Free Chinese Cooking for Diamond Thieves by Dave Lowry

new ones, on his forearms. Cooks in Western restaurants have scars like thick red smudges where their arms come down accidentally on the side of a pan. Chinese cooks like Langston—and me—have kitchen scars that are fine ribbons, either scarlet or tan, depending on their age, where our forearms have encountered the thin, searing edge of a wok. I had my own collection, most of them healed into shiny streaks by now. It had been a while since I’d gotten any new ones.
    He pushed against the table so he was balanced on the back legs of the chair and looked at me. “You’re on.”
    I told him the story of my life, skipping the parts he knew. Since we’d known one another since second grade, that meant I could leave out most of it except the past week or so. I left out the part about Corinne Chang. I thought that part might be superfluous. I still wasn’t sure what it was all about anyway, and I didn’t feel like going into it, even with someone like Langston, who was a good listener. He sat and did just that and didn’t interrupt.
    â€œSo,” I finished, “not having any other immediate prospects educationally, socially, or professionally for the moment, I thought I’d come out here and see if there were any restaurants looking to upgrade their kitchen staff.”
    Langston nodded. “And you, being a
laowai
with pretensions and a deep, probably neurotic need to try to be a part of a culture that neither needs nor wants you in the club, thought I might get you in the kitchen door of some place.”
    â€œExactly,” I said, reflecting on the fact that was the second time in less than a week I’d had ethnic slurs used to my face. Corinne had called me a “big nose.” Which was mildly offensive but was really just an old term for Westerners, who, when they first appeared in China, seemed to have bigger noses than the Chinese were used to seeing. Langston was calling me a
laowai,
an “old foreigner.” I’d never known why it had become a standard Mandarin term for a Caucasian. It could be an insult. It usually was. But sometimes it was just a description. And even when it was used insultingly, a lot of my Chinese friends and coworkers like Langston used it more to tease than anything else. Any way it got used, it didn’t bother me. If you were going to be a white guy hanging out in Chinese kitchens, you had to put up with a certain amount of cultural insensitivity.
    The rice was bubbling in the pot now, thick, viscous enough that a pair of chopsticks would stand up in it. Langston leaned into the open refrigerator and pulled out a bowl of leftover chicken stew studded with feathery knobs of silver jelly-like fungus and stirred it into the rice. He poured the hot water from the kettle into a teapot. I found a couple of bowls in the cupboard and put them on the table with two teacups. Breakfast was served.
Zhou,
rice porridge that we both liked Cantonese style, with a sprinkle of pickled and slivered bamboo shoots Langston retrieved from the refrigerator. It was the breakfast I’d mentioned to Corinne that first morning back in New Hampshire. It was even better than I’d imagined it then.
    â€œGood snow ear,” I said, using the Mandarin word for the fungus,
xue er.
“Tastes like it’s from Dongxiang.”
    â€œIt is,” Langston said. “Only it’s
bai mu er.
”
    This was our old, not particularly funny routine. Back in high school, cooking at his parents’ house one day, we got into an argument. I insisted “snow fungus” and “white wood ear” were the same; Langston said they weren’t. I turned out to be right. I never let it die.
    After we finished, we cleaned up our breakfast dishes, and Langston showed me the apartment. The place he was renting was on the top floor of a brick apartment building built back around the time of the World’s Fair in St. Louis, in 1904. More than a