SU MEANS “PLAIN,” AND TO AN EATER OF CHINESE FOOD IT ALSO means “no meat.” Su jiaozi are dumplings stuffed with bean threads, chopped shitake mushrooms, cabbage shreds, or greens. Su ji is not real chicken but a savory vegetable filling wrapped in tofu skin. The plain cuisine, my waipuo claimed, developed out of necessity. To eat su is the province of only the impoverished or the deliberately pure, and su cooking reaches its heights among those who have made a habit of denunciation.
Well into her sixties, Waipuo was a sybarite, a petite but sensuous eater who nursed a long belly under her drab widow’s clothes. She loved spicy shrimp served in the shell and all parts of the pig. I remember her sinking healthy teeth into the shining skin of a fat pork joint stewed “red” with soy sauce, sugar, and cloves; or thrusting out her lower lip, indignant at the skimpy dinners served by her daughter, my mother, at our kitchen table in northeastern Wisconsin. She looked with some disdain upon our ordinary lives, comparing our meager family table with the groaning board of a long-ago Shanghai banquet. She took true interest only in the meals she cooked herself and in her best grandchild, my sister Tina, for whom she bought jewelry and knit the prettiest sweaters. Tina and I were close, and I knew she wasn’t perfect. I knew she had flirted with several boys and even kissed some of them in the basement; I knew she spent hours daydreaming about boys and that she hid sexy romance novels in her nightstand. But I suspect that even if our grandmother had known about these wanton activities, she would have overlooked them; with her capacity for pleasure she might have understood them.
Waipuo and I had little use for one another. With my height, big bones, and outsize feet, I reminded her perhaps of my studious mother, who had disappointed her by marrying my father. She had nothing against my father personally, but she wanted her daughter with a richer man. A less forgiveable offense lay in my unwillingness to please. While Tina needed only a brief instruction to apprehend or follow Waipuo’s lead, I never remembered the old manners she held dear. I dressed sloppily and forgot to comb my hair; I was always reading; I had no semblance of propriety: no guiju. I was shapeless, hapless, rudderless. As the third daughter of four, I wallowed in passivity and contempt, in the irresponsible hostility of the powerless. Stubbornly, Waipuo lectured me; she made me curl my hair and taught me how to knit. Sometimes when she looked at me through thick glasses, I had the feeling she wasn’t seeing me—rough hair, chapped lips, and sullen gaze—but straining to see something beyond me.
She pretended not to understand English, and I pretended not to speak Chinese; but despite these strategies our interactions were often stormy. “That can’t be your complexion. Do you ever wash your face?” “You have no guiju.” “You are a mess.” At her most incensed, her voice grew dry, and she spat out her lectures with the mechanical percussiveness of an old typewriter. “Without guiju! Without guiju! You must learn guiju!”
One afternoon when I was in my early teens, we came to grief over a sky-blue cabled sweater. Ten long rows back, I had dropped a stitch, and, in my cowardly and avoidant fashion, I failed to acknowledge this when it was discovered. My grandmother unraveled the ten rows, her lower lip swelling with disapproval and disgust. She insisted I replace each row, scrutinizing every stitch and lecturing relentlessly in her dry voice. Finally I exploded. I flung the knitting across the room and ruined it. I shrieked, “Leave me alone!” Another knitting lesson ended.
Later, doing the dishes, I dared to ask my mother if Waipuo had mentioned this quarrel.
“She says you have a temper.”
“She was such a pain!”
“She thinks you will become a Buddhist.” I heard a hint of curiosity in my mother’s voice.
“That’s weird!”
I knew Waipuo had recently joined a Buddhist temple in New York. I knew Buddhists did not eat meat, that they took vows of poverty and sought simplicity. But I could not understand what forces would compel my grandmother, or anyone, to move in that direction.
My grandmother was born the spoiled only girl in a family of ten children, to the son of a prominent official serving at the decadent tail end of dynastic rule. This official, my great-great-grandfather, had built a house so grand the grounds required eight dozen streetlights. Such ostentation made the house a target for revolutionaries in 1911. My grandmother survived the fire as an infant, carried out of the house by a maid.
