Soy Sauce for Beginners (2 page)

According to Amah, Ahkong had worked every day of his life to give his family a good, stable home, and now he was throwing it all away—and to go to Japan, of all places. “Less than a decade after the war. What would people think!”

She pleaded with him to stay—she even threatened to leave him—but my grandfather was stubborn. He demanded, then debated, then begged Amah to let him go. While she considered her decision, he neither ate nor slept, but sat forlornly at his desk, teaching himself Japanese.

“
What could I do?
”
Amah asked, her outrage tempered by time. “He had already quit his job. His moping was driving us crazy. I told him if he didn’t return in exactly six months, he would never hold his sons again.”

Upon seeing my wide eyes and dropped jaw, Amah stroked my hair and reassured me that this had been an empty threat. “Of course, I could never have done that to our boys.”

My grandmother wasn’t the only one who questioned Ahkong’s sanity. His former colleagues told him there was no money to be made in this fancy sauce. Customers wouldn’t be able to tell the difference, and they certainly wouldn’t fork over the extra cash.

But the more my grandfather learned, the more determined he grew.

Now, Uncle Robert paused to make sure he still had our guests’ full attention. “Once people saw how a single teaspoon can bring out the fragrance of scallion and ginger and garlic, or how a light coating can amplify the smokiness of tender roast meat,”—here, he bunched up his fingertips and brought them to his lips—“how could they turn away?”

Our guests nodded solemnly. My father’s eyes twinkled at me from behind his glasses, and I wished he would stop trying to engage me. I appreciated the effort, really, I did, but I was dealing with the time difference, the weather, the pain that slashed through me when I thought of all I’d left behind. Slapping a grin across my face, nodding my head to demonstrate interest—these acts required energy I did not have.

Besides, Ba needed to relax. He was technically retired: my mother’s worsening health had pushed him to let his younger brother take over as Lin’s president. This past week, however, with Cal still away, my father had come in to work every day after shuttling Ma to and from dialysis treatments. She’d been a professor of German literature at the National University of Singapore before kidney failure had forced her to resign. She was not interested in soy sauce.

Uncle Robert was telling the Santosos that it was only a matter of time before soy sauce overtook ketchup and mustard to become the number one condiment in America.

“It’s definitely possible,” Mr. Santoso said. “The Americans do love Asian food. When I was a student in Michigan, you couldn’t order fish that wasn’t deep fried. Now there’s sushi in every supermarket. Isn’t that right, Son? Isn’t that something?”

“It’s something all right,” the son said. He spoke with an American accent—typical rich kid who’d grown up in private, international schools.

To be fair, I was often mistaken for a native Californian, but I also spoke fluent Singlish, and thought of my accents like different hats, or maybe wigs, to be donned depending on occasion and mood. Still, even as I dismissed the son, his slurred syllables and flattened vowels and dropped consonants sent a tiny thrill through my body, like that moment you catch sight of a friend you haven’t seen in years and can’t decide whether to call out or slink away.

We followed Uncle Robert out to the cement-paved courtyard, which held rows and rows of Lin’s proprietary clay jars, each one large enough for a child to crouch inside. When we reached a patch of shade beneath a spindly yellow flame tree, my uncle explained that all seventy waist-high vessels had been custom-made for Ahkong in China’s Fujian province. The jars contained a mixture of whole soybeans—steamed instead of boiled to retain their earthy flavor—sea salt, water, and roasted winter wheat. Every four days, a worker stirred the contents of each jar with a long wooden paddle. Aside from this intervention, the covered jars were left to naturally ferment, beneath the sun, for five to six months.

On the opposite end of the courtyard, in the shadow of the shed that hid Lin’s new fiberglass tanks from view, a skinny, slightly stooped, older man was monitoring jar temperatures with a dial thermometer. He was dressed like the factory workers in a bright yellow polo shirt with our logo—a ring-enclosed
林
—
plastered across the back. Even before I saw his face, I recognized Mr. Liu, Lin’s head scientist. He nodded at me furtively, not wanting to attract attention, and I raised my hand and waggled my fingers.

But Uncle Robert jumped at the opportunity to introduce our guests to Lin’s oldest employee, hired by Ahkong back in 1958. “Lucky he’s been with us ever since. We couldn’t survive without him.” He waved Mr. Liu over and clapped him on the back. “
Ng dao eh sai bo?
”

Shielding his eyes from the sun, Mr. Liu answered in Chinese that the fermentation process was going just fine. He pointed an index finger skyward, stretched his lips into a shy smile and switched to English for the benefit of the visitors. “Hot days,
hor
, bad for people, good for beans.”

Beside me, James looked remarkably unruffled by the heat. His poreless skin was moisture free, his shirt collar crisp as card stock. He squinted at the sky and inhaled deeply. “Smells like a brewery,” he said to no one in particular. When he raised one corner of his mouth, I looked away.

As we made our way back to the offices, James fell in step beside me. “So,” he said, “what kind of work do you do around here?”

“Oh,” I said, feeling the heat settle on my cheeks, “Nothing important. I’m really just here to pass time.” I considered explaining that I was taking the semester off from graduate school to help care for my mother. Instead, I quickened my pace to catch up to the others, who were discussing a company that a mutual friend had been forced to sell.

