My sister and I once stood behind two glass windows in a stationery store secretly watching (and listening to) our father deliver a lecture. I was so absorbed in listening that I almost forgot it was my father. You know, when someone is talking to one or two people it is always different from when they’re speaking to a whole crowd of people—and when my father spoke before an audience it was indeed enchanting. He became gentle and humorous, more sincere and modest than he was at any other time. I don’t suspect that he was pretending, I just think that with a whole audience listening intently it is much easier for the speaker to lean toward virtue and moral righteousness. “I came pretty damn close to being moved by him,” my sister whispered as a gleam sparkled from the corner of her eye.
Within our little three-generation family, listening intently and even being moved were both common, unremarkable matters. During family gatherings, Grandpa would often give lectures in which he used life experiences to corroborate the truths written in the Bible. The date of his lecture would always be set one month in advance. Grandma would notify my parents by telephone, and sometimes she would even exhort my sister and me, “Don’t forget to remind your mom and dad.” In order for the whole family to fully appreciate the wisdom of the Bible and be appropriately moved by Grandpa’s life experience, Grandma would always hit the kitchen after the speech. She would whip up a table full of magnificent vegetable and meat dishes, enough to stuff the entire family. We never admitted it, but Grandma’s cooking was the only reason we attended the lectures. If Grandpa had found out, he would have had a heart attack.
And just what was it that Grandpa was lecturing about? Even after all those years, I can barely remember. All I can recall is Grandma’s cooking, which was always unforgettable. Actually, because of this, I developed a strange disorder: any time I heard an animated harangue, my stomach would begin to grumble and growl as if there were a small snake wildly slithering around inside. As the slithering intensified, my waist and back would sometimes even go numb, and then a notion that moves one’s flesh incessantly would clearly appear in my mind—I was hungry. I’m not exaggerating at all: any time I saw the commentary on the evening news, analysis of a ball game, or roundtable political debates, or heard the lecture of some writer who was preparing to shave his head and become a monk, my stomach would rumble with hunger. My sister knew about my disorder—she had the same problem. Just as my sister was getting close to being touched by Dad’s lecture, I was thinking of one of Grandma’s dim sum specialties: Fried Rose Petal Paste. She was thinking of Grandma’s Lotus Cakes.
How come Grandma never wrote a cookbook? My sister and I have been puzzled by this question ever since childhood. Perhaps the answer has something to do with the fact that Grandma is illiterate. This, however, cannot completely explain away the regret Mom, Dad, and even my sister and I felt that Grandma never passed on her cooking skills to us. The valiant attempt on the part of my sister and me to make a record of Grandma’s cooking with a V-8 video camera and a notebook ended in failure.
That dish of Fried Rose Petal Paste was a typical example. The first image of the run-down juancun that I recorded on tape was of the wooden poles, bamboo fence posts, and asbestos shingles that together composed the torrid kitchen. It was at that second that my sister’s narration erupted: “Grandma’s Cookbook, Chapter 1, Fried Rose Petal Paste.”
Covering her face with her hands, Grandma said smilingly, “Cut it out, it’s time to cook.”
“Excuse me, Grandma, what are the ingredients used in Fried Rose Petal Paste? And what about the amounts for each ingredient?”
The camera shook terribly as the shot panned closer to the kitchen, but you could still make out the handful of eggs, bowl of wheat flour, pot half-filled with water, and porcelain plate covered with a pile of powder shaped like a small mountain (I later learned that the powder was cooking starch) on the Japanese-style wooden counter. In Grandma’s hands were a can of white powder and a bag of sesame seeds. She bashfully turned her back to the camera, saying, “This is the stuff right here!” As she spoke, she put down the can of sugar and bag of sesame seeds and grabbed an empty bowl with her free hand. Crack, crack, crack into the bowl went three eggs, and she used a set of chopsticks to scramble them, adding in the wheat flour. She ladled in two (maybe three) spoonfuls of water while the other hand added a pinch of cooking starch, and then continued to mix the ingredients at lightning speed with her chopsticks.
“How about the amounts?” my sister’s narration continued from somewhere off camera. “How much wheat flour do you add? How much water? And what is that?”
“Dried cooking starch,” Grandma answered as she slid an empty wok onto the gas stove. After heating it up for a second, she suddenly threw in that bowl of egg-wheat flour paste and inverting her mixing spoon, used the handle to scramble the mixture.
My camera lens chaotically shook back and forth as I tried to avoid the lampblack emitted from the stovetop. Amid the hazy smoke all I saw was Grandma scooping up what appeared to be a lump of lard from another porcelain dish and holding it above the wok, letting the melting lard dribble in over the heat. She then fished the cooked paste out of the wok and slid the whole thing onto a porcelain plate.
“After it cools down you slice it and then fry it. As you fry it you cool it off by adding the syrup. Add some sesame seeds and rose petals and you’re done.” Only then did Grandma turn to directly face the camera. “What’s there worth taping here?”
“But you still haven’t told us how much of each ingredient you used,” my sister objected loudly.
“If there are a lot of people you cook a bit extra, when you’ve got less people, you cook less. Just as long as you don’t waste any food you’ll be fine.” Facing the camera, Grandma exposed her gold front tooth—this was her conclusion.
During the recording of chapter 8 or 9 of “Grandma’s Cookbook,” the V-8 video camera expired. With a puzzled tone, the repairman I hired asked, “What the hell did you do to your video camera to make it look like a kitchen ventilator fan?”
My kid sister, however, began to feel an overwhelming sorrow for Grandma. “She has absolutely no idea just what she is doing!” my sister exclaimed. What she meant was that Grandma did not understand just how magnificent a feat it was to be able to prepare three meals a day (in all, she prepared over 43,000 meals over the years) in that ragged, worn-down kitchen.
