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When
my friend Daniel Chan confided in me that Jennifer was
leaving him
because he was washing his Wok with soap, I laughed till I
started
to wheeze.
And when I came up for air it
was to
use the little psychology I knew to assure him he was
obviously
displacing. Jennifer could have left him for any number
of reasons
– He was too short, had a missing front tooth, and even
though
only in his mid twenties, was already balding. To his
credit he
was an excellent chef, but he was considered a bit
eccentric because
he exercised, which is to say he ran a mile every other
day. To
all this Chan promptly responded, “Fuck you” the only
two English words that I knew him to deliver with
conviction.
It was not just Jennifer, he
explained,
his fellow Chinese students were no longer talking to him,
and African
students were eyeing him with suspicion, sometimes
jeeringly and
sometimes sucking air between the teeth to voice the jeer.
The more I thought about it,
the more
it seemed improbable – that in a culinary school in a
small
town in Kenya called Limuru, a soap-washed but
clean-rinsed wok
could come between two lovers from China, and leave the
man ostracized
from both his community and his adopted society.
But a few days after Chan’s
half-confession,
half lament, the culinary students, chanting a few choice
slogans
like “Fry Chan” and “Walk the Wok” went
on strike. The riot police, never having been called to
this part
of town to quell a strike by culinary students, got lost
giving
the students enough time to raze Chan’s dormitory to the
ground.
We were all sent home for two weeks.
***
Mpishi Msanii College (aptly
translating
into The Artist Chef) rested in the outskirts of Limuru,
on land
donated to the colonial government in the 1940’s by Lord
Baring,
and inherited by the African government in the 1960’s.
Lord
Baring carved the 10 acres from his 2000 acre ranch,
declaring that
Africa needed Africans with practical minds and practical
skills,
like cooking.
So started the Lord Baring
Native Cooking
School, where graduating from the three month course in
British
etiquette and cuisine assured students of work in country
clubs
and the homes of various wealthy colonials.
With the wave of
nationalization and
renaming that came with independence, or
still-in-dependence as
the witty amongst the natives called it, Mpishi Msanii
College was
born. The three month course in cooking pancakes, fried
sausages,
eggs and chips and broiled rabbit grew wings, becoming an
intensive
two year program that produced not cooks, but cosmopolitan
chefs
well-versed in local and global cuisines.
But the one thing that
remained unchanged
was a survival course where each student was escorted
blindfolded
to the middle of Ngong Forest and left there with a box of
matches,
a machete and a Polaroid camera. The idea was to eat well
and efficiently
no matter the circumstances. Some had returned with
Polaroids of
wild boar, snake, hare and other small game, served on
plates made
out of twigs and leaves. I, for one, had quickly pounced
on a baby
deer which I roasted to a perfect tenderness over dry fig
wood fire.
Mercifully, and for no good reason beyond luck, no one had
ever
died in this rite of passage.
With that kind of dedication
to student
learning, Mpishi Msanii College soon became one of the top
culinary
schools in Kenya. Through tourists who ate in the
five-star, big-city
restaurants that graduates worked in, the school’s fame
grew,
attracting dedicated teacher-chefs and eager students from
all over
the world. The student population was comprised of
daughters and
sons of wealthy Africans who had failed to make the grades
necessary
to get into their national universities and had scaled
down their
dreams to become cynical and reluctant chefs; Africans who
really
wanted to become chefs – I would like to believe that I
fell
into this group even though I had failed my university
entrance
exams - and foreign students from all over the world.
We assumed this last group to
be rich,
because they seemed to have the best of everything –
personalized
spatulas, graters with fancy monograms, and silicon mixing
bowls.
But it could be that one dollar when converted into a
Kenyan shilling
was enough to buy you a Tusker beer, three loaves of
bread, a pack
of cigarettes and some Big G bubble gum.
Students of each nationality
naturally
coalesced into gangs, and Mpishi Msanii College was home
to drunken
midnight cooking competitions that often ended in
violence, with
singed hair and burns from boiling water and hot oil. In
this underground
world, sabotage attempts ranging from unscrewing
salt-shakers to
mixing in a rotten egg in the other group’s flour mix were
constant. But during the day, dressed in our white coats,
bandaged
arms carefully out sight, singed hair tucked under our
brimming
white chef hats, administrators and teacher-chefs would
not have
sensed any discord.