“What happened to the property?” I once asked my mother.
She shrugged. “It’s lost.”
“Lost? How did they lose it?”
“They spent it all away.”
Waipuo was married in 1934, in a hotel wedding in Shanghai. She was four feet, eleven inches tall and weighed ninety-five pounds; when uncoiled her hair, which had never been cut, swept to her knees. She wore a fashionable western wedding dress and a diamond ring. My grandfather took good care of her. In the next few decades, she survived the Japanese invasion, occupation, civil war, and exodus to Taiwan without letting these changes dim the pleasure she found in life. She was a creature entirely at home with her worldly desires. A woman who practiced such financial profligacy that even during the war, when the flesh of any animal was hard to come by, she would squander her husband’s money on fresh pork, chicken, and shrimp for one exquisite soup.
My mother was raised by servants, beginning with a wet nurse, and perhaps her serious nature developed as a form of resistance to her own mother’s lavishness and interest in fun. She worked hard, first in high school; and then, after my grandfather died, as a scholarship student in the U.S.; and finally, with my father, as a scrimping mother of four. She saved change in an envelope so that her daughters could buy nickel Dilly Bars at Dairy Queen. She counted out the slices of ham to make the lunch meat come out even each week. At night, she rarely left the house and never joined my father in his bridge or mah-jongg games, which reminded her, perhaps, of her childhood evenings spent wishing her mother would stay at home.
“She would play mah-jongg for a week at a time,” my mother said. “That’s why I hate mah-jongg.”
“How did she do that?”
“They would sleep through the day, then get started after a quick dinner and keep going until the sun came up. She loved to gamble.”
I imagine Waipuo in those years, a little plump but still beautiful, cackling out her dry laugh and flinging her luck at the bright tiles. Life was catching up to her. The Communist takeover forced her and my grandfather to flee the country. He was ill when they left China and would never again be well; he succumbed to cancer when she was forty-five. After his death, she had no idea how to hold onto his business. The money ran through her fingers and she came to the U.S. to live with her three children, who had crossed the ocean and were living on their wits. My uncles landed on their feet, becoming prosperous businessmen; my mother married an engineer and began her frugal life in northeastern Wisconsin, where she counted pennies and did her own dry cleaning.
When I was twelve, my mother was struck down with a mysterious illness. Although she had always been prone to headaches, stomach trouble, and general frailty, this new malady seized her with a consuming force. She spent days in bed, feverish and exhausted. One by one, her joints and knuckles swelled and grew misshapen. At the age of forty-two, she was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, a chronic and incurable autoimmune disease. She would never again ride a bicycle or weed the garden. She would never walk without pain.
In the face of this unsolvable trouble, my grandmother turned to Buddhism. Her own father had pilgrimaged across the Himalayas, traveling with his ink brushes and six personal servants. Now Waipuo began a more inward journey, alone. My mother’s illness sent her in search of answers from a higher power. My father built a prayer table for her room. Waipuo began to spend her mornings on her knees before a little figure of Guan Yin, the goddess of mercy. She passed the evening hours fingering her beads and chanting prayers under her breath. She joined the New York temple on a visit to my uncle. She played the drum during rituals and often stayed at the temple when the monks and nuns went away on pilgrimages and needed a housesitter.
She gave up meat in her early seventies. She did not take to the change with grace. I remember watching her bang around in the kitchen with her lower lip stuck out when she seemed angry at the diet she had chosen. With critical eyes I saw that after she renounced meat she took an even more special interest in food, spending hours in the kitchen, cooking for the family and savoring the smells of our forbidden meals. She made no effort to convert us, but my sister Tina accepted her Buddhism and took a natural interest in learning what it meant. At Dartmouth, Tina majored in anthropology and undertook a research project on eastern religious rituals.
