Mr. Pan by Emily Hahn

Author:Emily Hahn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 1941-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

Jade and Gentlemen

THE HAPPY PEACE of my home, the envy of everyone in Shanghai, had vanished. It was my own fault for tempting the Fates, I told myself bitterly, and for enjoying any private peace in that war-harried city. It was true that my cook, Chin Lien, was the very best cook in the world, but I should not have boasted about him. He was an old man from Peiping who had appointed himself my Grandfather Extraordinary, listening at the door with an approving smile on his face when I took my Chinese lessons, and giving me much too much good food. He never falsified accounts. He loved big parties. He kept everything very clean, and when there was no more work he retired to the kitchen to smoke the cigarette stubs he collected from the living room and went to sleep. He was severe with me only when I was lazy and addressed him in English, or when I spent what he considered too much on liquor. My foreign friends raved about him, and my Chinese friends said that I was in rare luck, and I agreed happily with all of them. So it came as a bad shock when I began to lose things.

I missed money first, and then a jade ring. It was the ring which made me realize that something must be done. Now, I am a very bad housekeeper, and that is why the capable Chin Lien was so valuable to me and why I hired his wife, too, as a wash-amah to keep him company. I am no landed aristocrat, and in a city where servants cost thirty Mexican dollars a month I was overstaffed with Chin Lien and the amah. I had no coolie, chauffeur, or houseboy who might pick up a stray bit of jewelry; there were only Chin Lien and his wife. For all his good food and his Chinese lessons and his honesty with the grocer it looked very much as if Chin Lien, or his wife, which amounted to the same thing, had been stealing. It was a mess.

I worried about the matter for several hours, gloomily surveying a future without Chin Lien. Before the chance which sent him to me I had lived at the mercy of a cook so incredibly awful that only I would have kept him a day, and I blush to admit that he victimized me for a year. Then he left town, probably at the request of the police, and Chin Lien came to me, set at liberty by a quarrel with his English employer. He did have a rotten temper, but we got along. He was an artist; he demanded appreciation, and with me he found it. As my friends devoured his puddings and roasts, loudly chanting his praises, his temper naturally improved. Sometimes it became embarrassingly evident that Chin Lien preferred my gentlemen callers to me, especially the Chinese ones. Upon the appearance of Pan Heh-ven he would produce from nowhere an elaborate cake or some delicacy that I didn’t know we had in the house.

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