Geng Ping’s Excellent Adventure

Geng Ping was having a Hollywood moment. Everyone in China, at least everyone she knew, had heard of “The Godfather,” the classic Hollywood tale of the American dream gone sour. And now this daughter of a Beijing policeman was standing on a hill overlooking Francis Ford Coppola’s Napa Valley home, sampling a bottle of Niebaum-Coppola wine that cost more than most Chinese earn in a day.

Of course, she didn’t really like wine, but that’s another story.

For an ambitious young chef from a working-class Beijing neighborhood, it was a food fantasy beyond her wildest dreams: a tour of famous Napa Valley wineries, lessons from some of America’s finest chefs, dinners at bistros featured in Gourmet magazine and, now, her own brush with fame.

Some might call it fate. Others would chalk it up to cosmic forces. But Geng had no patience for whys. In the here and now, two different forces were converging: the aspirations of American agricultural interests angling for a bigger share of the China market, and the best intentions of idealistic chefs eager to move an image of American cuisine beyond fast food. Like Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole, this 28-year-old found herself on a culinary adventure that would alter her life--though not in the way her benefactors intended.

Geng Ping was born in 1973, at the tail end of communism’s darkest years. by the time she was in elementary school, the Cultural Revolution was history and China’s leaders were tentatively opening their doors to the once-taboo forces of capitalism. While the land of Mao suits and communes gave way to Gucci boutiques and McDonald’s golden arches, Geng pursued the simple pleasures of childhood: playing with her elder sister in their West Beijing neighborhood, swimming at the local pool. She was 16 on June 4, 1989, when Tiananmen Square became a bloody battleground in the struggle between pro-democracy supporters and the government, an event that sent U.S.-China relations into the deep freeze. Asked about that time, Geng grows quiet, then politely asks to change the subject. At first glance, Geng and her friends don’t appear that different from young people in Tokyo or New York. They watch Hollywood blockbusters on DVDs, hang out at neon-filled shopping malls and sip Starbucks coffee. But in some areas of life, particularly politics, the government still casts a forbidding shadow. The message is clear: Respect tradition and tread incautiously at your own risk.

Geng, for example, had discovered that her options as the second daughter of a working-class couple were limited. She loved Chinese classical literature and poetry and fantasized about becoming a teacher. But middle school graduation was followed by a fork in the path: She could either attend high school, which would allow her to go on to college if she passed the competitive exams, or vocational school. Her parents urged her to embrace the practical. Why not police work?

Leafing through a book of vocational programs, Geng came across culinary training for the hotel industry. The opportunity to work in a place populated with foreigners sounded intriguing, although kitchens made the slender young woman uneasy. (“Women cooks in China are usually fat,” she observed.) She settled on a program that trains chefs for the “cold kitchen,” where she could surround herself with fruits and vegetables.

After graduation, Geng, who goes by Cindy (she got the name from the movie “Cinderella”), landed jobs at several Beijing hotels and spent 10 months on a cruise ship in northern Europe. In 1997, she joined the Hong Kong-based Shangri-La chain, which was building a 562-room hotel in Dalian, a bustling Chinese port across the water from North Korea. There she coordinated the produce orders and oversaw the preparation of the hotel’s salad buffet, fruit baskets and other cold foods. Competition was fierce for foreign business travelers and Japanese tour groups, making cost-cutting a top priority.

Dalian offered few diversions for a young single woman. Indeed, other staff grew tired of the remote location and returned to Beijing. But Geng persevered, becoming the highest-ranking woman in the kitchen. Her salary rose to 7,000 yuan ($846) a month, nearly 10 times the national average, and she was assigned a private room in the staff apartment building.

But the pressure and dawn-to-dusk workdays exacted a price, transforming her into a more solemn, quieter person. On her one day off, Geng had little energy to do anything but sleep or read. Or eat. Occasionally she and her friends would splurge on the only American food they knew: McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Pizza Hut. At least she could savor the pleasures of junk food.

In the meantime, 5,700 miles and cultural light years away, a small group of American chefs were conspiring to transform China’s image of American cuisine. For those swept up in their good intentions and noble ambitions, life would never be the same.

