“Ming is here?” She looks suddenly severe.
“He’s on a call, I think. He’ll be back.”
Katherine sits at a table for four. She’s a defensive diner, with her back to the wall like Al Capone. James asks for her order. Tea. Spicy tofu. Does she want it with, or without, pork? She wants the pork. Would she like brown rice? No, she says, brown rice is an affectation of Dagou’s, not authentic. White rice is fine. Whatever her complications, James thinks, they’re played out in the real world, not in her palate.
But Katherine’s appetite for Chinese food is hard-won. She’s learned to love it, after an initial aversion, followed by disinclination, and finally, exploration. Everyone knows she grew up in Sioux City eating peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, carrot sticks, and “ants on a log” (celery sticks smeared with peanut butter, then dotted with raisins). Guzzling orange juice for breakfast; learning to make omelets, pancakes, waffles, and French toast. On holidays, family dinners of an enormous standing rib roast served with cheesy potatoes, mashed potatoes, and sweet potatoes with marshmallows, Brussels sprouts with pecans, creamed spinach, corn casserole, and homemade cranberry sauce. Baking, with her mother, Margaret Corcoran, Christmas cookies in the shapes of music notes, jingle bells, and double basses. Learning to roll piecrust. Yet her immersion in these skills, taught by her devoted mother, have over time created a hunger for another culture. James can see it in the focused way she examines the shabby restaurant. He can see it in the way she looks at him. It’s a clinical look, a look of data collection, but also of loss. Why doesn’t she do her research in China, where her biological mother lived and died? Because she works so hard at her demanding job in Chicago. In the meantime, the Fine Chao will have to do.
“James, where is Dagou?” She knows all of Dagou’s shifts.
“Um, not here today. He’s at home testing some recipe, getting ready for the party. Ming and I—”
At that moment, Ming walks into the room.
He seems agitated, younger than usual. Maybe he’s afraid of Katherine. She’s five years older, and, although they both have the same kind of good looks—clean-cut and self-possessed—she’s better-looking than he is. Moreover, she’s not generic. Her coat is too expensive to be artsy, James thinks, and yet she doesn’t quite have Ming’s corporate uniformity. You could just as well imagine her very high up in a special charity for rich people—something righteous, supporting the disadvantaged. Now she turns on Ming with an expression of familiarity and intensity. James feels sorry for Ming.
“What are you doing here?” Ming’s voice is cold. He’s not afraid, James sees suddenly; he’s angry with her. Why is he so angry?
“This restaurant is open to the public, or so I’ve heard,” she replies with equally icy precision.
Ming frowns. “You shouldn’t have come to town. Dagou told us about your ‘hiatus.’”
“That’s none of your business.” She’s so pretty and so terrifying that for a moment James is almost worried for Ming, or would be if he didn’t know his brother’s knack for evaporating from difficult situations. “I’m here to see Dagou,” Katherine says.
“He’s not here.” Ming keeps his voice as cool as ever. But there it is: although Ming tries to hold himself completely still, to not move a feature on his face, he blinks.
James blurts, inaccurately, “I can text him—”
“We can all text him,” Ming says. He pulls out the chair opposite her. “James, I need to discuss something with Katherine. Will you run to the kitchen and help O-Lan?”
James retreats to the kitchen. There is a fairly fresh pail of soapy water sitting near the door, but O-Lan is nowhere to be seen.
James busies himself chopping garlic for the party. Ming and Katherine are arguing in heated murmurs. They sit facing each other like mortal enemies, or life partners. From where he’s standing, he can almost hear them, but not quite. Ming has sent him to the kitchen because he knows (as all of them know) the exact distance that a normal conversation can carry from any point in the empty restaurant. Katherine is flushed. She and Ming are rigidly self-contained, yet as they talk, James can sense a kind of tilt under his feet, as if the carpet has become sand.
In the next moment, Ming and Katherine are shouting, their voices carrying across the restaurant as cleanly to James as if he were beside them.
“I’m not saying it’s my business!” Ming says. “It’s just hard to stand and watch as—”
“Butt out! This is between Dagou and me!”
“You don’t get it! Listen to me. Just listen. You guys are over. You are finished. You’re embarrassing yourself. Get lost! We are not your family! You live in Chicago! You need to leave town and forget about it for your own good!”
“You don’t know shit about what’s good for me!”
“I know more than you think!”
Katherine is weeping.
James senses movement at his shoulder. It’s O-Lan, wearing the expression of a cat in a window, a private, hungry gaze, as if she’s lapping up every scrap and drop of passion in their conversation. That’s what it is, James sees all at once: it’s passion. The very air shakes with it. James edges toward the bathroom, that place of refuge. He’s about to make a run for it when the telephone rings.
Ming moves automatically to the front counter.
“Fine Chao Restaurant.” He listens for a moment. “I don’t know,” he says at length. “He’s not here. I don’t know.”
There’s something in Ming’s voice. James approaches.
“Hold on.” Ming leans closer to James. “Listen,” he says, pressing his palm on the receiver. “Some woman named Chang, an ABC, I’m guessing, is missing a piece of luggage. This woman is calling every Chao within two hundred miles, she says, to search for it.”
James stands still, his mind abruptly cavernous, echoing with the distant screech and roar of underground trains.
“Lost item?” Leo Chao returns, ostensibly to get another couple of beers. But he can’t do anything subtly. There is something charismatic in his movements—even in the casual way he reaches out to wrest the phone from Ming—that makes them all look over at him, even Katherine, who no longer weeps, but watches.
Ming grabs an order pad and scribbles on it. As he walks back to his seat opposite Katherine, he hands James a slip of folded paper.
Leo listens, then barks into the phone, “A bag? What color bag? How big is it?”
James opens his mouth. He must tell his father what he knows—he’s on the balls of his feet—but Ming shoots him a warning glance.