Chan was a much better chef
than I
– he had an imagination that allowed him to combine
disparate
spices or foods, as if he could mix and taste them in his
head before
adding them to his pan. It was he who suggested adding a
light
touch of curry, crushed garlic and black pepper to an
onion, mushroom,
green and red pepper omelet. But even more innovative, he
added
eggplant. Biting into it while still hot and juicy was
like biting
into different textures of spicy tastes - milky and
crunchy all
at once.
His advanced skills as a
chef, combined
with gang loyalty -- he belonged to the Chinese gang and I
to the
Kenyan gang (which further sub-divided along ethnic lines
unless
facing the foreigners) -- made our friendship improbable.
But after
we ran into each other a few times at a den where the
potent, illicit
brew Changaa was sold, we became fast friends.
In the den, no one spoke
English, so
often the laborers from nearby coffee plantations
communicated with
Chan through hand-gestures and drunken nods. The end
result was
that mutual curiosities, most of them pertaining to
culture and
sexual prowess, went unanswered until I came along to
translate,
earning myself an occasional free glass of Changaa,
as well as Chan’s trust and friendship.
Chan liked to unbutton his
shirt and
lie down on the bench when there were only a few customers
visiting,
light a cigarette and start asking questions, sometime
regaling
us with stories of his own like how his parents were
former school
teachers who lost their jobs when during Mao’s Cultural
Revolution.
Western tailored suits and dresses where found in their
attic.
So he grew up poor, surviving mostly on rice. But the more
he thought
about it, the more he realized he did not have to eat
plain rice,
he could add spices to it, spices gathered from leaves and
tree
barks.
“Always remember, necessity
is
the mother spice”, he declared as he waved a finger at his
spell bound audience. And so his rice became a gourmet
meal until
one day he added poisonous bark and he had diarrhea for
days. It
was then that he resolved to become a chef and turn his
love into
a more forgiving science.
One memorable night Chan
pulled a bottle
of Coke from his pocket and added a few drops to his glass
of changaa,
getting rid of the brew’s bitter aftertaste. From then
on,
if you wanted a touch of rum at an extra cost of one
shilling, you
asked for the Chan Cham Rum. The proprietor of the
den, Madame, even started a running
special, 10 shillings for a glass of the Chan Cham Rum,
as we grew to call the drink, and a small packet of githeri
– our popular local dish of boiled maize and beans spiced with
a bit of salt rolled in a newspaper so that it tasted
vaguely of
black ink.
One day Chan drunkenly
observed, and
I drunkenly translated, that githeri was the most
boring
and unimaginative meal he had ever had the misfortune of
eating.
As the clientele worked themselves into a rage over the
perceived
insult, Madame challenged Chan to improve the githeri,
or
the curse of our ancestors, who had survived sieges,
famines and
droughts on this dish would fall on him.
Chan asked for a flashlight,
and ten
minutes later, he was back with an assortment of barks,
leaves and
grasses. He ground everything into a thick paste, and
tossed a pan
onto the cooking fire. He added a healthy helping of
Kimbo cooking
fat and let the onions brown, adding the paste and
eventually the githeri.
Chan earned everyone’s
respect
that night. I suppose the survival course did come in
handy.
***
Our Master Chef, an old
Kenyan man
who it was rumored had been Lord Baring’s chef, instructed
us through a mixture of invectives and wise sayings like
“Do
not play God”, “Humility comes before the knife and
fork,” and his favorite, “To cook is to travel through
cultures.” So in our cooking lab and white aprons we had
traveled to France, Turkey, Japan and Western Africa.
We had stopped by India where
Master
Chef started the journey by saying “Indian Food is like
Jazz,
Coconut milk is the drumbeat, turmeric the bass, cloves
the trumpet
– But curry”, he paused looking up in the air in search
of the right words “Curry is fool’s gold.”
But it was while in mainland
China
that the troubles started. There were three commandments
that had
to be followed at all costs, Master Chef declared. “Love
your
Wok. Never wash your wok with soap. And oil your wok
after each
use.”
We learned how to season the
Wok by
roasting it over open flames for an hour, sponging it with
oil,
then letting it cool. We rubbed salt and black pepper
over the
surface, and then fried sesame seeds. Soon, the smoke,
sweet and
light with hints of stir-fry, filled the room. I watched
my wok
transform from a glossy, buy-me-I-am-new shine to a black,
leathery,
sand paper gloss. After several hours of seasoning our
woks we
left them sitting on the counter to cool overnight.