The reason most women my grandmother’s age never became famous chefs was not that their cooking wasn’t up to par, but that they never had the opportunity to describe what they were cooking and how they did it. They had lost the ability to tell stories.
“That isn’t how you are supposed to use it.” That is what the technician who was repairing the V-8 camera said to the absent-minded duo, my sister and me. That was on a weekend afternoon during the late autumn or early winter of 1991—at the time I was an instructor at an officer school and my sister had just begun her junior year in high school. On several occasions afterward we would remember that we had a V-8 video camera that we still hadn’t picked up. It was stuck in the warehouse of the repair department of some electronics store, probably covered with dust—or maybe a considerate repairman had wrapped it in a plastic bag. Then again, by now they had probably resold it. Anyway, no matter what the case, my sister and I would always simply say, “I’ll go when I have time.” Just like we used to say about “going to visit Grandma.” For the majority of the time, we were telling stories while listening intently to our own voices. It was as if by doing this we were able to complete or live out something.
What kept my sister and me from going to pick up the video camera was the person in our family who also frequently played the role of the intent listener: my mother.
As the curtain lowered on my father’s painting exhibition, the night before he delivered his speech of appreciation, Mom finally broke down—beforehand there wasn’t even the slightest forewarning. At the time, she was alone in her room beside a small lamp, going through the thousands of articles she herself had cut out, pasted together, and bound for Dad. My sister burst into my study (which used to be my father’s study) to tell me that the V-8 didn’t work. To my sister and me, this was an incident of the most serious nature. Originally we had had everything all worked out: we were going to wait until the concluding day of Dad’s painting exhibition to begin carrying out our plan. First we would lie low, hiding out in the stationery store across from the gallery; then when the time came we would rush out, pass through the glossy, mirrorlike hallway, and then push our way through the crowd at the gallery. After that, my kid sister would walk up to the podium and, taking advantage of my father’s state of happy astonishment, she would grab hold of the microphone and unleash a shocking denunciation. In front of the audience, we wanted to show how his artistic attainments in the realm of painting were no less genius than his talent for torturing our mother. My sister even planned to “tell him something that would haunt him for the rest of his life.” And me, I would be standing quietly off to one side recording everything on my V-8 video camera.
But it suddenly broke. The power button didn’t work, so all you saw through the viewer was complete darkness and none of the indicator lights lit up. We tried two different batteries but it was to no avail.
Then, me carrying the V-8 with both hands, we knocked open Mom’s bedroom door. In the darkness of the room, Mom’s eyes sparkled in the ray of light that came in. My sister murmured, “Why is it so dark in here?” As she spoke, she switched on the ceiling light. My mother’s robust body was spread out on the bed, partially leaning against the headboard, with a towel covering her stomach and thighs. Over one hundred albums containing cutouts of Dad’s articles littered the bed and covered her towel—this was a scene we had grown quite accustomed to. We even knew that after Dad was promoted to a “deputy position” and no longer wrote journalistic articles, Mom still quietly and carefully carried out her job of cutting and pasting, just like always. She collected any article that she felt should have been written by Dad and pasted them in that leather-bound album with bronze gilded characters. Some of the articles were editorials from different papers, short stories and novels by famous writers, essays introducing new breakthroughs in medical science, reports of major traffic accidents and natural disasters, and a whole bunch of movie advertisements. My little sister even discovered an autobiographical essay by the wife of the last president of the Soviet Union, Raisa Gorbachev.
At first, Mom just asked with indifference, “Now what do you want? I’m busy.”
It was exactly at that moment that she discovered the V-8 video camera in my hands. Immediately her face turned white. Her hands began to tremble and she pushed away the albums and covered her face with the towel. Timidly, her voice shaking, she said, “Don’t tape me! Stop recording! I don’t want to be recorded!” As she spoke, she grabbed one of the albums and held it before her face, adding another layer to separate her from the camera.
“We are just looking for a screwdriver,” my sister said. “Just looking for a screwdriver.”
“Stop recording!” my mother screamed, resolutely shaking her towel-covered head behind the scrapbook.
“Mom, we’re not recording. The camera is broken,” I said.
“I’m sick, don’t videotape me. I’m really sick—if you don’t believe me ask your pop. You can’t tape me.”
She meant to say “pop” but what actually came out was “poop.” Many, many years before, my sister and I used to call Dad “Poop.” Grandma was against us calling him that—she thought that “Poop” sounded too much like dog poop. In front of my parents I always called him Poop and I never felt that there was anything scornful or sarcastic about it. Even though my father was indeed quite dog-shitlike in character, for my mother it was as if he were the only soul in the world that she could rely upon. After Dad had Mom sign the divorce papers, it is quite possible that he sighed when he ran into his friends and explained to them how he had raised my sister and me to adulthood and now all his responsibilities were fulfilled. But actually he chose the perfect time to abandon the family—because it was just around this time that Mom began to utilize the phrase, “If you don’t believe me, ask your father,” any time she ran into trouble.
Right now I don’t want to tell you just how my father designed my mother’s illness—but since I’ve already mentioned it, I can only give you the simplest of explanations. This is because while “listening intently,” I painfully discovered how terrifying an ability “storytelling” can be. It can make the true nature of events clear or hazy, stronger or weaker; it can make them right or make them wrong.
This is the reason my sister came so close to being moved by my father’s speech. A glimmer emerged from the corner of her eye and she held my hand. At the time I wasn’t holding the V-8 camera. It didn’t work. It broke down on the same day as my mother.
