Good Soil

Good Soil

Fried Rice

When I don’t know what else to make for dinner, I poke around the kitchen to see if I have the ingredients for fried rice.

First, do we have leftover rice? If I think of it early enough in the day, I can make a batch, and then let the rice dry out for three or four hours. To make fried rice with freshly cooked rice is to risk disaster in the form of a mushy, sodden mess.

Next, what do we have in the fridge? I’ve made fried rice from the leftovers of a roast chicken, bits picked off the carcass of a Thanksgiving turkey, even half of an uneaten hamburger patty. It doesn’t much matter if your mushrooms have been languishing too long, as long as they’re not moldy. A slightly shriveled bell pepper will do. Half an onion? Lovely. Droopy green onions? Fine.

It’s a magical dish, and a hopeful one. In the warmth of a well-oiled wok, old rice, yesterday’s meat, and last week’s sad vegetables can be transformed. Reinvigorated by sesame and soy, all happily married with an egg or two cracked over the top, they sing a song of resurrection.

When I was young, my grandmother made me fried rice in her battered old flat-bottomed wok.

I don’t remember ever asking for fried rice. A good Chinese child eats whatever he’s served, and a Chinese grandmother’s primary love language is food. At my grandparents’ apartment, I’d hear the sizzle of vegetables hitting hot oil and then the clack-clack-clack of metal on metal as the wok turner met the wok, and I just knew what was coming.

There are multiple ways to make fried rice. When my mom makes it, she often scrambles the egg first and then chops it up. When my grandmother made it, she’d crack the egg right over the rice, so that each grain was coated. As the egg cooked, the rice would fluff up. I love my mom, and she has always been the best cook in the family, but I preferred my grandmother’s version of fried rice.

Grandma’s fried rice developed a crispy crust on the bottom of the wok. Once these near-burnt bits—called 飯焦 (“fan jiu”)—were mixed in, the best bites had just a little crunch. 飯 (“fan”) is the Cantonese word for cooked rice. 焦 (“jiu”) can mean “scorched” or “burnt,” but it can also mean “focus.” The heat concentrates all the rice’s goodness into that crispy layer. 飯焦 is the Chinese cousin of Persian tahdig as well as the socarrat you find at the bottom of the best paella. Deeply savory and rich with umami, it tasted to me like comfort and love.

I cook fried rice the way I learned from my grandmother, but I’ve never quite been able to replicate her 飯焦. Maybe I don’t give it enough time. “Shhhh,” my grandmother would probably say. “You need to wait. Just wait.”

Long before she became my grandmother, Yim Mo Lan taught Bible at a Baptist primary school in Hong Kong. The eldest of nine children, she was the only daughter, and her father doted on her, sending her away to boarding school to be educated—an unusual thing for a working-class girl.

Nobody ever told me the full story of how she met my grandfather, a pastor and Bible college professor seven years her elder. I suspect some minor scandal: He had been married before and had two daughters, who lived in his home village in southern China. I heard something once about her being his student, but nobody ever wanted to flesh out that story.

They married in 1934 and began building a life together in Hong Kong. At the time, the border between the British-ruled territory and nationalist-governed China was porous, and my grandfather would go back and forth between Hong Kong and Canton, preaching and teaching.

Canton fell to the Japanese in 1938, Hong Kong three years later. My grandparents, their three young children, and an entourage of my grandfather’s students fled westward to Guangxi Province, where the jagged peaks that tower over deep river valleys had inspired countless painters and sheltered innumerable refugees.

I wonder sometimes if that’s when Psalm 121 became my grandmother’s favorite Bible passage. By repetition throughout my childhood, she taught it to me in Cantonese. As she recited the words, which she knew by heart, she held her worn Bible open for my benefit, her wrinkly fingers slowly chasing the characters down each column of text. Later I learned the words in English: “I lift my eyes to the hills; where does my help come from?”

On the refugee road, the students’ help came from my grandparents. I imagine them huddled together in prayer, my grandfather’s preacherly baritone rising in their midst. Maybe my grandmother made fried rice for them, too.

