The Language of Baklava (16 page)

“Yes, Gram.”

“Isn’t that just typical?”

“Yes, Gram.”

“That’s what a man will do.”

Just a few blocks from Lincoln Center, the Imperial Palace is a massive edifice flanked by twin stone dragons on scrolls, glaring at incoming customers. A man in a red satin jacket opens one of the carved, ten-foot-high doors. He says, “Welcome, Imperial Palace,” like someone who has said this a thousand times a day, every day of his life.

We enter and I feel my heart rock against the side of my chest. My hands fall open and the breath catches in my throat. It’s a Disney ride of a restaurant, with a soaring ceiling, banners of fabric in fiery colors, hostesses and wait staff crisply turned out in short skirts and tailored jackets with mandarin collars, hair spun into ivory combs. There are cages full of songbirds and a real little waterfall bubbling down from the far wall to run into a circular pool in the floor. I feel light-headed, and a white buzz fills my ears. The air smells gorgeous, like marrow, roasting garlic, and grilled meat. I’d be happy just to stand there drinking in the aroma, openmouthed in the entryway, but one of the angrily efficient hostesses snaps up two menus. “You come now!” she commands, and plunges us into the roaring restaurant.

We’re offered seats at a table in the center of the room, which I think is an ideal viewing location. But Gram grumbles about being placed at what she calls a “dames only” table. We’re handed padded menus bound in crimson velvet and heavy as blocks of wood. I flip through the many pages, and even though there appear to be no Asian customers in the restaurant, all the meals are listed in both English and Chinese. The menu is a treasure map that takes me on its dotted line over snowy mountains, through hushed trees, past jade lakes. I read about bird’s-nest soup, thousand-year-old eggs, fried blowfish tails, jellied pigs’ knuckles, batter-fried eels, braised shark fins, dishes named for generals and princes, forgotten cities, and sinewy rivers.

I’m desperate to order the flying monkey soup and house-fried birds’ feet, but Gram decides that for our first exposure we should stick with the dishes listed on the first page under the heading “Chef Recommends.” She selects wonton soup and egg foo yong for us to share.

Our waiter is a remote, stately man with graying temples who looks out of place among the brisk hostesses and dapper young waiters, their hair sleek as chips of onyx. He bows very slightly, smiles a vacated smile, and recites the specials in a faint voice. His name tag, a bit of jade green plastic surrounded by a scroll, says “Chen”—the only Chen in the sea of Marys and Johns and Roberts walking around here. Gram gives Chen our order, then presses one confidential hand to his jacket forearm.

“We just went to see a won-der-ful performance, all about your people!” Her voice is full and voluptuous, as if she’s congratulating him personally on the performance. I look away, my mouth wavy with embarrassment. You never know who Gram is going to talk to or what she’s going to say to them. “It was a wonderful show—at the opera house!” she goes on. “Such a spectacle—the little Oriental girl was so dainty and refined.”

I study the marble columns in the back of the room, imagining that Chen is now rolling his eyes. There’s a pause; then I hear Chen say, “You see Chinese opera?” I’m astonished to hear an electric wire of excitement in his voice. I turn back. All his brusque efficiency has fallen away. He is staring at Gram.

“Yes! You would have loved it,” she gushes as if they are old chums. “It was just glorious. The singing, the costumes, the set. Ohhh . . .”

“Yes, Chinese opera very important, very ancient art form. Center of cultural life.”

“Oh, I know, I know! It was spec-ta-cu-lar.” Gram draws out every syllable. “So sad and meaningful. It was ex-tra-va-gant.”

Chen looks as if he will pull a chair right up to the table. He stands but is nearly bent double to speak as closely as he can with Gram. “Where you hear it? Where you hear Chinese opera?”

“Why, it’s right down the street,” Gram says. “Right at Lincoln Center!”

His eyes follow Gram’s gesture as if he could gaze through the walls. “This is venerable art form, this opera. In the Cultural Revolution, opera is the only kind of art we are allowed. Chairman Mao says it is not bourgeois. But I don’t care about this, I don’t think about politics. Always as a boy, I loved the opera,” he says, his voice suddenly so sweetly yearning that it seems too intimate of a confidence.

