“An old Chinese saying?”
Zhang nodded. “A modern version. ‘Updated,’ as my son would say.”
They walked on to the butcher and while Zhang was buying mincemeat for the mapo doufu, Paul waited in front of the door and watched a prostitute disappear into the back room of a hairdressing salon with a client. Everything that he had seen in the last few minutes was illegal. But no one made even the slightest effort to pretend to be obeying the law to save face. Why were the police doing nothing about this? Where was the party secretary for this district?
VII
Zhang diced the eggplant with deft movements, put it in a bowl, and sprinkled salt on it liberally. He took a smaller knife and chopped fresh ginger and garlic into tiny pieces, sliced two bunches of spring onions, cored the bitter gourd with a few twists of his hand, cut the tofu into small pieces, and fetched several jars containing pickled chili, chili paste, and fermented black beans from the cupboard. He was dry frying some Sichuan peppercorns in a pan on the side. Once they were done, he ground them to a fine powder in a mortar with slow, rhythmic strokes of the pestle. Paul set out a folding table and three stools in a corner of the tiny kitchen, sat down, and watched Zhang’s every movement.
Many, many years ago, on his list of Things That Make Life Worth Living, “Watching Zhang Cook and Having the Meal Afterward” had been in one of the top spots. He had never seen anyone else prepare food with such love and dedication.
Zhang barely spoke in the kitchen. He did not reply to any questions; he didn’t even hear them. Guests who arrived didn’t get a look from him; he was deep in a world of smells and spices, of herbs, oils, and pastes, of steaming, slicing, and woks. Mei and Paul thought that cooking was another form of meditation for him and he had let them believe this for over twenty years. There were things in his life that he could not talk about, not even more than thirty years later. Neither with his best friend nor with his wife. How could they understand that food was never just a simple meal for him? That he envied everyone for whom it was so simple. That he could never put a piece of tofu, a chicken’s foot, no, not even a single, tiny grain of rice into his mouth without thinking of Li, Wu, Hong, and all the others in his work brigade who, like him, had been sent into the mountains as children during the Cultural Revolution to help the farmers with the harvest, where they had been forced to labor for six long godforsaken years. Six years in which they thought they had been forgotten by their parents and by the rest of the world, in which they had almost nothing but rice to eat, and, when that was not enough, because the inexperienced city folk were a burden rather than a help during the harvest, they ate grass, leaves, and bark. Six years in which not one summer or winter passed without one—weakened by starvation though surrounded by a natural world that had more than enough for everyone if only it were properly managed—succumbing. Six years in which he could think about nothing for days at a time but the dumplings his mother used to make. Not about his mother; Zhang thought about the dumplings.
For him, every meal was a celebration. A small, quiet triumph of life over death. Of love over hate. Of beauty over ugliness. Of good over evil. And the more effort he made, the better it tasted, the more the taste buds were stimulated or the nose pleasured, the more the stomach was filled, the sweeter the triumph. Who said a pinch of pepper was just a matter of taste? Who said coriander, chili, aniseed, caraway, ginger, and cloves were only spices? Who said life was so simple? He had seen how the Red Guards had shouted at Old Hu just because he had tried to give his watery broth a little taste with some of the pepper he had secretly stored away. The peppercorns were said to be proof of his decadent bourgeois past and of the impossibility of reforming him. The soup had to taste the same for everyone. Who did he think he was? He had better not dare think of trying that again. And what did the mad old fellow do? What did this fool, who had worked as a chef in a French restaurant in Shanghai before the Revolution, do? He seasoned his food. He seasoned it again, he seasoned it without showing any remorse. As though pepper were a form of resistance against barbarism. The Red Guards had been watching him; they beat him until he no longer moved. The whole village watched: the children, the old people, the men, and the women, and no one helped him. Instead, they screamed, “Punish the counterrevolutionary Hu!” “No mercy for Hu’s betrayal!” And the sixteen-year-old Zhang Lin stood there and screamed with them, and if they had ordered him to hit him, he would have done it. Three peppercorns. Who was he supposed to explain that to? Beaten to death because of three lousy black peppercorns. Who on earth would ever understand that?