The following afternoon,
after a morning
spent with Master Chef lamenting how nobody takes Chinese
breakfast
food seriously because of the invention of white bread, we
made
our first stir-fry dish. Nothing heavy, a little bit of
sesame
oil, two tablespoons of oyster sauce, soy sauce, minced
garlic,
onion, bok choy, carrots and broccoli poured over
short-grain white
rice. It tasted good, but not unusually good – seasoning
the wok didn’t seem to make a difference. We rinsed the
Woks
with cold water, dried them with paper towels, oiled them
again
and started the seasoning process all over.
Then at the end of the week
it happened
– and I understood what Master Chef meant when he said
that
the Wok, like language is also a keeper of culture. We
prepared
a simple broccoli-based meal, yet it contained hints of
past meals,
rich enough to be noticed, but calm so as not to overwhelm
the present
taste. It was the old giving way to the new, or rather the
new recognizing
its past, the original sauce still present like an active
ghost
in the new sauce I had just made. Later that evening
while at Madame’s,
it occurred to me that that if we could cook history, it
would have
to be with a wok.
I remember seeing Chan’s Wok
in class – oil sizzling in a bottom so discolored that it
was metallic, the edges a thin light blue that got darker
closer
to the top, the dark brown wooden handle split from
overuse. It
was utterly unlike my wok, which had a spongy, even sooty
inner
surface. Chan was clearly washing his wok in soapy water
and, what’s
more, scrubbing it clean with steel wool. Master Chef was
pacing
up and down, agitated, shouting “The Past is Prologue,”
“To love your wok is to let culture grow,” “It
must have history” as he tried to correct Chan by
reprimanding
the whole class.
Still, I didn’t foresee
Chan’s
actions would later tear the whole school apart.
***
When school reopened after
the fire
and we returned to a brand new dormitory courtesy of the
Chinese
Consulate in Nairobi, the first person I sought out was
Chan’s
ex-girlfriend. Jennifer, though Chinese, spoke English
with a British
accent. She was beautiful and clearly rich, but she had
some bohemian
tendencies – she liked to wear torn jeans with beat up
white
tennis shoes that during the rainy season kept slipping of
her feet
and getting stuck in the mud, and she liked to wear her
long hair
in a bun held in place with two chopsticks. I had an
inactive crush
on her.
“The wok changed Chan,”
she said when I asked her why they had broken up.
“The wok changed Chan?”
I repeated in surprise.
“When he started cleaning it,
he started forgetting his culture. And I loved him
because he was
home for me,” she answered in a tone that suggested I
understood
what she meant. I did not.
“You really left him because
of a wok?” I thought I might as well get to the bottom of
it.
“How can a Chinese woman be
with
a man who washes his wok?” She asked with a self-conscious
smile.
I started to say something
else but
she stopped me.
“I still love him,” she
said in a whisper. “But he has to stop. You are either
Chinese
or you are not,” she added as she stretched a long thin
arm
out of an oversized rainbow colored sweater to squeeze my
hand.
I felt my heart flutter. It was time to go before I
started misreading
things.
I was starting to
understand. A wok
in Kenya was no longer just a wok; it was about finding
mojo in
a place where you were different. Chan was just not being
reflexive
and defensive enough. In his ability to synthesize and
create,
in his fluidity, he was unbalancing everyone else.
***
After I left Jennifer, I
walked through
the famous Limuru fog to come across a group of Chinese
students
smoking up a storm of Marlboros behind the cooking lab. I
had quit
smoking a few years before but I had to find a subtle way
in.
“Sco?” I asked.
Kenyan lingua franca demanded that I ask for a sco,
short for a score.
Inevitably I followed this up
with
“Can I have some fire too? Damn to be out of smoke…and
fire.” The laughter that followed, at once a chorus of
different
pitched coughs, some low some high let me know I was in.
Besides,
this was an opportunity for them to disabuse me of my
friendship
with Chan.
“The strike…” I started
saying.
“It’s all about our culture,
man – We are in the belly of the beast - Babylon never let
dread-man grow,” a joke because everyone laughed, at me I
assumed but nevertheless, it was funny and I too joined
in.
“Culture…” I prompted
when our laughter died down.
“We are Chinese in Africa –
we are the ambassadors,” a woman masked by the smoke and
fog
said.
“But Chan, he is one of you,”
I responded, sucking on the cigarette and thinking of the
impending
re-addiction, might as well make it count.
“He want to fuck the wok,
instead
of walking the wok,” an anonymous voice, said to more
laughter.
“Look,” a more serious
voice said “We are here, we eat your food, we drink your
beer,
we are here. But how can we really know we are here?”
