Kitchen Chinese Read online

  I spent the rest of the morning with the telephone receiver wedged under my ear as I struggled to reach all the sources named in the article, while my fingers typed agitated bursts into the LexisNexis search engine. The journalist, a freelancer named Zara Green, was considered one of Belle’s rising stars, known for her assertive reporting. I’d met her once at a brown-bag lunch for assistants, and found her unreserved enthusiasm and determination compelling. Unfortunately, she’d left so many holes in this story about Jolly Jones, I was starting to feel more like her ghostwriter rather than a fact-checker.

  At lunchtime my boss appeared at my cubicle.

  “Almost done?” She shot an agonized look at my computer screen. As Belle’s managing editor, Nina was arguably one of the most powerful women in New York media, yet she lived in constant fear of getting fired for missing a deadline.

  “Not quite.”

  “When?” Nina spoke in one-word sentences when she was stressed.

  “I don’t know. I need another couple of hours. Actually, I had some questions…”

  She heaved a sigh so forceful it ruffled the papers on my desk. “What is this, like the eight hundredth story you’ve fact-checked for the magazine? You should be able to do this in your sleep by now.”

  “It’s just that there’s so much information missing from the article…and I can’t reach half her sources. And Zara’s not picking up the phone or answering any of my e-mails. Are you sure this piece is ready…?” My question hung in the air.

  “Why don’t you just do your job, Isabelle, and I’ll do mine,” she said crisply. “Zara Green is a highly respected journalist and I highly doubt she’s making up sources.”

  “But—”

  “If you can’t finish in time, I’m sure I can find someone else to take over.”

  “The deadline is not a problem. But—”

  “Good. I’ll expect it on my desk in an hour.”

  Swallowing my frustration, I turned back to the phone, picking it up to call Zara one more time. To my surprise, she answered on the third ring.

  “Hi, Zara? This is Isabelle Lee from Belle magazine. I’m fact-checking your piece and I had some questions about reaching some of your sources…” As we started to go over my notes, I noticed that Zara had a habit of calling me “kid,” as if she couldn’t be bothered to remember my name.

  “Kid, don’t worry about reaching Henry Collins…he’s on some sort of meditation retreat in darkest Tibet. He’s totally out of contact,” Zara reassured me.

  “Henry Collins…” I scanned my notes. “You mean the extra on the set of Jolly’s latest movie who claims he had a one-night stand with her?”

  “Yes, and she made him dress up in a bear costume while they had sex.”

  “His quotes are pretty, er, revelatory.” Bizarre was more like it. “All that stuff about her ursine fetish—her fixation with beehives, smearing honey all over him, using a stuffed salmon as a sex toy, and then retreating into a darkened room for days and calling it hibernation…it all just seems a little…unusual. I would really like to talk to him. Are you sure he’s out of contact? He’s not checking e-mail or anything?”

  “I doubt the monks will let him, kid.” She laughed. “Apparently they’re very strict. Must be all that yak butter tea.”

  “But…I really need to verify everything.”

  “You can try to reach him, kid, but believe me, it would be a waste of your time. I used to be a fact-checker. I know you probably have a million other things to finish today.”

  “Are you sure you don’t have a telephone number or anything for him?”

  “No.” Her voice sharpened. “I told you, he’s in Tibet. He doesn’t want to be contacted. Trust me.”

  I felt uneasy, but Nina’s words came echoing back to me: Zara Green was a highly respected journalist. Why would she invent her sources? And so, I finished up my conversation with Zara and put the article through to production. The rest of the afternoon passed in a blur as I made Nina’s photocopies, answered her phone, and ordered her son’s organic, gluten-free, vegan Wiggles birthday cake. Three days later, when the issue hit the newsstands, even I had to admit that the article looked stunning, illustrated with Annie Liebowitz’s photos. Yet despite my best intentions, I still couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong.

  The morning of my review, I searched the skies for an omen and decided that the bright sun and puffy clouds could only signal a positive outcome. Three people smiled at me on my walk to work, I found a penny on the sidewalk, and the Starbucks barista started making my nonfat cappuccino the minute I walked through the door.

