The Kitchen God's Wife

  But then her eyebrows drew close, her face became dark as clouds. “This kind of thinking—I don’t understand,” she said.

  So I explained again: “We must have concern for the whole situation, not just our own husbands. Something worse could still be coming.”

  “Ai-ya! Daomei!” she cried, and covered her mouth. “How can you use these kinds of bad-luck words to poison everyone’s future?”

  “They are not bad-luck words,” I insisted. “I am only saying we must be practical. This is wartime. We must feel with our hearts, but also think with our minds—clearly all the time. If we pretend the dangers are not there, how can we avoid them?”

  But Hulan was no longer listening to me. She was crying and shouting. “I’ve never heard such poisonous words! What use is it to think this way, to use bad thoughts to attract only bad things?”

  On and on she went, like a crazy woman. Now that I remember it, that was when our friendship took on four splits and five cracks. Hulan did it, broke harmony between us. I tell you, that day Hulan showed me her true character. She was not the soft melonhead she made everyone believe she was. That girl could throw out sharp words, slicing fast as any knife.

  “You are saying tragedy will come to us too. You are saying a husband can still die,” she shouted. “Why can’t you be happy, holding onto what you have now?”

  Can you imagine? She was accusing me in front of everyone! Throwing out a question that was looking only for a wrong answer. Making it seem as if I were the one who had said something bad.

  “I did not say this,” I answered right away.

  “You are always wishing for the worst.”

  Again these lies! “No such meaning,” I said. “Practical is not the same as bad-luck thinking.”

  “If there are five ways to see something,” she said—and here she fanned out the fingers on one hand, then pulled up her thumb as if it were a rotten turnip—“you always pick the worst.”

  “No such thing. I am saying our own happiness is not enough during a war. It is nothing. It cannot stop the war.” I was so angry I could no longer understand what I was saying.

  “Chiang Kai-shek says he can stop the war,” she was shouting. “You think your thoughts are stronger than Chiang Kai-shek’s?”

  Hulan and the other two women were staring at me. Not one of those women stepped forward to stop our fight. They did not say, “Sisters, sisters, you are both right. You only misunderstand each other.” And I could see Hulan’s strong words had already damaged their thinking, left big holes where understanding could drain out. No wonder they could not see how ridiculous Hulan’s arguments were.

  So I said, “Suanle!”—Forget this! And I left them to go to my room.

  Remembering this, I still get mad. And that’s because she has not changed. You can see this. She twists things around to her way of thinking. If something is bad, she makes it sound good. If something is good, she makes it sound bad. She contradicts everything I say. She makes me seem like the one who is always wrong. And then I have to argue with myself to know what is really true.

  Anyway, after that fight, I was so mad I could only sit on my bed, thinking about Hulan’s mocking words. I told myself she was the one who always said foolish things. She was the one people laughed at behind her back. And when I no longer wanted to hear her words in my head, I searched for something to do. I opened a drawer and took out some cloth given to me by New Aunt, a bolt of cotton made by one of our family’s factories.

  It was a pale green fabric covered with small gold circles, very light cotton, suitable for a summer dress. I had already thought up a pattern in my mind, fashioned it from my memory, a dress I had seen in Shanghai, worn by a carefree girl.

  So with this picture in my head, I began to cut my cloth. I imagined myself as this girl floating by in a green dress, all her friends admiring her, whispering to themselves that her clothes were as fine as her manners. But then I saw Hulan criticizing the dress, saying in her too loud voice, “Too fancy to wear after a husband has just died.”

  Right away I made a mistake—cut a sleeve hole too big—that’s how mad I still was. Look what she did! Affected my concentration. Worse!—twisted my thinking and put a very bad thought into my head.

  Such a bad thought, a thought I never could have imagined on my own, never. But now it had jumped out and I was chasing it. I was imagining a time, not too far away, when Hulan would say to me, “Sorry, your husband was killed. Bad fate that he fell from the sky.”

  “Oh, no,” I said to myself. “Goddess of Mercy, never let him die.”