After the war ended, my grandparents returned to Hong Kong with their growing family. Somehow they’d managed to produce two more children while in exile, and while my grandfather shuttled back and forth between Hong Kong and Canton, my grandmother taught and mothered.

She developed a formidable reputation as a strict taskmaster. Her classroom manner was famously brusque, her tolerance for misbehavior nonexistent. Every third grader at Pui Ching Primary School took Bible from her, and they never forgot the experience. Whenever we went back to Hong Kong, I’d hear the same story: Remember that time when Teacher Yim called on ____ in class? The custom then was that, if called on to answer a question, you’d stand up next to your desk to give your reply. This girl was so petrified that she stood and peed on the spot.

The story seemed so wild to me—and confusing, too. I thought of my grandmother as gentle, her spirit as soft as her hands.

“You didn’t know your grandmother then,” relatives would say to me.

No, I didn’t. Obviously. I was born eight years after they immigrated to the United States.

“You didn’t know your grandmother then,” they would reiterate. “She dotes on you,” they’d say, as if surprised that she had softened.

I wanted to tell them how embarrassing she could be. Before leaving for Chinatown to go grocery shopping, she’d tuck a thick stack of religious tracts into her tote bag. As she chose her oranges and surveyed the greens, she’d proffer one of the pamphlets and say to whatever unsuspecting old lady was standing nearby, “Do you believe in Jesus?” She relished these encounters most when the target of her proselytizing said they believed in Buddha or in the old Chinese gods. As she unspooled a mini-sermon about their need to be saved, I’d wish for some salvation myself, mainly from this mortification.

She could be annoying, too. When I would have preferred to watch TV, she’d pull out stacks of graph paper, write a series of Chinese characters across the top row, and hand me a pen. I knew that my job was to copy and copy and copy. She hovered over my right shoulder, correcting the order in which I made the strokes, unsatisfied until it was clear to her that I was no longer copying but writing, the characters all my own.

Sometimes, I wanted to tell them, she’d take my sister and me to the McDonald’s down the street from her apartment. She’d muster the tiniest bit of English to order a “filet fishuuuu” for me and McNuggets for my sister. Then she’d show her senior card to get herself a free cup of hot coffee. Generosity and thriftiness, all wrapped up in one moment.

Sometimes, I wanted to tell them, she made me fried rice—the best fried rice I’d ever tasted. Nobody else made me fried rice like she did, always with lots of green onions, because she knew I loved them, and on an especially lucky day, morsels of Chinese sausage instead of leftover meat.

I wanted to tell them all that, but I didn’t, because a good Chinese child only speaks when asked a question. They hadn’t asked me any questions.

When I was nine, we left California, for my dad’s job, but my sister and I returned to stay with my grandparents every summer. We were like migratory birds. We flew west, spent a couple of months fattening up on excellent Chinese food, and then returned to Miami, where, in my view, there was none beyond my mother’s kitchen.

One of the things I remember most about those summers was bedtime. Every night after we watched the news on the Chinese TV channel, we’d fold out the creaky old sofa bed in the living room, and my grandmother would lead my sister and me in bedtime prayers. This took a while. These were Baptist prayers, after all.

She prayed for the Chinese Communists and the American Democrats and Republicans.

She prayed for our relatives in Hong Kong and China, Britain and Australia, Canada and New Zealand, especially the ones who didn’t go to church anymore—and here, her voice softened nearly to a whisper as she begged God to turn their hearts.

“Amen,” she said. Except that the “amen” didn’t mean she was done.

She prayed for the victims of whatever tragedy had been on the news that evening.

“Hallelujah,” she said, as if she were mounting her own prayer chorus to rebuke my sister’s silence and mine.

She prayed for our family’s church in Hong Kong and our family’s church in San Francisco and for the church universal.

“Hallelujah,” she said again, still not done.

She prayed for protection from the devil and his minions.

“Praise Jesus!” she said.