Alice Yang
Hongmen Banquet
Excerpt
The private banquet room was raucous, adrift with the sounds of oil popping and clinks of glasses. The waitress noted that most of the diners already bore tomato red cheeks, their faces flushed from the flow of erguotou and rice wine. While her colleague busied herself with refilling the glasses—only for them to slosh over as they toasted again—she brought in two more dishes, placing them on the lazy Susan, blooming with plates half plucked at. The patriarch, the lao ye—a man made small by the years, wrinkles pulling on his face so that his mouth became a pursed, inward line—was treating. Whether or not he would be the one to pay, if he would be beaten by another relative slyly passing a credit card under the table, was another question. With large parties like this, there were always at least three attendees who tripped over themselves in their efforts to foot the bill. In the few months of her waitressing career, she had witnessed families sitting at cleared tables arguing over the check for an hour, elbows knocked into faces, and once, a bottle dashed over a head, leaving a shower of shards and a lolling skull to clean up.
The patriarch had ordered half the menu, and her colleagues continued to stream into the room, their arms warm from the undersides of porcelain plates. Guo bao rou, square slices of pork, garnished with garlic and drizzled in Shaoxing cooking wine. Fish heads fried in oil, their filmy eyes flickering upwards to the mouths they’d be buried in. Long, doughy noodles—for longevity—soaked in chili oil and red vinegar, slurped down burnt throats.
“This is a homecoming,” he had announced to the girl taking the order, “don’t let our mouths or cups go empty.” She left the menu with him in hopes that he’d order the remaining half by the end of the night.
The pièce de resistance of the feast was a thirteen-pound roast suckling pig. His legs were comically splayed out on the platter—pulled to the sides as if the creature had been nearly quartered by a pack of hunting dogs. The resemblance his face had had to a pig’s was burned away: his eyes charred slits, his snout shriveled from heat. They decorated the corpse with orange slices of persimmons and clementines, pieces of pineapple, a bed of napa cabbage. Though not heavy, the platter was large and unwieldy and had to be carried by two waitresses. Together, they nearly spilled the pig into a girl’s lap as they lifted the platter over her dark head and onto the table.
The waitress observed that this girl, sitting closest to the door, was an ABC. American-born Chinese. She had passed the back of her head—that sheet of black hair—enough times to know. The few ABCs she encountered seemed indignant to be exposed as outsiders, thinking they could sink into Chinese society without a ripple. But picking an American out of a crowd was easy, even if they wore a Chinese face. The tells were there: her Mandarin was clunky and devoid of an accent. She wore a thin, strappy dress. She had choked on her first glass of erguotou, a continuous cough soothed only by an entire bowl of rice. Chopsticks frantic as she shoveled the grains into her mouth, looking to scrape the burning from her tongue. The waitress silently brought a second bowl of white rice, placing it at her side.
With large, watery eyes set in a sickly face, she turned to her and said in English, “Thank you,” forgetting where she was. Which was how the waitress knew the erguotou was working.
O
Their family was Northern—born and bred in Jilin since it was called Manchuria—which meant that the act of knocking back erguotou was instinctual, a muscle memory passed down. In the brutal winters, chill and slant snow cutting down to the bone, warmth came from a glass. The esophageal burn of baijiu pooling in the stomach lent heat when heat was too expensive. In the summers, swamp-like and sticky, they chased away their discomfort with drink. Ankles swollen from clusters of mosquito bites, heat stroke, frostbite were all cured the same way.
The Chinese phrase for “cheers” is gan bei—literally “dry your cup.” May was learning that the Lis took this very seriously, and several aunts and uncles had peered into her shot glasses, inspecting for wayward drops. Refusing her weak protestations, the relatives continued to ply her with shots, toasting often to her. After three shot glasses in which she had left dregs of clear liquid, she had learned her lesson. Don’t come up for air until the bottom was bone dry. Not until you could see your reflection—warped face, now green with nausea, stretched eyes converging in a tiny, pointed chin—in it.
May could no longer feel her mouth, sensation swallowed up by the acridness of the alcohol. A half-blind Baidu search under the table revealed that erguotou, a baijiu distilled from sorghum, was 100 proof. And still the heat and bitterness were foreign, different from the fraternity-served Everclear that she had once tried at university. Warmer too than the smell of bleach.
Her grandfather—seventy years old, the carcasses of six shot glasses spread before him—looked and acted no different than when he was sober. Rosacea blistered his cheeks with a permanent blush. The round table was crammed to bursting with drunk shu shus and a yis: Lis from all different family lines reaching over one another to spin the lazy Susan and serve themselves their preferred dishes. May was unable to differentiate between these distant cousins and her maternal uncles; they were all stitched together by the same ancestral grief, their cheeks all windburnt from the same winters.
Lai, lai, lai, an aunt said, using her chopsticks to gesture towards May’s empty plate. May dutifully handed it to her, and the aunt began to pile the plate high with pinches of dishes: twice-cooked pork, chicken stewed with mushrooms, Peking duck wrapped in pancakes. At last, a rough-cut slab of the roast pig riddled with fat deposits.
Hao le, hao le, the girl laughed. Enough, enough.
Aiyah, the aunt exclaimed, tai shou le. Too skinny. Other relatives nodded in agreement.
May laughed again, this time the sound half-strangled. She knew that if she were not as thin as she was, they would chide her, prodding her with an Aiyah! Xu yao jian fei!—must lose weight! Her mother had said the same when she was eleven, her baby fat still clinging to her bones. Under her mother’s roof, she was fed scraps: the peeled whites of eggs, the skins of tomatoes, the guts of a nearly-hollowed sweet potato. Eventually, she found comfort in the way her fingers slotted between her ribs. Weaned on hunger, she craved its familiarity—the gnawing acidity shoring up along the sides of her stomach a daily lullaby.
Skinny just like Fang, an uncle said.
Another aunt clicked her tongue, You could never put meat on Fang. She was born in the winter. January, too, the coldest month.
A slippery wonton wriggled out of May’s chopsticks, an earthworm burrowing back into the ground after being brought out by the rain. She left it wilting at the bottom of her bowl.
What does being born in the winter have to do with it? May asked.
Mei guo mei mei—American little sister—in Jilin when your mother was born, you could not fill a belly in the winter, an uncle answered.
Yes, you should feel lucky to have so much food in front of you, an older relative added, their tone lecturing. The older generation smiled at her, nodded encouragingly to her plate—a gesture for her to start eating. They chewed with their mouths open, and in their smiles, they showed May glints of digestion through the slats of their yellow teeth. Not wanting to appear thankless, May picked at a piece of duck, forcing a close-lipped smile as she chewed. Her mouth punctured the crisp, papery skin, sunk into a pillowy layer of fat. She held back a gag as she swallowed its softness.
An aunt sighed. Do you remember how we used to prepare for the winter? And now, so much food in Jilin you could gorge yourself to death on it. She was around May’s mother’s age, but her hair had turned bone white. The ceiling light that bounced off of its whiteness was a gunshot that made May’s pupils constrict.
About the Author
Alice Yang is a Chinese-American fiction writer from Virginia. Her work explores themes of intergenerational trauma, postcolonialism, and environmental racism.