Gram’s cheeks bloom; she looks as if she will rest her head against his chest. She places the flat of her palm at the center of her sternum. “Oh, Chen,” she says, “I understand completely, I really truly do. I too have always been a lover of the arts, but when I was married my husband would never have gone to the opera.”

I bite my lips, and my neck stiffens with embarrassment. I want to bark at her,
Gram, get a grip!
But she’s not paying any attention.

“I think maybe only most sensitive people understand the opera,” Chen says. Gram nods mournfully. He and Gram stare at the same point on the floor. I look back and forth between the two of them:
What about the egg foo yong?

“Only the sorts of people who’ve really known suffering really appreciate the opera.”

“From suffering come the greatest art,” Chen says.

“Oh, what a true, true, tragic thought.”

I jitter in my seat, swing my legs, yawn like to unhinge my jaw.

Finally, after a moment of charged silence, Chen seems to come to. He abruptly bows and withdraws from our table.

While we wait for our food, Gram leans over and begins chatting with a family of five flaxen-haired boys and their mother. They’re hard to avoid since there’s barely a hand’s width of space between our tables. The mother tells Gram they are visiting from Kentucky, at which point Gram turns, covers her mouth, and murmurs to me that Kentucky was “neutral” in the Civil War. She swivels back and, flapping her hand, goes on to tell them all about our afternoon at what she is now referring to as the “Chinese opera.” When she reveals that the opera was
Madama Butterfly,
the family matron, a gentle-eyed woman with tightly permed steel wool hair and wearing a Ma Kettle dress, says to Gram, “Why, darlin’, I thought that was a Japanese type of music opera? Maybe even written by an Eyetalian?”

And Gram laughs gaily and says, “Well, yes, I suppose she was supposed to be a sort of Japanese girl. But here in the North, we don’t really like to make those sorts of distinctions. We feel it’s more polite to call them Or-i-en-tals,” she enunciates.

“Oh my, well, y’all don’t say!” remarks the flushed matron, fanning at herself a little. Then she redirects the conversation, complaining that she doesn’t know how to take all these spices.

The youngest of the five big, round-shouldered sons at the table is hunkered down, holding his plate and using his chopsticks like a snowplow blade to shovel chicken with cashews into his mouth. He gazes at me steadily without slowing his food intake.

“There’s a little boyfriend for you,” Gram says, elbowing me.

This type of observation from Gram increasingly has the power to make me crazy. “I thought you hated men!” I roar back at her.

She tut-tuts, rolls her eyes, and says, “Oh, for the love of Pete, that’s not a man.”

Our exchange is preempted by a cool-eyed waiter with military posture and an impassive face holding up a tray crowded with steaming dishes of meats, vegetables, and rice. I scan them wildly, searching for the young pig flesh. Behind him, serene and dashing, is Chen. He stands beside the young waiter and orchestrates the exact placement of each dish on the table, then dismisses him. While the Kentucky family looks on, he crouches between me and Gram and murmurs, “Egg foo yong too plain! Chinese opera lovers need real Chinese food!” He has taken the liberty of switching the egg foo yong for crispy shrimp with almonds and adding a plate of shredded beef in hoisin sauce.

I swell up, proud of my sophisticated tastes, and glance over at the other tables, hoping that some ignoramus has ordered egg foo yong.

Chen shows me how to fit the chopsticks to my fumbling fingers. After a few trembling attempts, I manage to get a small piece of beef to my mouth. I close my eyes and my senses swim in my head. The flavors are so complex and capacious, I don’t know how to make sense of them. It’s enthralling, the way the dark, sweet sauce clings to a salty bit of meat, the twenty-five shades of flavor secreted in the grilled crust of a shrimp. Who would have thought to bring these ingredients, these ways of thinking about food, together in such startling ways? It’s so good that it seems nearly intimate, an impossibility that this unknown chef, a total stranger, would know how to touch all the hidden places in my mouth.

“Yes, yes, yes. . . .” Chen’s voice enters my reverie, coaxing and seductive. I open my eyes and he is looking at me. His own eyes are dark glimmerings. “It’s good, isn’t it,” he says. “You taste it, don’t you? I see that you taste.”

