Some evenings, when the meal was over and the guests had gone home, my father would sit a while in the kitchen. He would smoke a little tobacco in Ah Heng’s water pipe and tell stories of the Forbidden City while the kitchen was cleaned.
At those times, depleted from yet another elegantly conceived and crafted meal, he often spoke most yearningly of the rustic. To hear him then, nothing was better than plain, everyday foods. He would insist that true cuisine was the perfect preparation of the simplest food, though we all knew he did not cook that way.
He also told us how the Empress Dowager Ci Xi would make periodic demands for the rustic road food she was forced to eat when they fled from the Boxer Rebellion. This was part of the lore of the palace and taught to Liang Wei in the most meticulous fashion by his own master, the renowned imperial chef and antiquities connoisseur Tan Zhuanqing. Master Tan taught my father to make
xiao wo tou,
the rough little thimble-shaped corn cakes that the Empress remembered her bearers buying from vendors along the road, stopping their bumpy caravan in the flapping wind of a mountain pass to eat them, tiny and hot. Years later she would call for them when she wanted to feel alive again. She had been ordinary for a moment, almost poor, outside in the open air like any lowly person. Strangely, of all her memories, it was one of the most thrilling.
My father used to say he detected a smirk on the face of Tan Zhuanqing when he prepared
xiao wo tou
for the Empress. Like many Chinese dishes,
xiao wo tou
has a second layer of meaning beyond how it looks and smells and tastes. Indeed, in the decades that followed, among food people the dish acquired a certain connotation. To cook
xiao wo tou,
to serve it, even to refer to it, was to speak of China’s Marie Antoinette. Ci Xi cared nothing for her people. Her reign brought a system that had endured thousands of years to its end. Father taught us that when we made
xiao wo tou
we were making reference to the worst kind of imperial disregard for the common people, and so we must be extraordinarily careful where and when we served them. Delightful and rustic mouthfuls, they were also powerful political statements and could bring about a chef’s downfall. Be careful, he told us.
I never made them outside the house. In fact, after I went to work in the restaurant at sixteen, I never made them again.
When I began in the restaurant in 1951, the government was getting ready to close down the industry. Liang Jia Cai was a favorite of everyone, even party royalty. They loved dining there. They always commanded the best tables. So our place was one of the last to go.
I made the most of my few years at Liang Jia Cai, adding eight dishes that became top sellers. People started to say that the Last Chinese Chef would have a successor after all. I gave an interview in the new state-run pictorial magazine. Father was pleased. He worked with me every day to show me as many of the old dishes as he could remember.
In 1954 our door was closed. They chose a final few restaurants to stay open for officials and guests of state, and shuttered the rest. At first Father was livid that ours was not one of the few left open. Yet we were lucky. A few years later, to run an imperial-style restaurant, even one sanctioned by the Communist state, would become very dangerous. This fate he was spared.
When Liang Jia Cai was closed I was transferred to Gou Bu Li in Tianjin. It was a lucky placement, for Tianjin was not far, only 120 kilometers, and I could visit my parents often in their last years. The restaurant itself was one of the most famous eating places in all of China, but it was a dumpling house. There were few more proletarian foods. Even the name, which grew from the nickname of the original chef and meant A Dog Ignores It, gave the feeling of roughness. I was told they served many types of dumplings before liberation, but when I was there they made only their original steamed stuffed bun, filled with either meat or cabbage. That was all right. A great dish can be made with a cabbage. The best food can rest on the simplest ingredients. And there is nothing higher in its way than a fragrant, light-as-a-cloud meat bun. I made these day after day, week after week, for four years. I lived in the commune attached to the restaurant. We cooks had all been transferred there from other places, without families; we lived in the work unit. We slept in a long, low room with two lines of bunks. It was the best place in the world for me to hide.
