Kitchen Chinese (15 page)

Hours later I have watched so many takes I could perform the scene as a one-woman show. The problem is not with the leads—impossibly glamorous creatures who stand about between takes smoking slender European cigarettes—but with an extra, a sharp-faced girl who keeps stuttering her single line. Max Zhang comes closer to exploding with every take, pressing his lips together in the controlled manner of one used to suffocating his frustration.

“And…action!” he calls out in English. Film-making terms are universal, one of the extras whispers to me. Chinese directors use “action” and “cut” (or
“ka”
) even if they don’t know any other English words.

The scene begins again and I follow along, unconsciously echoing every gesture and mouthing each line. The extras start milling in the field, the lovers embrace passionately, the servant girl runs in—everyone tenses—but no, she flubs her line one more time.

“Bu dui, bu dui, bu dui!
Cut!
Ka!”
screams Max Zhang, throwing up his hands in fury.

I glance at my watch and sigh. At this rate it’ll be midnight before I can sit down with him for our interview. And if I go back to Beijing empty-handed…I picture Ed’s irate face and shudder.

“Isabelle.” Tina hovers at my elbow, her forehead creased with concern. “Look, I’m really sorry about this, but it looks like we’re going to have to cancel your interview.”

“What?” I gasp. “Are you kidding me?”

“We’re way behind already and we need to pare back the schedule. Max wants to wrap today and it’s just impossible to fit you in.”

“What about tomorrow?” I demand. Rage starts building in the pit of my stomach.

“Max is leaving for Hong Kong tomorrow morning. I thought you knew that,” she says with a smug smile.

“Oh
really
.”

“Really.”

We regard each other for a moment, and I wonder what it would be like to reach out and slap her. I can almost feel the sting on my fingertips.

“Tina.” I take a deep breath and shove my hands in my pockets. “I know you have some petty grudge against me and frankly I don’t care. But you cannot drag me out to Shanxi province, change my accommodations at the last minute, arrange a room that doesn’t even have a bathroom, and then not grant me this
interview.” My voice rises but I quickly remember that to show anger in China is to lose face. “I don’t think you want any negative publicity in
Beijing NOW,
” I finish quietly.

She shrugs. “It’s not like you’re the
New York Times
.”

“Tina. I am tired. I am dirty. And I am
not
going back to Beijing without this interview.”

“Yes. You. Are.”

“Excuse me,” breaks in a voice I don’t recognize, the consonants sharp with a light English accent. “But when you ladies are finished bickering, we’d like to try another take.”

I glance over to see Max Zhang, his arms crossed, one eyebrow raised.

“Oh, Mr. Zhang, I’m so sorry…” I stammer.

“Who are you?” he demands, looking at Tina for an answer. “Who is she?” he repeats in Chinese.

“I’m a journalist,” I say.

“
You’re
the journalist?” He looks at me in surprise. “I thought you were helping the wrangler muck out the pig pen,” he says as I shoot Tina a dirty look.

Tina bleats, “Don’t worry about her, she’s nobody.”

Max examines my face carefully. “Hm. I need a nobody. Can you speak Chinese?”

“A little,” I say, as Tina pipes up: “No!”

“I love this waif look,” he muses. “It’s perfect for the servant girl…dirty hair…we can add some streaks of coal dust to your face…yes. Yes!” He turns to his crowd of minions. “Wardrobe!” he cries out.
“Fuzhuang zu!”

Before I know it, I am clothed in the baggy cotton clothes of a servant girl from the 1930s, my hair braided into plaits, my face streaked with dirt. The oversized coat remains—Max (he asked me to call him that) thinks it adds a Dickensian air—though the army boots have been exchanged for a pair of thin cotton slippers.

“Kuai! Zhuren zai majuan li deng ni. Ta yao zhao ni!”
Come quickly! The master is in the stables. He’s looking for you! I mutter the line over and over, humming the tones like it’s a song. My heart hammers in my chest so ferociously I’m afraid it might explode. But there’s no one I can turn to for help. The rest of the cast and crew are strangers, and Tina has stalked off in disgust. I can see her near the food service table, shouting into her cell phone.

“And…action!” I watch the lovers embrace and kiss, as if for the first time. The lead actress runs her slender fingers down the side of her leading man’s face and sighs. Oops, that’s my cue. I run in, my legs shaking.
“Kuai! Zhuren zai majuan li deng ni. Ta yao zhao ni!”
The words tumble out in a shrill screech.

“Cut!” Max walks over and places a gentle hand on my shoulder. “You’re nervous,” he says, and his tone is sympathetic.

I swallow. “I’ve just…never done this before.”

“May I offer a word of advice?” he says. “Just lose yourself in the moment. Don’t worry too much about the tones. You’re a servant girl. You probably have a thick accent anyway.”

