But the Shanghai of Wang Haibo’s childhood was a starkly different world. He remembers only poverty and hunger. During the Cultural Revolution, his father (a university graduate and school-board official, the sort of person particularly persecuted) was sent away to labor in Manchuria and the family slapped with the shameful label fan geming, “counterrevolutionary.” Wang’s mother was demoted to the lowest possible job in an outdoor vegetable market, where she earned the U.S. equivalent of $6 a month. With two children and two grandparents to support, and the grandfather sick with cancer, she could not feed the family. “There was never enough,” he remembers now. “After dinner, I was always hungry. By the time I woke up in the morning, I was starving again.”
Wang recalls the day he realized food was to be his lifelong preoccupation. “I was in fourth grade,” he says. “The Red Guards had taken away everything, even our umbrellas. My sister and I had to walk a long way home from school in a hard rain. We were so cold and so hungry. When we got home there was nothing to eat. No money to get anything. From that moment, I knew.”
Memories of humiliation still gnaw at him. “School was a place where anyone could do anything to you. Several boys beat me once. I was so enraged! But I couldn’t take them all. So I chose the head boy, and chased him until he fell down and broke his knee. The next day, the school broadcast the story and ordered me to make a cash restitution and give him nutritious foods—meat, fish, eggs!” Even now, the memory of having to give away such precious, treasured food brings tears of deprivation to Wang’s eyes.
When the Cultural Revolution ended, in 1976, Wang went to work in the Shanghai city government. With this job came one of the time-honored privileges of the Chinese bureaucrat, something which was to utterly change his life—group trips to restaurants.
It was as if a curtain had lifted. Real cuisine was a revelation. “Right away I saw it was more than flavor. It was art, color, and shape. It had to appeal to the eyes. When I tasted it I said, ‘I deserve good food. I deserve to eat well.’”
So he set out to learn, devouring books and magazines and eating out at every conceivable opportunity. “In time, I came to realize I could taste food better than my colleagues. I knew how something was going to taste as soon as it arrived at the table—by how it looked, by the aroma. Just as today I know the ingredients of a marinade by the color, by the smell, without tasting it.”
At 34, Wang Haibo faced a choice: stay in China, or leave. He felt America had the best opportunities, even though his “nonexistent” English was a problem. Still, at this point, he had not cooked, except for a few meals (“attempts,” he calls them) prepared in the kitchens of Shanghai friends. Nevertheless, when he arrived in the U.S. in 1996 he found there was one job for which no English was required—low man in a Chinese kitchen.
Life was hard. The restaurant was far from his rented room, and he walked to and from work. Though the largely Chinese world of the San Gabriel Valley enabled him to get by without English, as a new arrival he felt looked down upon by the earlier immigrants. He did the work they no longer wanted: cutting chicken, onions, and pork; peeling shrimp; cleaning the oven and the wok.
While he worked, he watched. After 18 months he decided he wanted his own restaurant, whatever the risk. This was the American dream. “I was very conscious that the average restaurant fails after a few months. But I had made a promise to my parents. I told them, ‘I will not let you down.’ I had only one purpose when I stepped onto the ground in America, to succeed.”
So he opened a tiny place. Still, he did not cook—not yet. “I got a chef to work for me. I only made some of the soups. But I watched the chef very closely. Finally, I thought, ‘I can do this.’” He stepped behind the wok, and things went well. Revenues climbed. Soon he was making enough to open a second restaurant, and then a third—Green Village, which has brought him both success and reputation.
His secret? Aside from his clearly exceptional sense of taste, he subjects everything on his menu to constant inspection and review. “Now I look back on those chefs I used to work for. They were good. But what is different between us is this: They learned the dish and they stuck to that way of doing it. Not me. I am always looking to improve. Very important to my success is putting my whole mind to it. Every time a dish leaves the kitchen, I am thinking, ‘The taste, the aroma, the appearance, how can I make it better?’”
Twitchy, hyperkinetic, and painfully thin, Wang is as driven a man as I have met. His large, restless eyes roam his restaurant incessantly. He rarely sits still. I’m not sure if he sleeps. (He once called a mutual friend at 12:45 a.m. to discuss the challenges of getting water weeds from Hangzhou for a certain soup.) He has long, light hands, philosopher’s hands, but these too give away his life’s obsession, for they are mottled with the multiple spatter burns of the fanatical Chinese cook.
For my family and friends, Wang made an elaborate 15-course meal that demonstrated how even the food of one region, the Yangtze Delta, includes all the diversity and complexity of “Chinese taste.”
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