“It’s always best when a business can stay in the family, though certainly there are challenges,” Mr. Santoso said. He gestured to his son. “So far, I’ve been quite fortunate.”

Uncle Robert and Ba made vague sounds of agreement. Neither, I could tell, wanted to discuss these challenges in greater detail.

In a low voice James said, “I apologize for my dad. He can be a little prosaic at times.”

I tried to remember what “prosaic” meant as I searched for a funny response. When our fathers moved out of hearing distance, I said, “Mine’s the king of misused idioms. He’s coined such gems as ‘talking about the devil,’ and, oh—in college, he used to call me a ‘party dog.’” Even though this was true, I felt guilty for making fun of Ba while he was standing right there.

When James laughed, his entire face shifted, creasing his forehead, wrinkling his nose and the corners of his eyes. A small pleasurable ache spread through my lower abdomen, a tightening that just as quickly slackened, leaving me invigorated and bemused. Suddenly I questioned why I so indiscriminately craved the approval of others.

An electronic rendering of the Queen of the Night’s aria pierced the air: my new cell phone ring. Everyone turned. My father frowned.

“I’m sorry,” I said, rooting around in the handbag I’d purchased precisely for its multiple pockets and compartments. “Nobody here’s a Mozart fan?”

Only James gave an uncomfortable chuckle. I silenced the queen by thumbing the red button, but not before I caught the name that flashed across the screen: Paul.

I did the math. Ten a.m. here made it five p.m. in San Francisco. We hadn’t spoken since I’d left a week earlier, and our last conversation had been terse. I couldn’t think of any reason for him to be calling me now. But then, perhaps he had no reason; perhaps he just wanted to hear my voice.

“Xiao Xi,” my father called from the top of the stairs, using my Chinese nickname. There was an edge to his tone.

The others were already in the conference room, so I hurried to join them.

Inside the room, one of the administrative assistants was pouring whole-leaf Iron Goddess of Mercy tea into five cerulean-blue teacups. My uncle sat at the head of the long table beneath a pair of Chinese landscape scrolls, featuring vast, jagged mountains overlooking a fog-shrouded river. He gestured for me to take the chair beside my father and across from James. “Now we will try some sauce,” he said.

At the center of the table stood two slender glass bottles bearing gold labels embossed with the ring-enclosed
林
.
A squat plastic bottle of Yellow River, the sauce produced by Ahkong’s former employer, had been set to one side, separated from its more graceful counterparts by a white porcelain tray containing three separate sauce compartments. Next to it was a dish of rice crackers the size and shape of communion wafers.

My father had led me through my first tasting at the age of six, and every year following, until I reached the age when kids start to hate everything their parents want them to like. Now, eighteen years later, the same impatience I’d felt as a girl of twelve washed over me. I wanted nothing more than to jump out of my seat, return to my desk, and call Paul.

But Ba was going to give our guests the full experience, and because I knew what was at stake for Lin’s, I paid attention.

He flipped up the cap of the Yellow River bottle and poured the sauce into the first compartment. “We start with the lousy stuff,” he said with a wink, and then his face grew serious. He held up the tray and swirled the sauce around with a priest’s solemnity. “You can see how dark that is?” he asked, his eyes narrowing in distaste.

The Santosos studied the tray as if it were a Rorschach test. I, however, knew what to look for. The sauce was dense and opaque and left a brown-black stain on the porcelain like a watery thumbprint.

Ba placed the tray back on the table and instructed the Santosos to lean in. “A bit closer,
lah
. Get a good sniff.” He took three short deep inhales to demonstrate. Just like a dog, he used to say when I was younger.

James bowed his head, exposing his fauxhawk in a manner that struck me as almost vulgar, a too-gummy smile in an otherwise pretty face. I wondered how much gel he slicked on each morning to make his hair stand up that way. I could feel the oily stickiness beneath my palms.

“You too, Xiao Xi,” Ba said, pushing the tray toward me.

I bowed my head, and the sharp, acrid smell of Yellow River made me grimace.

Next, Ba picked up a cracker, dunked its tip in the sauce and indicated that the rest of us should follow. The sauce tasted exactly like it smelled.

“Harsh, flat, one-dimensional. Almost metallic aftertaste,” my uncle said, shaking his head. “Terrible,
lah,
this sauce. It doesn’t matter how good your ingredients are if you cook with this.”

Ba added, “This isn’t real soy sauce. The color and flavor come from chemical.”

My mother’s voice flashed in my head, her American accent honed over years spent studying in Ithaca, New York. “Chemicals, Xiong,” she corrected. “Chemicals with an
s
.” Ba often confused the singular and plural, which didn’t exist in Chinese.

Next we moved on to the two bottles of Lin’s soy sauce. My uncle taught the Santosos to take a small sip of each sauce, rolling the liquid over their tongues to experience all the flavors. After the previous mouthful, this sauce was a revelation. Times like this, I understood why my grandfather had risked so much in pursuit of the perfect brew.

“Real soy sauce is as complex as a fine wine—fruity, earthy, floral also can,
lah.
” Uncle Robert pointed out the lively acidity of the light soy sauce in comparison to the rich, mellow sweetness of the dark one. Light soy, he explained, was used for seasoning and dipping; dark soy was used for cooking because its flavors developed under heat.