breath, the melodic pitch, the soft rolling sounds of the words, and then click, he was gone. She grinned at her phone for a second, giddy with relief, and then tapped in a text message to Sarah: Thanks for your message. I’m getting by. Meeting the chef tomorrow. Love, M.
She looked up. A waiter was moving toward her through the pools of electric light and the clanging dishes and the voices — was his steam basket for her? Yes. She leaned toward it — delicate, translucent wrappers and a savory mince of vegetables within. The aroma encircled her. She felt she could eat everything in the room. She tried the dipping sauce with a finger: soy, vinegar, little circles of scallion. “Thank you,” she said in English, looking up. But he was already gone in the crowd.
3
Yuan Mei, one of China’s great gourmets, once asked his cook why, since he was so gifted and could produce great delicacies from even the most common ingredients, he chose to stay in their relatively modest household. The cook said, “To find an employer who appreciates one is not easy. But to find one who understands anything about cookery is harder still. So much imagination and hard thinking go into the making of every dish that one may well say I serve up along with it my whole mind and heart.”
— LIANG WEI, The Last Chinese Chef
The chef lived in a low, ancient-looking building facing a narrow, tree-lined finger of lake called Houhai. The street that ran along the lake was lined with gray, age-polished buildings. Some were houses, with laundry spilling from their windows and women out front, on stools. Others had been converted to cafés and bars, the latter marked by the buckets of empty beer bottles that had been set out from the night before. The chef ’s place faced the street with nothing but a stone wall and a massive red wooden gate, unmarked except for a small house number on the side. Maggie knocked.
From the other side of the wall she heard steps on gravel, and then a man almost precisely her size, with sharp cheekbones and black hair pulled back to a smooth ponytail, swung the gate open. He could have been foreign — South American, Mediterranean — yet in his way of standing, of relaxing against his joints, she saw instantly that he was American.
“Sam,” he said, and put out his hand.
“Maggie.”
“I’m in the kitchen.” He waited while she stepped over the raised lintel, then re-latched the gate.
In front of them was a green-and-yellow ceramic spirit screen. She paused, unable to stop herself from touching its raised-porcelain design of rolling dragons. “Doesn’t this have something to do with evil spirits?”
“Yes. Supposedly they can travel only in straight lines. This has been here a long time. When I remodeled for the restaurant I left it, thinking I needed all the help I could get with spirits. Bad ones out, good ones in.”
“I don’t know if it works,” she said, “but it’s beautiful.” On the other side of the screen