It was only after Jack Seaver got home that Lily managed to get out of the house.
“Elsie, she’s a child, not a houseplant. You can’t keep her in the house all day. She’s got to get some skin scraped off now and then. Someday maybe you can put a corset on her and wrap her up for her husband, but not for a while. For now she needs to be out in the sun, running around.”
Elsie Seaver was not happy with this, but she let Lily out. “Dinner is going to be late tonight,” she said. “Your father and I need to talk.”
Lily slipped out of the house before she could change her mind. The sun was low in the west, casting long shadows on the street, where a cool breeze carried the voices of the returning miners far among the houses of Idaho City. The two Chinamen at the door of the house across the street told her that Logan was in the vegetable garden. She had gone there directly, and, when Lily lost their wei qi game from yesterday, Logan began to tell her the story of Guan Yu, the God of War, to console her.
The results of Ah Yan’s cooking were carried out of the kitchen into the garden on large plates and set on a makeshift table made out of overturned crates in the middle of the circle. The Chinamen, each holding a large bowl of steamed white rice, milled around the table to pile food on top of the rice. Ah Yan emerged from the crowd and handed Lily a small blue porcelain bowl decorated with pink birds and flowers. The rice in the bowl was covered with small cubes of tofu and pork coated in red sauce and dark pieces of roasted meat with scallions and slices of bitter melon. The smell from the unfamiliar hot spice made Lily’s eyes and mouth water at the same time.
Ah Yan handed her a pair of chopsticks and headed back into the crowd to get his own food. He was so small and thin that he nimbly ducked under the shoulders and arms of the other men like a rabbit running under a hedgerow. Before long he ducked back out with his own large bowl of rice piled high with tofu and meat. He saw that Lily was watching him, anxious that he got his fair share. Lifting his bowl from his seat on a stool across the circle from Logan, he told Lily, “Eat, eat!”
Lily sort of got the hang of using chopsticks, after Logan showed her how. It amazed Lily to see his big clumsy hands manipulating his chopsticks so skillfully that he could pick up the delicate pieces of tofu and carry them to his mouth without crushing any of the pieces, causing them to fall, as Lily did the first few times she tried to eat the tofu.
Lily finally managed to get a piece of tofu into her mouth, and she gratefully bit down on it. Flavors until then unknown filled her mouth. Her whole tongue delighted in the richness of the taste: the saltiness, a hint of hot peppers, the almost-sweet base of the sauce, and something else that tickled her tongue. She tried to chew the tofu a little, to bring the flavor out so she could identify that new component more clearly. The taste of hot peppers became stronger, and the tickling grew into a tingling that covered her tongue from tip to base. She chewed yet a little more. . . .
“Awww!” Lily cried out. The tingling suddenly exploded into a thousand hot little needles all over her tongue. The back of her nose felt full of water and her vision became blurry with tears. The Chinamen, stunned into silence by her yelp, burst into laughter when they saw what caused it.
“Eat some white rice,” Logan said to her. “Quick.”
Lily gulped down several mouthfuls of rice as fast as she could, letting the soft grains massage her tongue and sooth the back of her throat. Her tongue felt numb, paralyzed, and the tingling, now subdued, continued to tickle the inside of her cheeks.
“Welcome to a new taste,” Logan said to her, a mischievous joy in his eyes. “That was mala, the tingling hotness that made the Kingdom of Shu famous throughout China. You have to be careful with it, as the taste lures you in and then hits you like a mouthful of flame. But once you get used to it, it will make your tongue dance and nothing less will do.”
Following Logan’s suggestions, Lily tried a few pieces of bitter melon and scallions to rest her tongue a little between pieces of tofu. The bitterness of the melons contrasted nicely with the mala of the tofu.
“I bet you’ve never liked anything bitter before,” Logan said.
Lily nodded. She couldn’t think of a single dish her mother made that tasted bitter.
“It’s all about the balance of the flavors. The Chinese know that you cannot avoid having things be sweet, sour, bitter, hot, salty, mala, and whiskey-smooth all at the same time—well, actually the Chinese don’t know about whiskey, but you understand my point.”
“Lily, it’s time for dinner.”
Lily looked up. Her father was standing beyond the edge of the vegetable garden, beckoning for her to come over.
“Jack,” Logan called out. “Why don’t you join us for some of Ah Yan’s cooking?”
Taken aback by the suggestion, Jack Seaver nodded after a short pause. He could barely hide his grin as he strode between the rows of cucumbers and cabbages, coming up next to Logan.
“Thank you,” he said. “I’ve been wanting to try this since the first time I smelled it back when you first moved in.” He turned to the rest of the circle. “How’s the mining been so far, boys?”
“Wonderful, Mr. Seaver.” ?“The gold is everywhere.” ?“Logan has the touch.”
“That’s just what I want to hear,” Jack said. “I’m about to put in an order to San Francisco for my store. Tell me what you want from Chinatown, and I’ll work on getting some of that gold out of your hands into mine.”
While the circle laughed and shouted out suggestions, which Jack scribbled down on a piece of scrap paper, occasionally pausing so that one of the Chinamen could write down the suggestion in Chinese characters for his agent in San Francisco if the men didn’t know the English name for something, Ah Yan ran back into the kitchen to retrieve a new bowl of rice for Jack.
Jack stared at the dishes in the middle of the circle, licking his lips appreciatively. “What are we having today?”
“Mala Wife’s Tofu,” Lily told him. “You have to be careful with it. It has a new taste. And Duke Wei’s Meat.”
“What kind of meat is it?”
“Dog meat roasted with scallions and bitter melon,” Logan said.
Lily, who was about to eat a piece of the roasted meat, dropped her bowl. Rice and tofu and meat and red sauce spilled everywhere. She felt sick.
Jack picked her up and hugged her closely. “How can you do such a thing?” he demanded. “Whose dog did you kill? There’s going to be trouble from this.” His frown grew more pronounced. “Elsie is going to be hysterical if she hears about this.”
“Nobody’s. It was a wild dog running in the woods. It looked like a dog that’s been abandoned out in the woods since it was a pup. I killed it when it tried to bite me,” said Ah Yan, who had come out of the kitchen holding the new bowl of rice for Jack.
“But don’t you have dogs as pets? Eating a dog is like . . . like eating a child,” Jack said.
“We also have dogs as pets. We do not eat them if they are pets. But this dog was wild, and Ah Yan had to kill it to defend himself. Why would you let a wild dog’s meat go to waste when it is delicious?” Logan said. The rest of the Chinamen had stopped eating, intent on the conversation.
“Whether it was wild or not, eating a dog is barbaric.”
“You do not eat dogs because you like them too much.” Logan thought about this. “I thought you also do not eat rats.”
“Of course not! What a disgusting thought. Rats are dirty creatures full of disease.” Jack’s stomach turned at the very idea.
“We don’t eat rats, as a rule,” said Logan. “But if we are starving and there’s no other meat, it could be cooked to be palatable.”
Was there no end to the depravity of the Chinamen? “I can’t imagine when I would willingly eat a rat.”