  But the more I tried to push this thought out of my mind, the more it fought to stay. “He’s dead,” Hulan would say. She would probably smile when she told me this. And I would be angry and shouting like the stuck-up girl who had just lost her husband.

  And then I thought: Maybe I should cry and look sad instead, lamenting about my fatherless child. Yes, that was more proper.

  The next moment, my thoughts ran in another direction: Would I have to return to the island and live with Old Aunt and New Aunt? Perhaps not, not if I married someone new. And then I decided, Next time I will choose my own husband.

  I stopped sewing. What was I thinking? That’s when I realized that I truly was wishing Wen Fu might die. I wasn’t thinking this because I hated him. I didn’t. That was later, when he became much worse.

  But that night, in my room, in my mind, I was arguing with Hulan, with myself: Sometimes a girl makes a mistake. Sometimes a mistake can be changed. A war could change it, and it would be nobody’s fault, one unlucky thing exchanged for another. This could still happen.

  And so I finished making that dress. I cut the loose threads. I drew the dress over my head. But by then, my belly and breasts had already begun to swell from the baby. I put only one arm in before I realized: I was stuck.

  Oh, you think this was funny? Stuck in my dress, stuck in my marriage, stuck with Hulan as my friend. Sometimes I wonder why she’s still my friend, how it is that we can do a business together.

  Maybe it’s because we fought so much in those early days. Maybe it’s because we had no one else to turn to. So we always had to find reasons to be friends. Maybe those reasons are still there.

  In any case, this is what happened after that big argument.

  A few days later, the air force told us they would soon send us to Yangchow, where we would be reunited with our husbands.

  We heard this news at breakfast and we were suspicious. We were thinking the bombs would soon start falling where we were sitting.

  “A big danger must be coming here,” I said. “That’s why they are sending us away.”

  One of the other women, Lijun, said, “Then we should leave right away. Why must we delay two more days?”

  And the other woman, Meili, said, “Why Yangchow? Bombs can fall there too.”

  “It must be that Yangchow is not a good place,” I said, thinking aloud, “a city the Japanese would never want, so it will always be safe.” You see how I was thinking in a logical way? I was not saying I did not like Yangchow. How could I? I had never seen it.

  Right away Hulan contradicted me. “I heard Yangchow is very pretty, lots to see,” she said, “famous for beautiful women and good-tasting noodles.”

  I already knew I would not see such women. I would not taste such noodles. “I am not saying it is not a pretty city,” I explained carefully, “I am only saying it is not a good city for the Japanese. What Japanese want and what Chinese want are not the same thing.”

  So we left for Yangchow at the end of summer, only a few weeks after the war began. And we went by boat, because by then many roads and railways were already blocked. And when we arrived I saw that city was just as I had imagined it, a place the Japanese would never want.

  Our new home was only one half-day northwest of Shanghai, the best city in the world, very modern. Yet Yangchow was completely different—an old-style place with no tall buildings, only one story for ho
uses, maybe two stories only for more important buildings. Who knows why Du Fu and the old poets wrote about this place? To me, the city seemed to be made entirely out of dirt and mud. Under my two feet, it was dirt streets, dirt courtyards, dirt floors. Above, it was mud-brick walls, mud-tile roofs.

  The air force found us a place just like that, mud and dirt, divided into four living quarters, two rooms each, and a shared kitchen with four old-fashioned coal stoves. When we first saw this, we were all shocked.

  “This is wartime,” I finally said to the others. “We all have to make sacrifices.” Lijun and Meili immediately nodded and agreed. Hulan turned her face.

  And then she began inspecting everything, criticizing what she saw. She poked her finger into a crumbling part of the wall. “Ai!” She pointed to another wall, where bugs were marching through a crack of sunlight. “Ai!” She stamped her feet on the floor: “Wah! Look how the dust rises up from the floor and chases my footsteps.”

  I was looking. We were all looking. I wanted to shout, “You see how she is. She’s the complaining one, not I.” But I saw I did not have to say one word. Meili, Lijun, they could see for themselves how Hulan was.

