The Last Chinese Chef by Nicole Mones

Author:Nicole Mones
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Fiction - General, General, Romance, Literary, Americans, American Contemporary Fiction - Individual Authors +, Food writers, Fiction, Non-Classifiable, Cookery
ISBN: 9780547053738
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2008-04-22T07:00:00+00:00

Down in the kitchen Maggie and Sam found the four Xie children, all in their forties, all with the crosscut Xie cheekbones of the patriarch. None of them looked like the delicate, narrow-faced mother, not even the son. Sam introduced them: Songling, the oldest, Songan and Songzhe, the other two girls, and Songzhao, the son.

Sam had told her they spoke a bit of English, but she didn’t hear any. All were talking in Chinese at once. Cornucopia-stuffed string bags of food spilled onto the counters. Gourds and herbs and cabbages and all manner of flowering chives were spread out, tubs of rosy-fresh roe, a great live fish slapping in a plastic bucket, and two live chickens, caged.

“These you’re going to kill?” said Maggie.

“Not in here,” he said. “There’s a place outside the kitchen door for that. Don’t worry. It won’t be when you’re around.”

“Give me some warning. I’ll take a walk.”

“Come to think of it, maybe you should watch.” The thought made him smile. “You’re in China. Actually, Maggie, the sisters have a plan for you, if you like. They’re all going to get a massage. They want you to go with them.”

“A massage?” she said.

“They always do this together when they come home.” He was making separate piles of the vegetables, the sliced-in-place pads of fresh pasta, the eggs.

“Women shunbian qu,” one of the sisters offered.

“They’re going anyway,” he translated.

“To a massage parlor?” she said.

He laughed. “It’s not that kind. Oh, there are those here too, believe me — just not this place.”

“I wondered,” she said. “I saw girls in Beijing.”

“Wonder no longer,” Sam told her. “It’s everywhere.” Indeed, prostitution had sprung back to life alongside the restaurant business in the 1990s. It took all forms and went through every kind of channel, one of them being massage establishments whose true purpose was immediately made obvious by low lights, bed-furnished cubicles, and so-called masseuses clad in skintight gowns slit to their pale hipbones.

In the dim lights, the girls who worked there were usually pretty. By Western standards they were inexpensive, too. Added to that was the fact that prostitution here was not hidden away in secret, seedy places the way it was in the West. It was forthright, visible. Sexual services in token guises were openly offered in the best hotels and business centers. Outcall services supplied whatever was desired in more private settings. At the highest caste level were all the women who were kept in apartments and on retainers for their sexual services: contract mistresses. If what you wanted was paid sex — and Sam didn’t, personally, not because he was ashamed but because for him paying seemed to knock the whole point out of it — then China was a great place to be. Plenty of Chinese men were into it. Some laowai men too, though they mostly stuck to the bar-girls and masseuses.

“I won’t lie to you,” he said to Maggie now. “Massage parlors of that kind are everywhere. Very big here, with Chinese and with foreigners too.

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