I fumble with the chopsticks, feeling anointed and embarrassed. It is at once too much praise and no praise at all—who doesn’t know how to taste food?

But Chen’s gaze goes distant again. “The chef here, a very fine, sensitive man—he was one of the cooks for the Chinese emperor.” He lowers his eyes. “No more. Now he must cook for people who have no tongues and no noses!”

I concentrate on arranging my chopsticks, wanting to please this displeased man. Something about him—perhaps the failure to find the identical charms and graces of his first culture in this new one; the failure to recognize the new promises of his new country— reminds me of Bud. He’s also just as obscure as Bud. Who are these people with “no tongues and no noses”? I mull over the deepening mysteries of the Imperial Palace restaurant.

“Well, all I can say is I wish her big chief father were here,” Gram confides to Chen, tipping her chin at me. “That man, he thinks he’s the alpha and the omega when it comes to dinner. Fuss, fuss, fuss, nothing’s good enough, nothing’s right.”

“Many men I know this way.”

“Only the little onions, the itty-bitty cucumbers, only the meat from
his
butcher,” Gram minces. “Only this and that sort of rice. Oh, for the love of Pete, the rice! Only a certain kind of rice, washed, dried, oiled, sprinkled with ground lamb and fancy pine nuts. He spends more time on his rice than women spend on their hair.”

Chen glances at me again when Gram mentions the rice. “So you come from cooking,” he says. “I thought this when I see you eat.”

I lower my chopsticks in confusion, worried that I’ve broken another rule from Gram’s little pink book.

Chen apologizes profusely for the fact that he has a job and bows several times as he backs away, promising to return promptly. But I want only to return to my fumbling chopsticks, to retreat inside the smoky, sensuous dimensions of the food. I close my eyes as I chew. Slowly, I begin to remember something I saw in my parents’ encyclopedia set. I love browsing through these books and rely on them for the bulk of my school reports. I start to recall the entry for Japan, reading about some sort of dreadful, protracted trouble . . . with China. I don’t recall exactly what, though I dimly recollect something about invasions and atrocities. It occurs to me quite suddenly as I’m sitting there chewing that the Chinese and the Japanese don’t think of themselves as the same people at all.

The chunk of tofu and scallions in my mouth begins to turn cold. I swallow with difficulty and eye the generous abundance covering our table. Gram is offering bites to the Kentucky matron, who looks at everything fish-eyed and says, “Now good heavens, what is that?” before she waves it away.

The pleasure begins to leach out of everything. I try to keep eating, but my fog of gratification is dissipating. I’m ashamed, terrified of what the waiter will think if he finds out that we didn’t see a Chinese opera at all, but one about their sworn enemies. Anyplace with a thing like an emperor, I think, is a serious place. An emperor is even more than a king—it’s like a king and a president mixed together and seated on a mountaintop. I imagine the sad, refined chef who has lost his emperor, imprisoned in his strange new kitchen, hoping that some unknown diner out there will taste his food and the diner’s soul will be touched and will vibrate with the tender soul of the chef. This is the food for the emperor, I think, finally putting down my chopsticks.

Gram, however, is still blithely prattling away. She cuts through the food with a fork and knife, sprinkling it with what she is calling “salty sauce.” “Oriental men are so dear and lovely,” she says, scooping up some beef in its intense hoisin base. “They’re really not like men at all.”

“That’s not a good thing!”

“Oh,” she says smugly, “you don’t know the half of it, missy.”

“What?” I can’t stand being told that there’s something I need to know. “The half of what?”

“Oh, no, no . . . you’re too young for that.”

“Tch!” I cross my arms.

She eyes me and then finally says, “You see, there’s all sorts of trouble in bed, dear. That whole business is overrated. No, the best sorts of men cook for their women.”

My face burns and I am aggravated to be caught off guard by one of Gram’s risqué assertions. “So . . . what kind of cooking?” I rest my forearms on the table

She frowns and I remove my elbows: unladylike violation number five. “Any kind—that isn’t really the point.”

I look at her slyly, surprised at the color in her cheeks and how clear her eyes are. “Chinese food?”