The summer I turned nineteen, Tina arranged to meet our grandmother for a few days at the temple. She planned to attend services and interview the monks and nuns. She would have some time alone with Waipuo, who was getting old. On Saturday, she would meet Hao Ling Fashi, the head of the temple, who had a reputation as a fortuneteller. Then there would be lunch.
“You’re coming along on Saturday,” my sister said, and I obeyed. It was easier to obey than to learn what I wanted.
On a warm morning in early June, the three of us met in my grandmother’s temple on the edge of Chinatown.
The temple smelled strongly of incense and food. The main room was high and square, its walls a pale green tinged with smoke. In its center stood an enormous, garishly appointed statue of the Buddha, looming over an offering table and an enormous urn of incense sticks and ash. That day, the room had been readied for a funeral. A black-and-white photograph of a man hung over the offerings, platters of molded soybean shapes, dumplings, fruit, and paper money.
While our grandmother spoke to Hao Ling Fashi, I followed my sister. We walked to the back wall and gazed at the thousands of flickering red candles there. Followers had purchased each candle in memory of a soul. One of those candles, Tina explained, had been purchased by my grandmother for Huahua, our old dog who had died five years earlier.
“These Buddhists,” Tina explained to me, “place the same weight on all souls: the soul of a dog or a human being are the same.” This was the principle upon which my grandmother had given up meat.
I envied Tina for her knowledge of these details, but pretended to myself that I did not.
Hao Ling Fashi was a tall, ochre-colored man whose magnificent head rose, with its salt-and-pepper crew cut, from a rough brown robe. He had very large, very square black glasses and his stubbled scalp was spotted with rosacea. As the head of the temple, he was its official fortuneteller. According to my mother, the monks learned divination to detect future donors. This skill had helped the Buddhists survive thousands of years. Waipuo held Hao Ling Fashi in great esteem. She had heard that he was always right; and he wouldn’t tell the future of just anyone. People came from far and wide bringing donations to the temple; but sometimes, he would refuse.
Waipuo nudged Tina over to stand before the man. As the older child, she would have her fortune told first.
This took some time and was quite dull. Hao Ling Fashi peered at Tina’s hand; then he motioned to Waipuo, and they peered at it together, muttering. Waipuo was always reading our palms; many a knitting lesson had been interrupted thus; but now she looked with guidance, and it seemed to take forever. I was impatient, always, in those days, but Tina’s fortune was rendered particularly unendurable by Hao Ling Fashi’s choice of a dialect I didn’t know. Apparently our fortunes were to be kept secret from us. I shifted on my feet, listening to words slanted, words stunted and changed in tone, familiar words I could not place, unfamiliar words I knew that I would never remember. I felt regretful, and irritated by my regret. I glanced at Tina, whose Chinese was better than mine. Her pretty features worked with concentration, but it was clear that she could not decipher the conversation any more than I.
Then it was my turn. Hao Ling Fashi asked me to stand before him while he examined my palm. He was silent for quite a while, and then he pressed my fingertip until it turned white and watched the color flood back in. He said calmly, in careful English, “You should eat more slowly. Exercise. Eat less grease.”
I waited, skeptically. It was a piece of advice I could have found in Reader’s Digest.
Without further comment, Hao Ling Fashi leaned closer to read my face.
I have no idea what I looked like in those days. Photographs reveal a stranger, often with her eyes shut. I knew I was not a catch, like Tina, who already had a serious boyfriend whom she seemed about to marry. Nor was I unattractive enough to be excused from all appraisal; so I sought to be as nondescript as possible. I did not want to be beautiful if it meant I must be present. Moreover, if I didn’t assert myself, didn’t care, I would not be forced to acknowledge myself as a creature of such bile. My grandmother was correct. I was a mess, churning with anger and desire and loneliness; a mess of untamed feelings, unacceptable. I wished to be invisible, for invisibility was the closest thing to peace that I could imagine.
Still, I was curious to know what Hao Ling Fashi thought. Enlarged by the enormous glasses, his calm eyes gave little away. When he spoke, it was with something like surprise.
