like no other. In the Forbidden City’s kitchens you could create anything. They had the finest ingredients from all over the world. Hundreds of people cooked for one family.”
“So who became a cook?”
“Ah,” he said. “Not what you think. Not only certain people. Any person could do it. It was one of the weird democratic aspects of feudal China. Some chefs were rich and educated, some poor. Cooking was one of those jobs that relied purely on talent. Any man who excelled at it could get to the top. People respected great cooks. In fact, one chef in the eighteenth century B.C. was made a prime minister, his food was so good. His name, Yi Yin, is still spoken with awe thousands of years later. To this day, when people talk about negotiating matters of state, they say ‘adjusting the tripods,’ in honor of him and the bronze vessels of his time. You’ll see for yourself, the longer you stay here: we are ultra-serious about food.”
He talks of the Chinese and says “we,” she wrote. He has a dark face, indeterminate. If I had not known he was Jewish-Chinese I would never have guessed. He could be Greek, Afghan, Egyptian. He could be from anywhere. “So what kind of person was your grandfather before he became a chef ?”
“A slave.”
“There was slavery that late?”
“China was feudal until 1911.”
“So he was owned by someone.” She wrote, Descendant of slaves.
“But he wasn’t born that way. He sold himself. It was either that or starve with his family.”
“Where was he from?”
“Here. Beijing. The back alleys. You should read the story.” He pointed his knife at the far end of the counter. “I set it out. It’s the prologue to the book. It was the first thing I put in English. You can take it with you if you like. Or read it here.”
“Really?”
He turned back to his ribs. “Either way. Right now I have to cook.”
“Should I go in the next room?” she said, even though she hadn’t seen any place to sit in there. Just the one table. No chairs.
“As you like.” He was gathering minced green onions in a mound.
Maggie watched him for a second. She liked the rhythms of the sounds he made, and the raw, unblended smells. Everything he thought and felt and said was condensed into the food under his hands. And it was comfortable here — which was odd to her, because she felt in most people’s kitchens the way she felt about homes in general: wanting to leave as soon as possible. Do her interview, get her notes down, and leave. “I guess I’ll stay,” she said.
He was focused now on cooking and gave only a distracted nod. So she leaned on her elbows and turned past the title page, The Last Chinese Chef, and started to read.
& & & My name is Liang Wei. I was born in the nineteenth year of the reign of Guangxu, the year they in the West call 1894, into the lowest rung of society. My family were alley dwellers. Five of us lived in one room, but we had city pride. We were folk of the capital. At least we knew we were better than millions of others.
My father was a vendor who went every day to the great open squares inside the Fucheng Gate, to sell glasses of tea to the men who streamed in alongside lines of camels and mule-driven carts. In the heat of the summer and the numbing ice of winter, he went. The caravans bought, or they did not. Too often not. As the years went on, his face became set with the etchings of his fate.
By my seventh year we were starving. The decision was made to sell one of the children. Usually a family would sell a girl, but the girl in our family was the youngest. Too young to sell. I said I would go. It was time for me to be a man.
At least with this move I knew I would eat. There was a reason why families as poor as mine sold their children into the restaurant trade. It was slavery, but it came with hot meals, three times a day. And if the young one proved gifted, there was nothing really to stop him from reaching the top. With food a man could advance on merit alone, without money, lineage, or education.
And thus it was for me. Being sold was my life’s beginning. A broker resold me into