He could only begin to relax once the food was on the table. The white cubes of tofu lay like morsels of deliciousness in the luscious oily red of the chili sauce. The eggplant had exactly the right soft and creamy consistency, he could see that at a glance, and the bok choy, lightly steamed with garlic, had retained its freshness; he tasted it with his eyes and felt it on his tongue before he had even tasted the vegetable. And the bitter gourd! The many shades of its green! Tender and light in some places, almost transparent, and dark and moist in others, like the color of the paddy fields just before the harvest. He loved its bitterness. He loved the dominant taste of it, which did not suck up to anything else, was not overcome by the next-best flavor, and lingered in his mouth until the might of the Sichuan pepper finally covered it.
Hu would have been proud of him.
He waited until everyone else at the table had tasted the food; he always helped himself last. After a few bites Paul sighed with bliss. “Unbelievable. Wonderful.”
Mei nodded in agreement. “Now I remember—
“—why you married me,” Zhang said, finishing her sentence. She rolled her eyes in response. Did she know how much these small intimacies meant to him?
Zhang tried a piece of mapo doufu, one of his favorite dishes. The smoky, earthy spices filled his mouth immediately, followed by the typical taste of the Sichuan pepper, which bewitched the tip of the tongue and the lips then numbed them a little; he felt the kick of their unique spiciness in his throat and even in his ears.
“Why don’t you open a restaurant, seriously?” Paul asked, with his mouth full.
Zhang responded with a brief smile. It was a rhetorical question, a ritual, and the answer was the same today as always. “Too dangerous.”
They laughed.
Mei and Paul took it as a joke. They were thinking about dissatisfied customers, about drunks, rowdy guests, and policemen asking for protection money. Zhang was thinking about Old Hu and about how times could change so quickly in China.
“Danger aside, at least you’d earn a decent amount with it,” Mei said, helping herself to another piece of eggplant and shooting him a challenging look.
Just that morning over a quick breakfast, they had had another one of their bad quarrels over Zhang’s attitude toward his work and the poor chances of his career taking off.
Zhang had been a member of the Shenzhen police for over twenty-five years, but in all this time, he had been passed over for promotions with notable regularity. He had been moved one rank higher three times, until he had made it to a lowly inspector in the homicide division, but every modest recognition of this sort had been conditional on self-criticism in public. His most recent promotion was now fifteen years ago. The official reasons for this were his Buddhist beliefs, or, more precisely, the fact that he publicly acknowledged these beliefs, and his refusal, in the face of several requests, to rejoin the Communist Party after they had expelled him in the 1980s during a campaign to cleanse the party of “spiritual pollution.” Both of these black marks could perhaps still have been overcome, but, in the eyes of his superiors, what totally ruled him out to take on greater responsibility was his honesty. Zhang doggedly refused to extort protection money from restaurants, bars, hotels, businesses, or illegal workers, and he even politely but firmly refused the envelopes of cash, the cigarettes, the whiskey, and all the other p
resents at Chinese New Year. He even paid for his noodle soup lunches at the street stalls around the police headquarters from his own pocket. This honesty was a regular cause for quarrels in the Zhang family. The basic salary of a detective superintendent and that of a secretary, even one like Mei, who worked for the office of an international company, was not enough to enjoy all the advantages of these new times in which they lived, especially not when some of this income went toward supporting parents in Sichuan and donations toward the building of a Buddhist temple. It was not enough for an apartment. It was not enough for a car. It was not even enough for a regular shopping trip to one of the new shopping malls with their many international brands. The computer in the Zhang household was a Chinese make. The video camera, the digital camera, and the television too. Mei’s Prada bag and Chanel belt were imitations of the cheapest sort, just like her son’s Adidas shoes, Levi’s jeans, and Puma jogging suit. Mei could accept the time-consuming search for bargains and the crude imitation goods in her home, but what she could not forgive her husband for was the fact that she could not send her son to one of the many new private schools. Out of the five secretaries in her department, she was the only one who did not send her child to a private school. The only one! Did he really understand what that meant? What a loss of face. The people who could not afford one of those expensive schools did at least send their child to one of the private language schools in the afternoon or in the evening so that the child learned English well or at least received a certificate claiming that he or she had done so. But they didn’t even have enough money for that. Not even for a shitty second-class certificate.
