Over the years, American-style Chinese food has slithered to bottom of my list of preferred cuisines on a trail of sesame oil. I’ve found that applied avoidance of Chinese restaurants is a necessary precaution to avoid the hours of queasy digestive rebuking that can result from eating batter-fried protein, greasy carbohydrates, and limp vegetables swimming in sweet-n-sour-n-salty sauces.
Yet I’ve always assumed that genuine Chinese cuisine must be quite tasty and sophisticated, on the childlike logic that China is a big country with a long history and a lot of people. So I was intrigued by The Last Chinese Chef by Nicole Mones (author of Lost in Translation), which promised on the back cover to “unlock the deepest mysteries of legendary Chinese culinary arts to produce a feast for the human heart”.
The plot is as tidy and convenient as tightly-wound spring roll: Maggie, a 40-ish American widow and food writer, travels to Beijing to deal with a paternity suit involving her late husband. A magazine editor suggests that, while she’s there, Maggie should write about an up-and-coming Jewish-American/Chinese chef named Sam Liang, who cooks in the tradition of his grandfather, a renowned chef of the Forbidden City. While Sam prepares for a national cooking contest, he explains the intricacies of Chinese cuisine to Maggie, like how some cuisine evolved with poetry because poets often collaborated over meals, why fat is considered a delicacy, and how texture can sometimes trump taste.
Owing to several sub-plots, Sam and Maggie forge a bond. Maggie, who is dealing with the hurtful paternity suit, finds great comfort from, um, eating Sam Liang’s chicken, as shown in this excerpt that typifies much of the book’s language and style: She plucked a morsel from the side of the bird, low on the breast where the moistness of the thigh came in, and tasted it. It was as soft as velvet, chicken times three, shot through with ginger and the note of onion… It put a roof over her head and a patterned warmth round her so that even though all her anguish was still with her it became, for a moment, something she could bear.
The story goes down like steamed chow mein: Soft and amiable, with nothing too heavy to chew on. Before I realized it, I had finished over half the book. I just kept shoving the words in my brain without stopping to ponder them. I had to put the The Last Chinese Chef down for a week, and cleanse my brain with the fiber-filled Posthumous Keats before I was stricken by the desire to finish my plate.
Ultimately, The Last Chinese Chef satisfies the Recommended Daily Allowance of insight into China’s culinary traditions. In fact, it contains abundant, nearly toxic levels of Chinese food descriptions, all punctuated by our heroine Maggie gloating about how incredible it tastes. This is all pressed together with superfluous sub-plots and characters, and then deep-fried in love. The ending fortune cookie is an expected, sweet but cringing sex scene between Maggie and Sam. For all its pretenses of being about genuine Chinese cuisine, The Last Chinese Chef sure goes down like American-style Chinese takeout.
