Free Chinese Cooking for Diamond Thieves by Dave Lowry Page A

century later, it was near enough to Washington University to appeal to students looking for a cheap place to live. The landlord, Langston explained, was a local Chinese businessman. He’d figured out Chinese restaurant workers were just as able to pay rent as students and, unlike the students, didn’t leave for three months every summer. If they had parties, they kept things quiet enough that neighbors up and down the street didn’t complain. The entire apartment building, all three floors of it, was filled with Asians. Most were Chinese, either fresh immigrants or ABCs—American-born Chinese. Some were Vietnamese or Cambodian, Laotian, or Thai. Most worked at various Chinese restaurants within walking or biking distance. Langston’s place was divided into his large bedroom in the rear, a small kitchen, and a living room with a fireplace that looked like it hadn’t seen a fire since the World’s Fair. Facing out onto the street was a front room that must have originally been some kind of parlor or sitting room. We were standing in the middle of it now.
    â€œAll yours,” Langston said. “We can put up a sheet or a curtain right here”—he gestured—“and block this off so you can have some privacy and sleep in late as I know you’re accustomed to doing.”
    I unpacked the Toyota and hauled my stuff upstairs. There wasn’t much. Langston had a folding frame with a futon on it in the front room he’d told me was, for the foreseeable future, mine. I spread the futon on the wooden floor and put my sleeping bag on it. I arranged my clothes on a bookshelf built into one wall. I looked around. That seemed to be it, in terms of my personal property. I sat on the window ledge that looked out on the street below. Crusty mounds of snow the color of ashes were heaped along the curb. A couple of girls walked by, both in quilted parkas and very ugly big fur boots. A crow cruised by in a long glide. He landed with a single flap of his inky wings on the branch of a sycamore tree across the street. He was eye level with me. He glanced over my way, looking me over. Apparently I passed his inspection. He shrugged, shivering his black feathers, then settled down, watching, waiting. He looked like he was not intending to stay all that long there, but he was taking it all in, looking around to see what might be interesting for the time being. I knew how he felt.

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    Rule #31: Beginnings offer more options in life than do endings.
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    Langston used to cook at a place called the Eastern Palace. He’d gotten the job the way all Chinese cooks got them. His cousin knew a guy who was the brother-in-law of a woman who’d worked once at the Eastern Palace. Something like that. There was an expression: “Jangling the wok.” It meant that if you asked any one person in a Chinese restaurant to bang their metal spatula against the side of their wok if they knew or were related to any other person, chances were good the noise would commence and just go on and on.
    Langston took me to the Eastern Palace the next afternoon. It was only about a block from the restaurant where he was now cooking, in a section of St. Louis ambitiously called Chinatown. It was more like China Street. The neighborhood was a section of street at the western edge of the city, about half a mile long, lined on both sides with Asian restaurants, grocery stores, and acupuncture clinics. Two different Chinese newspapers. There were cramped shop fronts selling insurance and cheap jewelry, and a couple of auto repair shops, where, according to handwritten signs that appeared stuck in the windows, Chinese was spoken and understood.
    The Eastern Palace, Langston told me, catered to non-Chinese diners at lunch. There were enough businesses and offices within walking or quick driving distance to make lunch the real moneymaker. The Eastern Palace, along with a dozen other similar joints, served standard Chinese