I laugh shakily.

“We’re ready when you are,” he says.

“Okay.” I take a deep breath. “I’m ready.”

“And…action!”

This time I allow myself to shiver in the cold, and if my knees knock when I run out to the field, well, my character is probably scared witless by the imminent arrival of the master, right? I deliver my line in a breathless panic, cringing inside and waiting to hear the fateful
“Ka!”

But for the first time today, the scene continues. The lovers embrace once more in a heaving heap of emotion, the lead actress wipes away her tears, extends her hand to me, and together we go running through the field.

“Cut!” Max beams. “Great work, everybody,” he shouts in Chinese. “That’s a wrap!” As the cast and crew start moving en masse to the trailers, he turns to me. “Isabelle, I can’t thank you enough. I was about to throttle that poor Shanxi girl. But, because of you, we’re back on schedule.”

“It was my pleasure,” I assure him.

“If there’s anything I can ever do for you, please let me know. Really.”

“Well…” I shoot him a sidelong glance. “Actually, there is one thing…”

The rest of the day is spent hurrying to film the last scene before dusk descends, but Max invites me to ride back to Pingyao in his car. He is surprisingly candid during the interview, opening up about his impoverished childhood in Taipei, his university years in England, his early struggles in Hollywood, his feelings on filming in China, which his parents fled before World War II.

Plus, he promises me it will be an exclusive.

S
itting at my desk, I scroll through the names in my cell phone, considering each one. There’s Claire, but she went with me last month. Lily? Picky eater. Ed…not picky enough. Geraldine is detoxing with a raw foods diet. Jeff left for Shanghai right after
I returned from Pingyao, but even if he were here, he’s made it clear he wants nothing to do with
Beijing NOW,
which he considers amateurish (“small peanuts,” was how he described it, but I think he meant potatoes).

Honestly, I never thought it would be this hard to find people to eat out with me. Before I had this job, I would have jumped at the chance to dine with a food critic.

“It’s not that I don’t like you,” protested Gab last week as we ate lunch together in the conference room. “I like you. I like going out to eat with you. Just not on your review dinners.” He ripped the paper cover off a cup of instant noodles, releasing a cloud of steam.

“But why?” I demanded. “It’s a free meal.”

“Only when we don’t exceed the three hundred
kuai
limit,” he pointed out. And it’s true.
Beijing NOW
’s tiny budget means we usually end up paying most of the bill out of our own pockets. “Besides,” he continued. “Eating out with you is like a tour through
Roget’s Thesaurus.
”

“I had the exact same problem when I was the restaurant critic,” piped up Geraldine, pushing away her Tupperware of sun-warmed barley mixed with shredded seaweed.

“What did you do?” I asked eagerly.

“I switched jobs!” She laughed.

Still, I’ve got to find someone. As I scroll through the contacts in my cell phone one more time, I hear a little pop from my computer. Ooh, e-mail. I click on the tiny envelope in the corner of the screen.

I read the message a few times, looking for clues. Strange e-mails from young men who reference my mother can only mean one thing: setup. And after my mom’s last matchmaking attempt—a starched corporate attorney who kept translating words off the Italian menu (“Now this is al dente. Al dente means ‘to the tooth.’ Now this is linguine. Linguine means ‘little tongues.’”)—I vowed never to be fixed up by her again.

But…maybe this is just a friendly gesture, a family get-together. Besides, I could take him to Empress Impressions and kill two birds with one stone…

“Isabelle, when’s the weekly restaurant review going to be in?” bellows Ed from across the room.

“You’ll have it by Monday,” I promise as I type a quick reply to Dwayne, assuring him that I’d love to meet him for dinner. I’ll just need to coax someone into coming with us.

S
hit!” I stare at my e-mail in dismay. My date with Dwayne is rapidly approaching and I still haven’t found a third person to give me cover. I thought Geraldine might acquiesce, but she just sent me an e-mail saying she’s off to some silent hot yoga retreat.

“What’s wrong?” Claire wanders into the living room and perches on the arm of the sofa.

I groan. “It’s Mom. She wants to set me up with one of her
friend’s sons. We’re going to dinner tomorrow but I can’t find anyone else to go with me.”

“Why do you want someone else to go with you?”

“So that Dwayne doesn’t think we’re on a date, obviously.”

“Ah, yes. Safety in numbers.” She nods. “Who is it? One of Mom’s typical setups?”

I click on Dwane’s e-mail and show it to Claire. Her eyes scan the screen of my laptop. “You replied to him?” She laughs. “He got the one-click response from me. Delete!” She mimes clicking her computer mouse.

“Wait a second. He wrote to you too?”