Why did their fifteen-year-old son have to suffer from the moral strictures that his father applied to himself? What kind of job did he think their son would get later on? He was welcome to play the hero, but not at the expense of his family. It was his responsibility as a father to provide the best education possible for his son, that was what Confucius had stipulated, Mei used to remind her husband on a regular basis. Since Zhang did not accept the master as an authority on such things, she had buried herself for weeks in the writings of the Buddha to find something in them that would bring her husband to his senses. Sadly, Siddhārtha proved to be fully unsuited to justifying the acceptance of money and gifts in the name of the higher good. Quite the opposite: Greed and desire were constantly mentioned by him as the causes of human suffering, strengthening Mei’s conviction that this religion would never succeed in China and that her husband was a terrible eccentric in his beliefs. She could only appeal to his feelings of responsibility and his common sense: Could he tell her, please, how it could harm anyone if he merely did what everyone else in his position did, that is, let himself be paid commensurately for his work? And if the government did not pay enough, a person had to secure his livelihood by other means. In the past, he had replied to her with a long monologue saying that nothing, absolutely nothing, that a person did in life was free of consequences, and that we, not the government, not a political party, not a boss of any kind, were responsible for them.
In more recent times, he simply responded to her questions by saying that he, Zhang, would be harmed if he took bribes; he didn’t want bad Karma, after all, and he had to think about his next life. Who wanted to be reborn as a snake or a Japanese person? The hint of mockery in his voice told her that it would be foolish to object.
They were tough quarrels, long and fruitless, which ended with Mei refusing to speak to her husband for days. She would probably have left him long ago and accepted one of the many advances from her German boss if not for the fact that his stubbornness, his honesty, his courage, and his unbending nature were also the very qualities that she loved most about him. She could not really be angry with him. He saw that in her eyes, even in the moments when they were full of displeasure while looking at him. He could rely on Mei, and this knowledge gave him the strength to put up with the hostilities and the temptations he faced at work.
He looked at Paul, how he was scraping the bowl of mapo doufu clean and smiling at him gratefully from the side. It was good to see him sitting in this kitchen again. Mei did not understand why Paul had withdrawn himself so much; she thought he should have done the opposite and not turned away from life but thrown himself into it until it swallowed him and his pain up. Zhang, on the other hand, marveled at how resolutely his friend grieved for his son, how he took the time that was necessary for himself to do this, even if he would grow old in the process.
Paul looked at the clock and panicked. It was late, almost ten thirty, and on no account did he want to miss the last ferry. They made their way to the metro station, and were just crossing the plaza in front of the shopping mall when Zhang’s cell phone rang. He flipped it open, looked at the small screen, and picked up the call. His face darkened with every sentence he heard. He interrupted the caller with questions every so often, but in a dialect from Sichuan province that Paul did not understand. After he had ended the conversation, he turned to his guest again.
“Sorry, that was Wu, one of our pathologists. He’s from Chengdu and he cooks the best mapo doufu that I know. Amazing. He’s an old friend of mine and I asked him to ring me as soon as he had news. He hasn’t quite finished yet, but it turns out it’s true that the skull was smashed. Apart from that, the left arm is broken in several places and the right shoulder is dislocated. Whoever the victim is, he didn’t give himself up to his murderers without a fight. He’ll tell me the rest tomorrow.”
