A Certain Slant of Light

You know how it is with modern daughters and mothers who think we are modern. And it is even more delicate with a mother and a daughter, both having had mixed experiences of eating, cooking, speaking, and writing. Now that we have not neglected to do the making-up with each other after our last recipe, it is safe for me to claim that all the credit for the good points of the book are mine and all the blame for the bad points is Rulan’s.

Next, I must blame my husband for all the negative contributions he has made toward the making of the book. In many places he has changed Rulan’s good English into bad, which he thinks Americans like better…

Like Autobiography of a Chinese Woman, Buwei Yang Chao’s How to Cook and Eat in Chinese was translated into English by a family member: in this case, her daughter Rulan, with occasional footnotes by Yuenren Chao (who once has dueling footnotes with Rulan). The book is part traditional cookbook, with recipes, but also partly a description of Chinese food culture in the early to mid twentieth century. (The book was published in 1945. For obvious reasons, the Chaos had been stuck in America for a few years at that point.)

Chao mentions, for instance, that although it’s common in China to serve tea throughout the day, no tea is served at meals. In fact, often the only liquid at meals is soup, and people will take spoonfuls of soup to refresh themselves between courses. There’s no dessert at the end of the meal, but at a banquet, sweets may appear at intervals between other courses; the other main use of sweets in Chinese cuisine is as tien-hsin, “dot-hearts,” (tim-sam in Cantonese), which are little meals/snacks eaten with tea - although these are just as likely to be savory, “flour things which are baked, fried, or boiled and may be made sweet or salty.”

I loved the translation “dot-hearts” and wish it had caught on in English; it sounds so much more elegant than “snack.” I also loved the phrase Chao mentions as a description of fine food, “mountain rarities and sea flavors.” Isn’t that so evocative?

In many cases Buwei and Rulan are not just translating from Chinese into English but actually making up an English word or phrase to correspond to the original Chinese. Some of these caught on, like stir-fry (defined as “a big-fire-shallow-fat-continual-stirring-quick-frying of cut-up material with wet seasoning”); others didn’t, like wraplings for what I believe, based on the description and the line-drawings, English-speakers now call dumplings.

She does have a dumpling recipe - for a New Year Dumpling that is made by concocting a nut stuffing (ground walnut & almond, & sesame), sprinkling the balls of stuffing with water, and then rolling them till coated in glutinous rice flour and then sprinkling then coating etc etc until there are four or five layers of rice flour, and then you boil the whole thing up. If you google New Year Dumpling today, something completely different comes up! Is this because New Year Dumplings have completely changed direction in China, or because the dish Chao describes now goes by a different name in English?

As it’s a cookbook rather than a memoir, it has less forward motion than Autobiography of a Chinese Woman, so I found it a little harder to get into - but the process of translating from one language into another that doesn’t yet have a word or set phrase for the things you’re describing really intrigued me. And the food descriptions kept making me hungry!

If you are interested in the history of China in the first half of the twentieth century, or you’re intrigued by the idea of a memoir where the translator and the author (who are husband and wife) sometimes bicker affectionately in the footnotes (with occasional interjections by their children as the book goes on), or you just enjoy memoirs, then I highly recommend Buwei Yang Chao’s Autobiography of a Chinese Woman.

Chao seems to be one of those absolute powerhouse people who has gone everywhere, done everything, and made tons of friends while she’s at it. She was born in Nanking (she mentions how much she’s looking forward to visiting Nanking now that the war’s over… as the book was published in 1947 I hope she got right on that), was raised mostly as a boy for the first decade of her life (the family called her Little Mister Three), during which time her family moved frequently from city to city in China.

After breaking an engagement that had been made before her birth, pausing briefly at the age of nineteen to serve as headmistress of a women’s vocational school, and then fleeing to Shanghai when the Kuomintang government of Nanking fell, Buwei moved to Japan to study medicine for six years. (This was also the point at which she acquired the name Buwei: a friend chose it for her, not-yet-Buwei declared that she hated it, and then the friend died of scarlet fever and Buwei decided to use the name henceforth in her honor.)

You might imagine that fleeing Nanking as a refugee would have been a low point, but in fact the one part of her memoir that Buwei recounts without joy are her years in Japan. She recalls that the Chinese medical students (who were shunted together in one group, with a single horrified Japanese girl) discovered that their cadaver was an un-sterilized tubercular patient, and adds that this was typical. “Incidents, big and small, were part of the regular fare of Chinese students in Japan: you would find insufficient quantities of chemicals; you would be given defective historiological specimens. Sometimes you would meet with promoters of Sino-Japanese friendship, but they usually wound up reminding you of the war of 1894, when Japan annihilated the Chinese navy… And yet the Japanese wondered why Chinese who had studied abroad in Europe and America always spoke well of the country they had lived in, while the majority of those who studied in Japan learned to love the country less than before they went there.”