  My good luck continued at the office, where someone had left a glazed doughnut on my desk. I took a sticky bite and turned toward my phone, whose message light was flashing more frantically than an ambulance siren. “You have…eight…new messages,” announced my voice mail. That’s odd, I thought, as I punched my code into the phone. But maybe Nina was having a crisis. She once left me fourteen voice mails while I was in the bathroom just because she couldn’t find her metro card.

  In fact, the first message was from Nina. “Iz, could you come down to my office, please!” she said cheerfully.

  My heartbeat slowed. Nina sounded perfectly normal in her message. She probably wanted to discuss next week’s production schedule, or something.

  Except, messages two, three, four, five, six, and seven were also from Nina, her tone growing increasingly sharp. “Where are you?” she said finally. “I need see you now.”

  Before I could cross the hall to her office, she was there at my desk.

  “Do you know anything about this?” she demanded. “Did you have any idea?”

  “What?” I asked. “What is it?” Searching for clues, my eyes slid from her ashen face to her hands, which held a copy of the latest issue of Belle.

  “I just got a call from the legal department,” she said, her hands trembling slightly. “Jolly Jones is threatening to sue us. She’s furious about Zara Green’s article.”

  I swallowed hard. “Oh, no…”

  “She’s claiming that,” Nina leaned in and enunciated slowly, “some of the quotes were fabricated.”

  “Are you sure?” I said, and managed to keep my voice from cracking.

  Nina started pacing the corridor in front of my desk. “How could she have done this to us? How could we have let this happen?” She leaned in close. “You spoke to every single source, right?”

  “I—I…” My pulse skyrocketed. “Have you spoken to Zara?”

  “Not yet.” Nina’s lips thinned. “Get her on the phone for me, okay?” She bolted back to her office and closed the door.

  Zara was not at home and her cell went straight to voice mail. I pressed redial again and again, willing her to answer, and when she didn’t, slumped back in my swivel chair. This could not be happening to me. Zara Green could not be a pathological liar.

  My heart leapt at the ringing phone and I pounced on it, but it was only Julia. “Iz, I just heard what’s going on.”

  How? I thought wildly. Does everyone know?

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “I’m still trying to reach Zara,” I admitted.

  “Well, don’t freak out before you know all the facts.”

  “Jules?” I said in a small voice. “If something did…happen…you don’t think I’d get…fired…do you?”

  She sighed. “I don’t know.” Her voice was grim. “But I promise that no matter what happens, everything will be okay. You will be okay.”

  My other line beeped, signaling another call. “Look, that might be Zara on the other line. I’ll call you back, okay?”

  I switched lines and heard Nina on speaker phone, her voice distant and echoey. “Can you come into my office?” she said.

  I tried to respond, but could only squeeze a croak beyond the lump in my throat.

  If, as they say in journalism, getting fired is a badge of honor, then I was surely on my way to a long and il
lustrious career.

  Nina regarded me from behind her desk, her shoulders slumped. “I just got off the phone with Elaine,” she said quietly.

  I swallowed. Elaine was our editor-in-chief.

  “I’m…She wants…” Nina shifted in her seat. “Look, the magazine can’t let this slip through the cracks. Belle is not the kind of publication that allows shoddy journalism.”

  No, just articles on how to fake an orgasm, I thought bitterly.

  “We’ll give you six month’s severance. If you agree to the terms, I need your signature.” She gestured at a sheaf of documents before offering me a pen.

  “You’re firing me?” My voice cracked. “But how—Why—”

  “Elaine feels that we need to send a message. Make a clean start. Clear the slate.”

  “But—” I couldn’t untangle my thoughts to form a sentence. “It wasn’t me. Zara—” The words caught in my throat.