  That afternoon a cook girl and a manservant also arrived. The air force provided only one of each, so we had to share. The cook was a local girl, very young, with a big, happy face. Her job was to keep the coal stoves burning at the right times throughout the day, to wash and chop the vegetables, to kill the chickens and gut the fish, to clean up everything before it began to stink.

  The manservant belonged to the air force, a middle-aged man we called the chin wubing, which is the common word for a common soldier, the kind who fights only with broomsticks, only against flies. He was a small, thin man who looked as if his arms and legs would break if he carried anything too heavy. He was also a little crazy. When he worked, he often talked to himself, imagining himself to be a high-ranking officer who had been given bad orders: “Beat this bed cover! Wash this spot out!”

  That’s how I found out Hulan had ordered the chin wubing to mix six egg whites into a bucket of mud.

  “Plucked this strange recipe from the air,” I heard him say to himself. “That’s what I think. Paint this sauce on the floor, she tells me. A wind is blowing through her brain! Thinks she is going to eat her floor. Thinks it looks like a big delicious pancake. Ha!”

  I told Lijun and Meili what the chin wubing had said. I had to. What if Hulan was so crazy she decided to burn the house down? The other women also had strange facts to report over the next few days. Hulan had ordered the chin wubing to spill this egg soup on her floor every day for three days. And when the soup had cooked dry, she told him to spill some more. Worse, she made him cook a sticky porridge of rice and mud.

  “Threw it on her wall. Said it was cooked just right,” he said. And we all clucked our tongues. Poor Hulan.

  But a few days later, the chin wubing said nothing. He did his chores quietly, complaining only about a shopkeeper who had cheated him, had sold him a roast duck so bloated with air the moment he went to cut its skin, the duck burst and shrank to half its size.

  “Do not worry about the duck,” I said. “This is not your fault.” And because I could no longer keep my curiosity inside, I said, “Better than drinking mud soup, hanh?”

  The chin wubing frowned at me. “Sorry, tai-tai,” he said carefully. “I am not hearing well today.”

  I nodded toward Hulan’s side of the house. “The mud soup she made,” I said. “Probably it’s not very good-tasting, hanh?”

  “I’m sorry, tai-tai,” he said again. “Today my ears are not opening the way to my brain.”

  So I had to find an excuse to visit Hulan, to see for myself how she had become crazy. I plucked my best embroidery needle from my basket.

  “Is this your needle?” I said when she came to her door. “I found it on my floor, and now I am not sure if it is mine.” And as Hulan stared at that needle, I saw what she had done with her egg mixture, her mud soup. Her floors had baked shiny-hard like porcelain, so no dust rose up. And her walls that once had been crumbly like ours—they were smooth and clean with new mud, not one insect marching across.

  As I stared at this change, Hulan announced, “You’re right. This is my needle. I’ve been looking for this same one for many days.”

  Later that afternoon, Hulan helped me fix my floors, my walls. I let her patch things between us that way: fix one thing so you can fix another. She knew I would let her do this. Because she took that needle, and we both knew it was mine.

  I don’t know why I am talking so much about Helen. This is not a story about her, although she is the reason why I have to tell you my story. If she told you this story, she might say I did not try hard enough to have a good marriage. Let me tell you, I tried.

  Like that time in Yangchow. A week or two after we arrived, our husbands returned home, and I cooked Wen Fu a big celebration dinner. And not dinner just for him but for his pilot friends too, five or six men from the second and third class.

  Those men liked Wen Fu for his generosity, the way he said, “Come to my place! Eat all you want!” He invited them over, and also Jiaguo. So of course, I invited Hulan, also Lijun and Meili, as well as their husbands. All together, I made dinner for fourteen people. Hulan offered to help me shop and cook. And with so much to do, I protested only a little, before agreeing I could use her extra hands.

  It was my dowry money that bought all that food, the money my father gave me on my wedding day. No, Wen Fu’s family had not taken that away from me, not yet. My father was smart. He deposited the money in a Shanghai bank under my name, four thousand yuan, Chinese dollars. And I had pulled out two hundred after my wedding. In Yangchow I still had maybe one hundred left.