They walked down the west side of Shennan Road to the metro station in silence.
“Shall I take you to the border?”
“Thanks, but I’ll manage on my own. Do I look that tired?” asked Paul.
“Yes. Exhausted.”
“I am. It was all a bit much for a hermit.”
Zhang nodded understandingly. “Can you do me a favor, though? When you speak to the Owens tomorrow, please ask them if their son ever injured his left knee.”
“Why?”
“The body has a big scar on the left knee, probably from an operation. Wu thinks it’s from an accident or a sports injury.”
VIII
The voices of the night were no more than a whisper. The water lay smooth as a mirror in the glow of the red and blue neon advertisements, and a lone barge or tugboat made its way across the pond every now and then. Tiny waves lapped against the walls of the quay in exhaustion, as if the harbor had been transformed into a deserted, windless lake. The white lights in the office blocks had almost all been switched off, bit by bit, like lighting for a celebration that someone had carefully blown out candle by candle. Even the never-ending roar of traffic during the day had fallen silent. The hour after midnight was the time when the city that never otherwise stopped allowed itself a rest.
Paul stood at the pier from which ferries to the outlying islands departed and thought about what he should do. He had missed the last ferry. At this hour it was impossible to find a private vessel that would take him to Lamma, and there was no one he could stay the night with. Undecided, he sat down on the steps that led down to the water. He had slept in the train, and felt wide-awake in some strange way, yes, almost a bit hyper, but not unwell at all. The air was still pleasantly warm and smelled not of gas but of the sea and the humid, sweet, and heavy air of the tropics. He thought about what could be making him feel so keyed up. The many impressions of the past few hours? The pleasure he always felt when he saw Zhang and Mei? Did he care more about the fate of Michael Owen than he admitted to himself? Or was it the smells, the music of the streets, the faces, the sights of Shenzhen, which were different from Hong Kong’s, that stimulated him so? That awakened memories in him that he thought were buried so deep that two lifetimes would not be enough to unearth them?
China! The other side of the world. The better side.
He had first read about Li Si and her father, the emperor of Mandala, in a German children’s book when he was eight years
old. The little princess was the first girl he fell in love with. In her country lived an imaginary giant and there grew wonderful trees and flowers in the strangest shapes and colors, and they were all transparent. Plants made of glass! There were rivers there with porcelain bridges swinging over them! Some of these bridges had strange roofs with thousands of small silver bells hanging from them, which tinkled with every puff of wind and glittered in the morning light. In the capital city of Ping the streets were full of hair counters, ear cleaners, magicians, acrobats, and hundred-year-old ivory carvers, who carved away at a single piece of wood for their whole lives. From that time on, he had dreamed of traveling to Mandala, and when his father explained to him that there was no such country and that China was the country the book meant to describe, a huge empire on the other side of the world with a big wall around it and a secretive Forbidden City in which the emperor used to live, he had set his sights on traveling to China.
The life that he longed for was in China. In China the people were smaller, not so heavily built; there were no children there who were a head taller than him and who bullied him to chew the gum they spat out. In China no one cared if his father was Jewish or his mother German. In China parents did not quarrel and it was easy to make friends. In China the people were just much friendlier and more honest and cleverer; it was not for nothing that they had invented gunpowder, paper, and the compass.
China! The word alone drew the young boy to it like magic. Full of wonder, he discovered Chinese characters, tracing his finger across the paper over and over again, copying the strange lines with slow, respectful movements. What kind of country was it where the people drew small pictures instead of using letters like A or Z? Where the same sound could have completely different meanings depending on which tone it was spoken in? In New York, while the other boys played baseball on weekends, he went to Chinatown and hung around the vegetable and fish stalls, trying to catch snatches of words and to identify them again, because he was so incredibly fascinated by the sound and the color of the language.