My parents died within a year of each other and I had no one in the world except Jiang and Tan and Xie; though sworn brothers we were separated by both time and distance. I lost myself in the great kitchens of Gou Bu Li, which were divided into massive stations for each stage of production. There were the great floury, stone-topped dough surfaces, ringed with workers kneading, mixing, then turning out the perfect circles of half-leavened dough. There were the rows of supersized chopping blocks where the filling was minced and seasoned. There were the wrappers and crimpers with their gigantic shallow bowls of filling and their stacks of wrappers, constantly replenished. There was the cooking: the racks and racks of enormous bamboo steamers, each holding eighty, a hundred, a hundred and fifty
baozi.
I kept my head down. Like so many people at that time, I grasped that the key to survival was invisibility. My only goal was to live. I kept to myself.
Others were not so lucky. First Xie’s father went to prison. Then old Ah Heng, my father’s home cook, was denounced. I was drawing every breath in fear. I was a Liang, son of the famous Liang who’d written
The Last Chinese Chef.
It was only a matter of time. I trembled every day, waiting.
The first sign was a change in the red-character poster that had long been displayed in the kitchens. The old poster exhorted us to serve the masses with exemplary dumplings. Who would not want to do that? But then this vanished, and a new one appeared, filled with a denser text. I recognized it immediately. It was a passage from the writings of Chairman Mao.
Sumptuous feasts are generally forbidden. In Shaoshan, Xiangdan County, it has been decided that guests are to be served with only three kinds of animal food, namely, chicken, fish, and pork. It is also forbidden to serve bamboo shoots, kelp, and lentil noodles. In Hengshan County it has been resolved that eight dishes and no more may be served at a banquet. Only five dishes are allowed in the East Third District in Liling County, and only three meat and three vegetable dishes in the North Second District, while in the West Third District New Year feasts are forbidden entirely. In Xiangxiang County, there is a ban on all “egg-cake feasts,” which are by no means sumptuous . . . In the town of Jiamu, Xiangxiang County, people have refrained from eating expensive foods and use only fruit when offering ancestral sacrifices.
I looked at the bottom — “Mao’s Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan,” March 1927. Thirty-one years before. But I knew exactly why it was being posted now. Everyone knew. We were used to messages sent through historical symbolism. It was a signal. There was a shift. Those who had known privilege were in danger.
If you went by what comrades were willing to say, everyone at Gou Bu Li came from a peasant or worker background. We were all completely proletarian. But everyone knew it was not true. Each learned to keep silent about his or her own past while avidly listening for clues or simmering talk about everyone else.
So I waited. I watched. I knew something was going to happen.
When it came, it was in the form of an order for food. I was in the kitchen, in the thrum of almost one hundred cooks, at my station, which was for wrapping. Wrapping was the most difficult, the most pleasing, the most subtle part of making Gou Bu Li’s
baozi.
Each glossy-white bun had to be in the shape of a tight-budded chrysanthemum, closed at the top with no less than eighteen pleats. Mine were perfect. I worked with care. I kept my eyes down.
One of the waiters from upstairs approached. “Comrade Liang?”
“I am he.” I did not interrupt my pleating rhythm.
“There is a special order from a table upstairs.”
I looked up. There were no special orders. Just
baozi,
pork and cabbage. “What is it?”
“They made me repeat it. They said they wanted
xiao wo tou.
”
“
Ei?
Say that again.”
“
Xiao wo tou.
They said it was your specialty.”
“Nonsense,” I said. “Never heard of it. Don’t know what it is.” Though I did, exactly.
“They said you would know,” he said.
He was young, the skin on his face tight as a plum. “Listen,” I said, “you go back. Tell them you are sorry, we don’t make that at this restaurant. What are you standing there for? Go!” And I watched him scuttle off.
I did not see the boy again that night. When we finished I cleaned my area quickly and returned to the bunk room in time to roll up my few articles of clothing and hide them under my pillow. My
hukou,
my household registration, which gave me the right to exist in China, a home, a place in the pattern — this I left in its sewn-in pouch in my inner pocket. Later I would have to find a way to get rid of it.
I washed thoroughly, scrubbing every patch of myself, thinking it was possible I might never wash again. I crept back into the bunk room after the lights were out, so nobody saw me hoist into my bunk with all my clothes on, even my shoes.