  Wen Fu earned seventy Chinese dollars a month. That was a good salary, maybe twice as much as what a schoolteacher could earn. But Wen Fu used his money only for foolish things—to buy whiskey, to play mah jong, to bet that the weather would change when he said it would.

  So I used my dowry money to buy the furniture we needed as we moved from place to place. I didn’t have to. I used my money to buy food better than what the air force provided. I didn’t have to. And for dinner that night I bought good pork, fresh clover for dumplings, many catties of sweet wine, all very expensive during wartime, over fifty yuan.

  I didn’t mind spending this money. As I bought this good food, I was thinking about those men, all the pilots, also Wen Fu. If their luck blew down, those men might not return for the next meal. And with that sad thought, my hand would hurry and reach for a thicker piece of pork, one with lots of good, rich fat.

  And then I decided also to include a few dishes with names that sounded lucky. These were dishes I remembered Old Aunt had cooked during the New Year—sun-dried oysters for wealth; a fast-cooked shrimp for laughter and happiness; fatsai, the black-hair fungus that soaks up good fortune; and plenty of jellyfish, because the crunchy skin always made a lively sound to my ears.

  Hulan saw me choose these things. Her mouth was watering as I picked out my ingredients. I don’t think she had ever eaten food so fine.

  Back home, I told the cook girl to boil enough pots of water and to chop enough pork and vegetables to make a thousand dumplings, both steamed and boiled, with plenty of fresh ginger, good soy sauce, and sweet vinegar for dipping. Hulan helped me knead the flour and roll out the dough into small circles.

  I admit I was at first impressed by her cooking skills. She worked fast, pushing hard against her rolling stick. She was able to roll out three skins for every two that I made. And she always grabbed just the right amount of meat filling to dab in the middle of the skin, never having to add a little more or take a little off. With one pinch, she closed the dumpling off.

  And I also admit I enjoyed Hulan’s company during that afternoon. We were both happy. The pilots had returned. Everyone was excited. We all had smiles to give out. So on that day, Hulan and I did not criticize each other. We did not com
plain about others.

  We did not have to be careful to make only polite conversation. All our words naturally spilled out from our good thoughts.

  I told Hulan, “Look how fast you work. With your hands, we could make ten thousand dumplings if we wanted, no problem.” Of course, I found out later that she was good at only those kinds of laborious cooking tasks: kneading, rolling, stuffing, pinching. As to her sense of taste and smell, I can only say my opinion may not be the same as others’.

  Although maybe you can tell me. Be honest. Who is the better cook? You see! I am not boasting. It’s true. I know how much soy sauce to put on a meat dish, so that a salty taste does not become a salty flavor. I know never to add more than a pinch of sugar; anything more and you may as well be eating Cantonese food. I know how to make each dish delicate-tasting, yet the flavor is clearly distinguished from other dishes—not everything bland or everything hot as the same roaring fire.

  And others would tell you the same thing, if they were here today. The pilots, for instance, even Hulan’s husband, they all praised my cooking that night, told Wen Fu how lucky he was. They said it was impossible that a man could have both a beautiful wife and a talented cook—yet their eyes and tongue told them differently. I watched them eat, encouraged them to eat more, teased that I would be in trouble with my husband if more than ten dumplings were left over. At the end of the meal—just four left! What a good dinner that was.

  I cooked many other dinners like that. Whenever Wen Fu and the pilots returned home after many days’ absence, they always wanted to eat my dumplings first thing—steamed, water-cooked, or fried—they always thought they were delicious.

  In those days in China, it didn’t matter what part of the country you came from. Everyone knew how to eat and play together. You found any kind of excuse to live life as full as your stomach could hold. And in those days, I was still trying to please Wen Fu, to act like a good wife, also trying hard to find my own happiness. I was always ready to cook a good meal, even though the men usually returned home without telling me ahead of time—and sometimes, with fewer pilots.