Chinese Cooking for Diamond Thieves

Here’s the tragic thing about my years in China: I don’t really like upscale Chinese food. The fancier the restaurant is, the less I want to eat the steamed fish or abalone or boney-chicken-bits. Too many chewy textures, too many things flavored with bai jiu. Give me Beijing street food over upscale Chinese food any day.

I know that Dave Lowry’s descriptions of dishes in Chinese Cooking for Diamond Thieves, were accurate, because they weren’t very appetizing. In one section, our hero is making a steamed fish dish, and even while I wanted the lao wei to win the prize for best Chinese chef in St. Louis (I’ll get to that), the smell of steaming carp is a distinctive one. And not my favorite one. And it’s associated with a distinctive taste. And actually it’s turning my stomach to think too much about eating it. Evocative prose for sure.

Our hero, Tucker, is a lao wei in St. Louis, Missouri, trying to become a Chinese chef. Tucker is the best kind of unreliable narrator, beginning his list of dozens of rules with keep it simple, and trying to be completely honest from his very subjective perspective.

Fortunately, Tucker’s Mandarin is better than mine, so he’s able to eavesdrop on full speed Chinese, instead of just perking up at colors, numbers or yingwen laoshi out of a conversation. (Look, I’m able to do basic tasks in Chinese, but I talk like a baby.) So, when he overhears a girl at a rest stop telling her friend in Mandarin that she’s stranded, he gallantly offers her a ride. Also, she’s incredibly hot, because in fiction, stranded girls are always hot.  The early-twenties romantic plotline wasn’t bad, ticking all the required boxes for witty banter, quirky semi-dates, and sexual tension that must be fulfilled when a Very Smart Guy falls in love with a Mysterious Girl, but fortunately, it’s not the focus of the novel.

Spoiler, or I guess, an un-spoiler: The diamonds are not hidden in the New Hampshire rest stop, so the novel doesn’t end with Corinne and Tucker retrieving the diamonds from the spot where they met. (I was expecting that for about two-thirds of the novel, and was pleasantly surprised when it didn’t happen.)

The diamond thievery is interesting, and in general, the secondary characters are quite believable. Bao Yu, especially, is a lifelike mix of mockery and shyness.  In China, when someone calls you by a polite, formal name and asks if you had a nice weekend, they probably hate you. A real friend will call you Chubby or Sleepyhead or Slowpoke or something else mildly insulting. (I happen to know the Mandarin for zits — dou dou — because it was the affectionate nickname of one of the secretaries in my Yantai school. Ouch.) As Tucker gains friends in the restaurant kitchen, he naturally trades casual insults far worse than grass mud horse. It was a little bit odd how many of the English-speaking characters all spoke in the same snarky banter, but I chalked it up to Tucker’s narration, the way a friend will recount events in their own words, putting their own speech patterns on repeated dialogue.

Chinese Cooking for Diamond Thieves is an engaging, readable novel about new-adult identity, Chinese cooking and customs, and avoiding murderous Hong Kong gangsters in the midwest.