I lay as quiet as a stone while the moon rose over the Tianjin rooftops. The roomful of men, worn-out kitchen men who had cooked by hot steamers and cleaned and gone finally to their beds, quieted to a soft forest of sighs and snores.
I waited hours to get up. To climb down I had to step on the bed of the man below. “I’m sorry, Comrade.” And I whispered a local slang word for the bathroom. The man snorted and returned to sleep. I hunched down the center aisle, holding my midsection as if ill, concealing my bundle. I slipped out and passed the rear of the kitchens. The last of the men were inside cleaning, and they had set racks of leftover buns in the doorway, which they would divide up later and take home. I took five dozen, wrapped them in three tight cloths in my bundle, and continued on, holding my middle, into the latrine, then out again through a back door that gave onto a Tianjin alley. We were never prisoners in our workers’ collectives, but if a man did leave, there was nowhere else to go.
I set out walking. First I cut across the city, with its silent shadows, and then through the hours of thinning buildings and finally the countryside, due east, by the stars. Later, by the sun. I walked without stopping until I came, finally, to the flats that led to the sea. The air was cold, which was good for the
baozi.
As a cook I was well fed, better than most people, and I had the reserves to walk a night and a day without food. I only drank, stopping when I could at farmers’ pumps.
By the time I reached the flat, fine, oily sand it was night again, and I could walk no farther. I stumbled out onto a pier crowded with boats. There were fishing boats, squat, of dark, heavy wood, and lined up in their berths, the larger craft — metal-hulled diesel-engine boats scavenged from the years of war, patched, remade, bumping the wood pilings, lines clinking. I had taken my last steps; if I did not lie down, I would collapse. So I staggered out along a wooden plank beside one of the berths, maneuvered my leg over the rail, and stepped aboard a boat. It was a large one, fourteen meters of hull at least. Three metal doors. I pulled at one; it opened. Down a ladder was a wedge-shaped space, and a bunk. I untied the
baozi
from my waist and collapsed.
When I awoke, a man was bending over me with a long knife, the tip of which he pressed ever so gently against my throat. I felt my eyes popping wide as I shrank away, but he followed me easily with the sharp point.
“Don’t move,” he said in the Tianjin dialect. With his free hand he checked me for weapons, feeling only my sewn-in
hukou
and a few unpromising coins in my pocket.
“If you want to kill me, it’s no problem,” I croaked. “I am dead already.”
He grazed me again with the knife, as if considering it. He had a wide, squat face, creased and salt-burned with thick caterpillar brows. It was impossible to tell his age. “You look alive to me.”
“Not for long.”
“Unless?” he prompted.
“Yuan zou gao fei,”
I whispered, Travel far and fly high. Slip away. Disappear. Start again.
I saw in his face that he understood. “Where?”
“Anywhere,” I said. A minute ago I had been a dead man. Now my heart raced with hope.
He looked me up and down. “You don’t have anything.”
“I have that,” I said, and pointed with a look. “Open it.”
He finally pulled the knife back a few inches and reached for the bundle, still keeping his eyes on me.
He untied the first knot and I could see the change in his face when he caught a whiff of the aroma, and then he laid back the cloth and saw the
baozi,
cooked, in their neat, slightly compressed rows. He leaned his face close to them and breathed. In those days meat dumplings were festival food, and though a man like him was blessed that he might eat his fill of fish, a meat dumpling was something he tasted only a few times a year. And these were buns from Gou Bu Li.
He glanced back at me. He had decided. “All right,” he said. “I’m going south. I have cargo going to a work unit in Fuzhou. I can drop you near there. It’ll be eighteen days, maybe twenty. I have four men. We go out on the tide tonight. You stay here until I tell you.” He threw me a boiled-wool blanket, left, and locked the door.
It was twenty-one days to Fujian Province, around the Shandong peninsula and down the coast past the great mouth of the Yangtze. When finally we came to the first wet fingers of the Min Jiang estuary, north of Fuzhou, he said I should get off there instead of near the city. Go ashore in some quiet place. Hide for a while.