“But look people, the wok,
it’s
not even Chinese…everyone in Asia uses a wok…”
Someone slapped the sco
from my hand and slowly ground it to its death.
“In Africa, the wok is
Chinese,”
a voice said sounding dangerous. It was time to wade some
more
in the fog. I had one more stop.
***
At Mpishi College, there was
only once
place to find a concentration of Kenyans and Africans. In
spite
of everything we had learned about cooking, nutrients,
dishes from
far lands, Africans culinary students could always be
found at Wakari
Nyama choma where, the owner claimed, roast meat was
an art.
Take the African sausage, goat tripe filled with all sorts
of goodies–
he had a point.
So as soon as I walked in I
knew what
I had to do – order one kilo of the sausage and two kilos
of nyama choma– rubbed with curry but just enough
so that it was a hint to be overpowered with fresh garlic
and minced
cilantro. The African students would sing - the only
question I
really had to answer was this – how the hell was I going
to
give up this delicacy for information?
“Look man, Chan thinks he can
come to Africa and do whatever the fuck he wants. He is
messing
with our culture. He drinks changaa and messes
with githeri.
Look, you don’t see me adding boiled maize and beans to
broccoli”
someone summarized between mouthfuls of the nyama choma.
This is what it boils down
to I reasoned to myself: Jennifer wanted Chan
because he keeps her authentically Chinese, the Chinese
students
want Chinese cuisine and traditions protected and Africans
do not
want foreigners to mess with their cuisine and traditions.
In this collusion of interests, a strike was inevitable. But
what did Chan want?
***
When I told Chan that
Jennifer would
take him back if he stopped washing his wok, his reply was
to suggest
we celebrate our return to school by visiting Madame.
After we were nicely drunk
and he lay
peacefully on a wooden bench, I asked him why he washed
his wok,
and with soap, when all his troubles could end simply by
wiping
it clean. He did not say anything; he just lay on that
bench rubbing
his belly like it was a genie bottle. Then he abruptly
ordered
me to follow him to the cooking lab.
“This, this will be something
nobody has ever tasted before, not even I” he said as he
threw
fat salmon skin into his wok which he let fry until there
was a
nice ring of oil at the bottom. I knew that was going to
be in
place of oyster sauce. He skimmed off the now dry skin and
scales
and added some garlic powder, paprika, crushed red chilies
and diced
white onions to the oil. He turned up the flame and once
the sizzle
started, he turned it down to sweeten the onion until the
sauce
produced that musky sweet smell. He added some fresh
basil and
dashed some soy sauce into the wok. The sweet smell soon
became
a furious storm of clashing tastes, bubbling dangerously
like hot
molten lava.
Chan’s movements were
deliberate
and steady like he was keeping rhythm to something his
hands and
the fire were doing. He took some old rice and precooked
lentils
from the fridge and started heating them in a pan. He
added some
raisins before turning his attention back to the wok and
the sauce
to which he added peanuts and broccoli. When the peanuts
started
to brown, he took them out and threw in shitake
mushrooms. Three
minutes more and dinner was ready.
The food was a symphony of
tastes,
at once impossible yet possible. The lentils fought the
rice and
raisins, and the sweet onions tried to rise above the
hotness of
the crushed red chilies, the oil from the salmon swarmed
against
the current of the peanut oil. The shitake mushrooms,
cooked on
the outside, but steamed in the inside, had a taste that
did not
exist in my world until then – a slippery crunch that gave
way to the softest of bites, and the broccoli, soft on the
outside
was still juicy and crunchy on the inside.
On my animated tongue the
food was
a galaxy of tastes, each distinct and without the
heaviness of the
past that infused the food we had been cooking. Put
simply, it
was as god, or perhaps the devil, intended food to taste,
naked
and in the present.
As we ate, or rather as I
listened
to what I was eating and Chan the artist observed his
audience of
one, he tried explaining. “The soil in which things grow,
that is the real wok.” I didn’t understand and chalked
it to still drunken talk.
“You know they will ask you
to
stop” I said as I washed his wok with soap and hot water.
He did not have to answer. I knew why he would never
stop. And
he would never give this up for Jennifer.
I understood. My eyes were
open and
I was feeling lighter already. I too wanted to make
dishes that
were not prisoners of the past. Right was on Chan’s side
– and like in a revolution, we would win more and more
people
to our side – one liberated mouth at a time. And if we
failed
and were kicked out of the school, so be it.
We had tasted the future.
“Time to go back to Madame’s”
Chan said as soon as I had dried his wok on an open flame
and oiled
it with more of the salmon skin.  |