  Nina sighed. “You didn’t hear this from me, but Jolly’s lawyers have agreed to drop the lawsuit against us if we identify the responsible parties and terminate their employment,” she said quietly. “We’ll never use Zara again, but she’s just a freelancer. She’s not under contract at Belle. And it was your responsibility to fact-check the article…”

  I opened my mouth to protest but nothing came out. It wasn’t fair, but Nina was right. I had fact-checked the article—and I hadn’t verified every source. I didn’t think it was possible that Zara would fabricate quotes. I trusted her. I stared at Nina’s wide hands for a moment before reaching for the pen and signing the papers. I pushed them back toward her and searched her face, hoping for a glimmer of compassion, but the expression in her eyes seemed closer to relief.

  I managed not to cry until we had politely shaken hands, until I had cleaned out my desk and hugged the other fact-checkers good-bye, until I had walked out the double glass doors of Belle magazine, my dreams of journalistic success tarnished black by my tears.

  By the next day (and three boxes of Kleenex later) I had started wandering the streets, officially unemployed. Well, maybe not actually wandering. But I was tucked up in my apartment, Aunt Marcie’s hand-knit afghan pulled up to my shoulders, TV turned to The View, when Rich called and asked me to dinner. “I’d love to!” I said, trying to keep the surprise out of my voice. As much as I adored him, Richard wasn’t exactly known for his caring, nurturing side. Nevertheless, he’d booked a table at my favorite French bistro for eight o’clock.

  I arrived first and ordered a glass of champagne. One sparkling sip and my mood lifted. After all, I was young, I lived in the media capital of the world, I had tons of contacts, and a sophisticated, thoughtful boyfriend…I had nothing to worry about.

  “Darling!” Richard advanced from the door and swooped down to kiss me on both cheeks.

  “Hi, sweetheart,” I said, and felt a smile spread across my face. He looked so handsome in his black turtleneck and tweed trousers. Of course we’d had our ups and downs, but it meant so much that he was there. That he cared.

  We ordered steak frites right away, and after our waiter disappeared, Rich reached across the table to wrap his hands around mine. “My poor, sweet Isabelle,” he said. “This must be so awful for you.”

  “It’s worse than awful,” I groaned.

  “Any job prospects lined up?”

  “No,” I admitted. “Julia wants me to go to some book party tomorrow but I don’t know if I can face the humiliation.” I gazed at him hopefully. “You wouldn’t want to go with me, would you?”

  “Oh, Iz, I don’t know.” He removed his hands from mine. “Look, I know you’ve got a lot going on right now…but I think we should take a break.”

  A leaden feeling tightened my chest.

  “I’ve always loved how undefined our relationship has been,” he continued. “There’s never been any pressure to make it last two weeks or two years—”

  “A year and a half,” I said faintly, squeezing the words past the lump in my throat before the anger, shock, and pain combined to turn me silent.

  “We didn’t force ourselves to label it, put limits on it, you know?”

  The waiter delivered our food, and I cut into my steak and watched the red juices seep out. It’s the last thing I saw clearly before the tears started falling down my cheeks, before I pushed my chair away and left.

  Thank God for Julia. I lay on her green velvet sofa and wept, my head and heart aching. She bit down on her lip, but made nary an I-told-you-so peep. The next morning she forced me out to the farmer’s market, where we dug through a bin of winter apples. The sharp wind dried my cheeks and numbed my hands, and when Emily, tucked up in her stroller, received her first sip of warm cider with a clap of her chubby hands, I even tried to smile. Later that afternoon we baked a pie, and I took comfort in the precision of the measurements, fiercely chopping apples, lightly rubbing butter and flour together with my fingers.

  “Will you think about Beijing?” asked Julia.

  But I’d already decided.

  I couldn’t disappear, of course. But two months later I’d sublet my apartment, sold most of my furniture, and become skillful at decoding the tide of opinion about my decision.

  “What an adventure!” exclaimed my neighbor, Liz. “But what will you do?” Translation: You’re crazy!

  “You’re moving back to China?” said my hairdresser as she clipped layers into my long, dark hair. “How exciting that you’re going back to your homeland!” Translation: Your life is an Amy Tan novel.