“Yep, the exact same e-mail. I guess he didn’t care which one of us he ended up with.” She turns back to the computer. “I. Am. Dwayne,” she intones. “He sounds like a caveman. You, Isabelle. Me, Dwayne. Go. Eat. Dinner.” She raises her eyebrows and continues to read out loud: “‘My mother is friends with your mother…’ Well, Mom certainly didn’t pick him for his literary style.”

“He’s single and she knows his family. According to Mom, that’s all us young kids need to fall in love. You know what she’s like.” I stiffen my spine and lift my chin in an approximation of our mother’s upright posture. “‘You girls,’” I shake my finger. “‘You need to think about settling down and having some kids before your father and I go senile. Aiya’!” I heave a heavy sigh.

Claire giggles, before straightening her face and adopting the same upright stance. “‘I know a nice young man,’” she says in our mother’s clipped tones. “‘Why don’t you go out with him? Just one date. It won’t kill you! He’s very nice. Chinese.’”

We both dissolve into laughter. “Ugh. She’s so annoying,” I grumble. “She’d marry us off to the first two Chinese guys who came along.”

“Chinese? Any guy. As long as he has a good job. You know how she feels about Jewish men…”

“‘They’re so smart,’” we both chorus.

“Why don’t I go with you?” Claire suggests.

My eyes widen in astonishment. “Really? You’d do that for me?” I say gratefully.

She shrugs. “Sure. You know my mission in life is to thwart Mom’s matchmaking.” She laughs, but I’m not sure if she’s joking.

I slip my arm around her slender shoulders and give her a little squeeze. “Thank you, thank you, thank you!” I cry with relief.

College, career, marriage, grandchildren. Like most Chinese parents, my mother has always expected these things of her daughters. And, like most Chinese parents, her hopes have soared high—the college should be prestigious, the career well-paid, the husband Chinese, and the children fluent in Mandarin. Oh, and we would live next door to her and Dad, so they could see their grandchildren every day. Obviously things have not quite worked out this way.

Fiercely competitive, my mother and her friends engage in a continuous game of one-upmanship, pitting their progeny against each other like pawns. For years Mom was the queen in the corner of the chessboard, sweeping aside everyone else’s accomplishments with Claire’s academic achievements at Harvard and Yale Law. But then Auntie May (we call all of our mom’s female friends “auntie”) announced her daughter’s engagement to one of the Google founders, and started knitting booties exactly three months after the wedding. And then Auntie Teresa, who had been in disgrace ever since her daughter, Connie, moved to San Francisco and came out of the closet, gained ground by revealing that Connie’s girlfriend was pregnant via in vitro, and they’d bought the town house next door to her. Scarcely a year later Auntie Daisy moved to New Jersey to live with her son—perfectly sweet, though he’d only graduated from community
college—because he and his wife wanted their children to grow up speaking Mandarin.

My mother now stands alone among her friends as the only one with (a) two unmarried daughters, and (b) zero grandchildren. She watches from the sidelines as her friends cluck about the size of their daughters’ engagement rings and red egg parties. She remains silent as they swap notes about Chinese banquet halls or sigh with mock exasperation over their precocious grandchildren. And she conspires to somehow, by hook or by crook, find us husbands. She’s asked all her friends, visited a fortune-teller, and created profiles for us on Match.com. Claire claims she’s even consulted a famous Taipei matchmaker. I wouldn’t put it past her.

Of course, I’m partially to blame for the pestering. I haven’t introduced my parents to a boyfriend in eons, so long that they’re convinced I don’t date, that I’m not interested in men, or they’re not interested in me. If I did produce someone nice (e.g., Chinese), perhaps Mom would stop with the blind dates, the make-overs, the unsolicited fashion advice. In fact, the last time she criticized my unruly mane of hair—“Men don’t like messy!” she’d insisted. “Believe me! I’m a hair professional!”—I was tempted to whip out my cell phone, speed-dial Richard, and demand that he hop the next Metro North train to Westchester, to hell with his fear of suburbs. But then I remembered what happened the last, and only, time I introduced a boyfriend to my parents.

I was nineteen, which explains why I was dating a frat boy. Blaine and I met in “Geology of Earthquakes,” a freshman lecture designed for jocks (him) and liberal arts majors afraid of science (me). He saw the Greek letters on my sorority sweatshirt, invited me to a date party, poured me whiskey sours and told me I was mysterious and beautiful; one thing led to another, and for the first time in my life I fell madly in love.

Blaine had all-American looks and an all-American story. He was the first person in his family to go to college—his father worked in a coal mine in western Pennsylvania—and he had a boisterous laugh and a slight, but jagged, chip on his shoulder about privileged, upper-middle-class sorority girls. I was intrigued by his broad-chested confidence and hardscrabble childhood—so different from my own—and when my parents made their monthly visit to Manhattan for dim sum, I brought him along.