“Xiong!” He spoke the word emphatically. “Xiong,” he repeated. I can almost recall him shaking a finger as he spoke. It was a word I knew. It meant, I knew, “fierce.” I liked that word in English; it conjured up a vision of tigers and other charismatic predators.
He peered at my palm and tapped it. “Fa cai,” he said. So what? I thought. So I would be rich. I had never wanted money.
Then Hao Ling Fashi turned to my grandmother and spoke for several minutes in their rapid-fire dialect.
Later Waipuo told my mother what he had said. But when I questioned my mother, I could only pry from her a few vague pieces of information. She said I would have power and fame, but that my luck would not be steady. I would marry late, she added, frowning. I asked her about Tina, but she wouldn’t respond. “She has peach blossom luck,” she finally said, but refused to clarify what that meant. I asked every native speaker I knew until I managed to compose a working definition. A person with peach blossom luck is someone too much desired. That’s all I was able to discern.
Using a Chinese dictionary, I also learned the connotations of the character xiong. “Fierce.” “Inauspicious, ominous.” A xiong year meant crops would fail, famine would come. A xiong person was terrible, fearful; and as a noun, the word meant an act of violence.
“He never said that,” my parents told me, when I asked them about xiong. “He never used that word for you.” But I heard him say it. In fact, it pleased me. Whatever Hao Ling Fashi meant, he did not make light of me. He had seen something in my formless self, something to be reckoned with.
They say the people of the east believe in passivity and fate, and westerners in independence and free will. But I believe it was at the moment of my first contact with Buddhism that I began to see myself as a person who would make her own future, separate from my family, a thing unto myself. I who had lived under Waipuo’s skeptical gaze would someday escape this gaze. I would become a woman of force; I would emerge, perhaps darkly, perhaps more fiercely than anyone wanted. The pain of always trying to follow a set of invisible rules would disappear; it would be lost. I would be free.
Leaving the temple, walking with my grandmother and sister, yet newly separate from them, I felt ravenous.
We ate our lunch in a nearby restaurant, wedged into a tiny booth.
It was the last meal I can remember eaten together by the three of us. It was my first meal as a fledgling self. Now I think of this lunch often; it is one of the most vibrant feasts in my memory. In the center of the colorful, odorous restaurant, my grandmother, sister, and I sit together in a booth. Next to me, Tina takes out her notebook about Buddhism. Tina is twenty-one years old; her smooth brown features are demure and her thick hair falls to the middle of her back. Tina, who will be too much desired. She will be engaged the following year. In six years, she will be divorced, and in two more, remarried.
Aecross from Tina and me, my grandmother works her chopsticks. She who has been such a creature of the world is now learning to say no to it. With this plain meal she takes one more step along a path she started in her twenties, when she chopped off her own luxurious hair in the interests of modernism. She gave up wearing colors; she gave up China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Now she is an old woman living with her children, a vegetarian whose donations to the temple come from the government. In six years she will die of a cerebral hemorrhage, the swift, easy death she prayed for.
While my grandmother and sister chat, I am busy eating. I’m nineteen years old, and I have just said yes to the world. My mind is bright with focus and with unsatisfied hunger. My mutinous passivity shields ambition and desire. Soon I will defy my parents and abandon a more stable job to pursue the life of a novelist. I will move twelve times in fifteen years. I will not marry until the age of thirty-nine, and only then will I begin to recognize how dangerous it is to want things. We never recover from our desires, and must at last wean ourselves away from them, patiently, as my grandmother did.
But I don’t know that at this lunch. I am eating, feeding my worldly ambition on the food of monks, the exquisite pure dishes of those who have renounced the world. There are vegetable dumplings in translucent, almost bursting skins, including tiny bits of carrot for the pleasure of their color. Dumplings delicate and savory, each flavor a surprise. There are ribbons of pressed tofu wrapped around savory mushrooms; there are delicious wilted pea leaves of a deep and vibrant green. Everything is simple, everything complex. As I taste these plain dishes more vividly than I have tasted anything before, I understand that there is richness even in plainness, a vividness as marvelous as anything to be found.