For thirty-five years, everyone supported Leo Chao’s restaurant. Introducing choosy newcomers by showing off some real Chinese food in Haven, Wisconsin. Bringing children, parents, grandparents not wanting to dine out with the Americans, not wanting to think about which fork to use. You could say the manifold tensions of life in the new country—the focus on the future, tracking incremental gains and losses—were relieved by the Fine Chao. Sitting down under the dusty red lanterns, gazing at Leo’s latest calendar with the limp-haired Taiwanese sylphs that Winnie hated so much, waiting for supper, everyone felt calm. In dark times, when you’re feeling homesick or defeated, there is really nothing like a good, steaming soup, and dumplings made from scratch.
Winnie and Big Leo Chao were serving scallion pancakes decades before you could find them outside of a home kitchen. Leo, thirty-five years ago, winning his first poker game against the owners of a local poultry farm, exchanged his chips for birds that Winnie transformed into the shining, chestnut-colored duck dishes of far-off cities. Dear Winnie, rolling out her bing the homemade way, two pats of dough together with a seal of oil in between, letting them rise to a steaming bubble in the piping pan. Leo, bargaining for hard-to-get ingredients; Winnie subbing wax beans for yard-long beans, plus home-growing the garlic greens, chives,4 and hot peppers you used to never find in Haven. Their garden giving off a glorious smell.
You could say the community ate its way through the Chao family’s distress. Not caring whether Winnie was happy, whether Big Chao was an honest man. Everyone took in the food on one side of their mouths, and from the other side they extolled the parents for their sons’ accomplishments. Heaping praise upon the three boys who grew up all bright and ambitious, who earned scholarships to good colleges. Commending them for leaving the Midwest. Yet everyone was thankful when the oldest, Dagou Chao, returned to Haven. Dagou coming home to his mother, moving into the apartment over the restaurant, working there six days a week. Dagou, the most passionate cook in the family. Despite the trouble between Winnie and Big Chao, everyone assumed the business would be handed down fairly, peacefully, father to son.
Now, a year after the shame, the intemperate and scandalous events that began on a winter evening in Union Station, the community defends its thirty-five-year indifference to the Chao family’s troubles by saying, No one could have believed that such good food was cooked by a bad person.