It was Blaine’s first trip to Chinatown, and as we strolled hand in hand down Mott Street, I watched his face carefully. He seemed fascinated by the cramped streets, the long-necked roasted ducks hanging in shop windows, the sidewalks lined with rows of fake Gucci purses. As we entered the crowded dim sum hall, I squeezed his hand and our fingers remained entwined until we located my parents, sitting at a crowded round table.

“Mom, Dad, Auntie, Uncle, everyone…this is Blaine,” I said shyly. “Blaine, these are my parents, Grace and Tom Lee, my aunt Marcie, uncle Gray…” I went around the table, trying to ignore their expressions of surprise. I had mentioned a boy, but not a boyfriend, and I certainly hadn’t told them he was white.

“Howdy!” Blaine exclaimed, sitting and draping an arm across the back of my chair. “Grace, Tom, I’ve heard a lot about you. It’s great to meet you!”

I cringed. None of my friends ever called my parents by their first name. But my parents seemed to take it in stride.

“Would you like some tea?” asked my mother, pouring us each a cup from the china teapot.

“Nah, I’ll just have a beer,” he said, gesturing to the waiter. “Can I have a beer?” He pantomimed drinking from a bottle.
“You know, beer?”

“Um, I think he speaks English,” I muttered. “Are you sure you don’t want to stick with tea?” No one else was drinking beer.

“Are you kidding, babe? Beer’s awesome with Chinese food.”

To his credit, Blaine ate. And ate, and ate, and ate. He devoured dumplings, upending the small steamer baskets onto his plate. He loaded piles of noodles onto his plate, demolished half a dish of spare ribs and a heap of fried rice. My mother and Aunt Marcie kept ordering more and more food, and it kept getting scooped up by Blaine’s fork and disappearing down his gullet.

Finally, four beers, three pairs of dropped chopsticks, and twelve baskets of shrimp
xiumai
later, Blaine pushed his chair away from the table and exhaled deeply. “That. Was. Awesome!” he exclaimed, stretching his arms and depositing a hand on the side of my thigh, squeezing it suggestively. “Babe, we’re going to have to work some of that off.” He grinned.

Four pairs of eyes swiveled toward us and I saw shock in all of them. Had my family ever alluded to sex before? Maybe once, when I was going through puberty and my mother bought me a box of sanitary napkins and told me about my period. But that was it. I was still embarrassed to watch R-rated movies with them.

“Um…” I blushed and muttered something about having to meet my roommate at the library. Blaine and I left soon after.

I felt sure my mother would give me an earful, but she didn’t mention Blaine until I came home for the weekend, a few weeks later. I was on my way to bed when she beckoned me into the tiny front room she used as her office.

“Isabelle, come here. I want to talk to you.”

I winced. I thought I knew what was coming. She sat at her computer, balancing a heavy dictionary on her lap.

“There’s a word I want to know,” she said seriously, pointing to the open page. She squinted at the book. “I can’t read it without my glasses. Can you have a look?”

I followed her finger. “‘Callow,’” I read aloud. “‘Immature or
inexperienced. Untried, raw, green, naive, puerile. A callow youth.’” I fell silent.

“Callow,” my mother repeated thoughtfully.

What was she trying to say about Blaine? Was she going to ask me about my sex life? I squirmed under her gaze and my heart started to beat too fast. I licked my lips and wondered how I could escape to my room. “Um, I’m feeling kind of sleepy…” I feigned a yawn.

But it seemed my mother had expressed everything she wanted to say, relying on subtext to convey the rest of her message. “Give me a kiss,” she said, holding up her cheek. “G’night, sweetheart. Love you.”

I went up to my room, my cheeks burning with a shame and anger that I swallowed rather than express.

Blaine and I broke up a few months later—he cheated on me with a Spanish student while studying abroad in Barcelona—but our relationship had changed the day he met my parents and it never recovered. My mother’s disapproval of Blaine tarnished everything, making our dorm room romance seem tawdry and juvenile. I wanted to ignore her, but my parents’ opinion mattered too much to me. Fearful and resentful of their censure, I didn’t introduce them to my next boyfriend, a long-haired, chain-smoking anthropology major. Or the next one, a Wall Street junior analyst, who I practically lived with. Or the next one, a sharp-tongued financial journalist, but we barely lasted three months anyway. As the years passed, maintaining silence about my love life became a habit I didn’t want to break.

As a result, my mother assumes I’ve been single for the past ten years. And now that I’m hurtling into my thirties, her anxiety grows with each passing month and wasted egg. Two wasted eggs, actually, considering that Claire is also single.