  On a weekend visit to my parents’ house in the suburbs, I casually mentioned my plan over lunch. My mother beamed. It was the first smile I’d seen from her since I told them I’d been fired (actually, I used the handy term “laid off”). “Your father will be so happy,” said my mother. Translation: I’m ecstatic.

  I glanced at my dad, but if he was happy, it proved hard to decipher. A second generation Chinese American born in Queens, his ties to China faded before he was born, when his parents left Guangdong over eighty years ago for the United States. Later, as I climbed sleepily into my childhood bed, he tiptoed into my room and tucked a hundred dollar bill into my hand. “For emergencies,” he said. “Don’t tell your mother.” Translation: I’m worried about you.

  His concern didn’t surprise me. My parents had been worried about me for years. For starters, there was my choice of college: “You want to go where?” my mother had said, when I told her I wanted to apply to NYU. “Is that a four year university?” And then, once I’d graduated, there was my career: “Journalism?” she’d said, when I got my job at Belle. “Oh, you don’t want to do that. You’ll never support yourself!” Getting fired amidst a blaze of scandal only seemed to confirm their fears: straying from the white collar, model minority path led to disaster, and, worse, loss of face.

  Being at home with my parents was like reverting back to my childhood. I visited them once a month—not as often as they would have liked—and every time I entered via the garage door, I knew exactly what to expect. The modest colonial still smelled the same, a not unpleasant mix of steamed rice and tiger lilies with a faint trace of mothballs. My father still sat in his overstuffed lounge chair watching golf and working the crossword puzzle. My mother, home from her trio of hair salons (the largest Asian hair empire on the East Coast) whizzed around the kitchen stirring bubbling pots of pork stock, or chopping spring onions with an oversized cleaver, all while chattering on the phone in Chinese with my aunt Marcie. Claire’s diplomas still hung in the hallway, a pair of gilt-framed curlicued documents that haughtily announced her Ivy League education. And I still felt the same feelings of adolescent insecurity.

  Upstairs, our bedrooms also remained the same, even Claire’s, though she hadn’t been home in two years. The closet held her collection of plain trouser suits, arranged by color; in the desk drawer I found a stack of gift cards to Barney’s, which I’d given her in the hopes that she’d abandon Ann Taylor forever. They looked untouched. I peered at a row o
f her college textbooks, arranged neatly by height.

  Claire had said that opening her law firm’s Beijing office was a huge promotion, the opportunity of a lifetime, but the thrill hadn’t reached her pale face when she announced the news to us all those months ago. She’d always been ambitious—valedictorian of her senior class, editor of the law review—but it still seemed strange that work could have kept her away for all this time.

  My mother caught me leafing through Claire’s old Mandarin textbooks, examining the characters with familiar fascination and frustration.

  “Have you heard from her?” she asked, her voice wistful, though her expression remained impassive.

  “I haven’t e-mailed her yet,” I admitted.

  “It would mean so much to me for you two to be together in China,” she said, heaving a theatrical sigh.

  I resisted the impulse to roll my eyes. My mother’s feelings for China were filled with the wistfulness of an exile, expressed with all the melodrama of a soap star. Even after thirty years in America, she still regarded herself as Chinese; her deepest regret—expressed many times over family dinner—was that I didn’t speak fluent Mandarin.

  “Mom, just because I go to China doesn’t mean I’m going to have some enormous ethnic epiphany,” I said impatiently. “Or that Claire and I will become best friends.”

  She pursed her lips together and looked at me with an air of disappointment that I recognized all too well.

  I feared Claire’s reaction the most, but finally typed her an e-mail and waited nervously for her reply.

  To: Claire Lee

  From: Isabelle Lee

  Subject: Beijing

  Dear Claire,

  I know it’s been a while since my last e-mail, but I think of you often and wonder about your adventures in China. Things here are fine but work has been a little rocky and I’ve been thinking about making a change…maybe coming to Beijing, which seems so exciting right now. There’s no easy way to ask this, so here goes: Am wondering if you’d have room for me in your guest room, just for a little bit while I get on my feet? If this is too inconvenient, just let me know. I won’t be mad, promise. Hope you’re well. Mom and dad say hi.