However, Buwei held the course, completed her studies, and went back to China to set up her own hospital with a friend. However, after a year or two she met Yuenren Chao, an all-around polymath who eventually became most famous for his contributions to linguistics, and gave up the practice of medicine when they married, as henceforth the family moved almost every year.

They lived in multiple cities in China, in London, in France, in Hawaii, and in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In Cambridge in the mid-twenties, they lived on the middle floor of a three-story house, with Black families on the other two floors. “Some American friends said that we should not live with colored people,” Chao records. “I did not understand what they meant until I learned that yellow and red were not colors, but that black was.”

As a footnote, she adds a story recounted by a Chinese friend: “when he visited the South, he purposely sat in the sections in buses and cars marked ‘colored’ to see what would happen. The conductor would not listen to him when he insisted that he was colored.”

The Chaos’ friends, like the Chaos themselves, are all the kind of indomitably curious people who take this sort of “wonder how this works! Let’s fuck around and find out!” attitude toward weird foreign customs like Jim Crow. This makes for a bracing read although there are moments, like that particular footnote, where the reader gasps OH GOD I’M GLAD YOU’RE OKAY.

Among these more or less yearly moves (which speed up to almost monthly while they’re fleeing the Japanese invasion of China), the Chaos brought up four daughters. Buwei Chao notes proudly, “When one or two of my daughters said they wanted to go into medicine, I said:

‘No, my dears, you look almost as pretty as I did at your ages. The country needs more women doctors, to be sure, but leave it to the less marriageable ones.’

Thus, thanks to my advice, Nova is still able to work in a chemical research laboratory after becoming Mrs. Huang P’eiyung.”

One of the other daughters grew up to be the children’s book author Lensey Namioka, most famous these days for Yang the Youngest and His Terrible Ear, but most beloved by me for her Zenta and Matsuzo Mysteries, about two ronin (masterless samurai) who wander Japan solving mysteries. I read them in my teens and recall that they were deliciously slashy in a Sutcliffian loyalty kink kind of way. In fact, it was through researching Namioka (read: reading her Wikipedia page) that I discovered the existence of her mother’s memoir, although I’d already heard of Buwei Yang Chao’s earlier cookbook How to Cook and Eat in Chinese in a discussion of mid-century American food culture.

At the time I was intrigued (I actually namecheck How to Cook and Eat in Chinese in Honeytrap: Daniel’s mother has a copy), but now I have moved from “intrigued” to “I have to read it.” I’m not sure I’ll cook out of it (I suspect American and Chinese cooking have both changed a lot in the intervening eighty years!) but I bet it’s fascinating all the same.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Norma Fox Mazer’s After the Rain, a 1988 Newbery Honor book about a girl whose grandfather is dying a long, slow, painful death of mesothelioma. It actually has lots of interesting details about daily life in the eighties (and some hair-raising details about medical ethics in the eighties… the doctors tell Rachel’s family that Grandpa Izzy is dying, but they don’t even tell Izzy that he has mesothelioma!), but, well, at the end of the day it IS a book about someone dying of mesothelioma.

What I’m Reading Now

“An extraordinary aspect of the decision making in Washington between 1961 and 1975 was that Vietnamese were seldom, if ever, allowed to intrude upon it,” Max Hastings comments drily in Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975. I have reached the mid-sixties and the Johnson administration, three-quarters aware that this is a terrible idea but one-quarter unwilling to believe it because it’s an unacceptable reproach to their sense of national power and prestige, have just committed themselves to a massive ongoing ground war in Vietnam.

Instead of the traditional hoopla (parades, brass bands, etc), the administration shipped the troops off as quietly as possible, apparently in the hope that the American people would fail to notice there was a war on. Unfortunately for Johnson, the American people DID notice, and antiwar protests sprung up concurrently with the first major troop deployments.

I’ve also begun Buwei Yang Chao’s Autobiography of a Chinese Woman, which is actually a collaboration between Chao and her husband, Yuen Ren Chao, a linguist who translated Buwei’s original Chinese text into English. He begins the book with a forward where he muses about the growth of Chinese literature in the vernacular… except that after about a page, Buwei interrupts, the two go back and forth, and then she triumphantly takes over the forward and finishes it herself. She also interpolates footnotes in the actual text when she thinks her husband’s translation is too hifalutin. (My favorite is the one where he introduces a somewhat tortured metaphor and her footnote is just “?”.) I love them.

What I Plan to Read Next

I need to finish some of the many things I’ve started! Vietnam is very long (I’m only about a third of the way through), so that's going to take a while; but if I really put my mind to it perhaps I could FINALLY knock out Fire from Heaven... You were right, kore, I should have started with The Persian Boy. But now by God I’m committed.