The Family Chao
Lan Samantha Chang
PART ONE
THEY SEE THEMSELVES
For thirty-five years, everyone supported Leo Chao’s restaurant. Introducing choosy newcomers by showing off some real Chinese food in Haven, Wisconsin. Bringing children, parents, grandparents not wanting to dine out with the Americans, not wanting to think about which fork to use. You could say the manifold tensions of life in the new country—the focus on the future, tracking incremental gains and losses—were relieved by the Fine Chao. Sitting down under the dusty red lanterns, gazing at Leo’s latest calendar with the limp-haired Taiwanese sylphs that Winnie hated so much, waiting for supper, everyone felt calm. In dark times, when you’re feeling homesick or defeated, there is really nothing like a good, steaming soup, and dumplings made from scratch.
Winnie and Big Leo Chao were serving scallion pancakes decades before you could find them outside of a home kitchen. Leo, thirty-five years ago, winning his first poker game against the owners of a local poultry farm, exchanged his chips for birds that Winnie transformed into the shining, chestnut-colored duck dishes of far-off cities. Dear Winnie, rolling out her bing the homemade way, two pats of dough together with a seal of oil in between, letting them rise to a steaming bubble in the piping pan. Leo, bargaining for hard-to-get ingredients; Winnie subbing wax beans for yard-long beans, plus home-growing the garlic greens, chives, and hot peppers you used to never find in Haven. Their garden giving off a glorious smell.
You could say the community ate its way through the Chao family’s distress. Not caring whether Winnie was happy, whether Big Chao was an honest man. Everyone took in the food on one side of their mouths, and from the other side they extolled the parents for their sons’ accomplishments. Heaping praise upon the three boys who grew up all bright and ambitious, who earned scholarships to good colleges. Commending them for leaving the Midwest. Yet everyone was thankful when the oldest, Dagou Chao, returned to Haven. Dagou coming home to his mother, moving into the apartment over the restaurant, working there six days a week. Dagou, the most passionate cook in the family. Despite the trouble between Winnie and Big Chao, everyone assumed the business would be handed down fairly, peacefully, father to son.
Now, a year after the shame, the intemperate and scandalous events that began on a winter evening in Union Station, the community defends its thirty-five-year indifference to the Chao family’s troubles by saying, No one could have believed that such good food was cooked by a bad person.
DECEMBER 21
Fa—mi—lee
“Please help, young man.”
Through the crowd at Union Station, slipping in and out among the travelers, the frail voice reaches James Chao’s inner ear. A first-year college student, James has lost his Mandarin, forgotten the language as a toddler with two older brothers teaching, loving, and tormenting him exclusively in English. Only from time to time, when he’s not expecting it, will a spoken phrase of Mandarin filter to this innermost chamber of his ear and steal into his consciousness.
“Please help.”
James turns. He’s looking into the face of an old man. The stranger might be in his seventies, close to his father’s age, but he is altogether more frail than Big Leo: he clutches an ancient blue traveling bag in one hand, stooping with the weight of it, and his eyes are milky with time. He’s seen through the cataracts, can see beyond James’s generic jeans and hoodie to recognize another Chinese man. Can the familiarity be also in their movements, something in the way they look at one another? Is it in the stranger’s way of gripping his luggage, mirroring James’s grasp on the greasy paper bag of vegetable jia li jiao he’s bringing home for his mother?
“I’m sorry,” James says. “I don’t speak Mandarin.” Here’s a liability of his: he always wants to help, but his ignorance makes him useless to his own kind. Not just to this man, but to every lost Mandarin-speaking traveler fumbling in mid-transfer who mistakes him for a helpful guide.
James can’t tell if the man has understood his English. He shakes his head, then retreats a few steps. But the old man holds up a finger to say, “One minute!” and reaches into his coat pocket.
“I can’t help you,” James says. “I—” He’s interrupted by an announcement for the California Zephyr. The crowd streams around them, everyone hurrying to make the train.
Standing stubbornly in place, the old man pulls out a U.S. airmail envelope addressed in Chinese characters, from which he extracts a photograph. He and James lean in and study it together.
It’s a posed color snapshot of a solemn-faced middle-aged man and woman seated with a young girl of about ten, her black hair cut into heavy bangs across her forehead. She grasps a small, muscular beagle on her lap, and the animal gazes balefully, red-eyed, into the flash. James doesn’t know why he’s being shown this, but as he studies the photo shaking in the man’s hand, he senses that he knows these strangers. He’s never met them, but he can tell that they are recently arrived to the U.S. He can recognize the feelings in their mute, level eyes: defended, skeptical, yet somehow filled with hope.
“Fa—mi—lee,” the old man says. “Fa-mi-lee Zhang.” The crowd has trampled through; he and James are alone now. He points at the photo, then to himself. “Zhang Fujian.”
“Family Chao,” James says, putting a finger to his chest. “Chao—” He could never pronounce his given name, Li Huan, correctly.
The old man flips the photo. On the back is written, in slightly smeared blue ballpoint, an Illinois address. James feels the lightening of relief. The town is near a stop along the same Amtrak line as his own stop, Lake Haven. The track is on the upper level.
He points across the station to the metal stairs. “Follow me,” he says.
The man’s wrinkled face splits into a brilliant smile of fake teeth.
James adjusts his backpack and duffel. He can do it, he will lead the stranger up out of this dark abyss of bending tunnels to the next step of his journey. He’s singularly moved by the idea of the old man traveling from afar—from the other side of the world, perhaps—to be united with his family, as James himself is traveling to his own family, coming home from college a thousand miles away, for Christmas.