Is it possible to change the taste buds of a nation with a food culture dating back 5,000 years? Three years ago, the Culinary Institute of America and the Western U.S. Agricultural Trade Assn., a trade promotion group, decided to find out. The mission of the CIA--the cooking school, not the spook agency--was to present a more sophisticated image of American food to China. Think fresh, seasonal and ethnic. Think roast turkey with spicy peanut mole or Thai spicy braised beef with star anise and lemon grass. The trade organization wanted to sell more U.S. agriculture goods, a rather audacious idea in a country whose global palate is still in its infancy. (The most popular Western food in China is KFC, which opens a restaurant in that country every three days.) How to achieve both goals? Target influential chefs in the Western kitchens of China’s five-star hotels.

Backed by a $900,000, three-year grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the CIA launched the China Foodservice Education Initiative in the spring of 2000, arriving at Dalian’s Shangri-La Hotel just as the long, cold winter set in.

As the most proficient English speaker in the hotel kitchen, it was Geng’s responsibility to keep the classroom stocked and bridge the gaps between the foreign chefs and the nervous Chinese staff and students. The early encounters were painful. “When we got there, they were absolutely stone-faced,” says CIA instructor Adam Busby. “I think they were fearful we were going to come in there and make their lives hell for two weeks,” the 38-year-old Toronto native recalls. “By the third day, they were laughing. By the fourth day, we were all friends.”

Busby was also intimidated. “The Chinese knew how to cook before anybody else in the world knew how to cook,” says the chef, who had previously owned Star Anise, a popular Vancouver, B.C. restaurant. “Their whole philosophy of eating, their loyalty and allegiance to their flavors is amazing. We don’t have that because we’re such a young country.”

But he soon learned that his enthusiastic Chinese students, largely trained in classic European-style cooking, were unfamiliar with many culinary influences Americans take for granted, even flavors from nearby Vietnam, Thailand or India. Geng had been exposed to international cuisine on the cruise ship, but the CIA menus included ingredients she had never heard of, such as peanut flour and orange flower water.

Geng, the de facto culinary and cultural translator, felt as if an exotic species had invaded her kitchen, a group of wisecracking cowboys in white hats. They poked fun at each other, substituted ingredients with abandon and insisted on venturing out into the frigid air every evening to seek new food adventures.

Their culinary knowledge was impressive, from the curries of India to the moles of Mexico. But linguistic dysfunction lurked around every corner. In the translation of the CIA’s teaching manual, some finer points were lost. Busby didn’t realize how much until he turned around one day and observed one of his students poised to drop a whole turkey into a vat of boiling vegetable broth. “My recipe said roasted turkey, but the Chinese version said poached,” he says.

To stave off disaster, Geng and Busby began reviewing the recipes before class. Several days into their meetings, Geng began to let down her guard. She confided that she dreamed of becoming a hotel food and beverage manager but feared it was impossible because of the discrimination women chefs faced in China.

Before he left Dalian, Busby told Geng that he hoped to see her again. Not likely, given the cost of a trip to the United States, she replied sadly. “She had this real lust for wanting to get more out of life but this overwhelming feeling of repression. I felt bad that she felt her opportunities were so limited,” says Busby, who chased his culinary passion to France, South Africa and western Canada before settling at the CIA.

On their last day in China, the CIA chefs dropped by the kitchen to give the Shangri-La staff some CIA aprons, T-shirts and instant-read thermometers. Busby and Geng shared a warm handshake, but there was a wistful quality to the obligatory farewells. “Everybody kind of knew we wouldn’t ‘See you later,”’ says Busby.

It was a warm May afternoon when Geng Ping disembarked at the San Francisco airport. Her suitcase contained some clothes, a chef’s coat and hat, a set of knives and a bottle of appetite suppressants. She had come prepared for a parallel universe of abundance and affluence, though she soon learned that life in America was far more complex--inside and outside the kitchen.

Shortly after Adam Busby had left Geng inspecting produce in her Dalian kitchen, the CIA was asked to set up a tour under the U.S.-funded Cochran Fellowship. The 10-day visit was designed to expose young Chinese chefs to the creation and consumption of food in America, from the ground up. The CIA put Geng on the guest list, and Jess Corder, the Shangri-La’s Australian food and beverage manager, urged the hotel to let her go. “She’s talented,” he says. “She needs to be pushed to take risks.”

The Shangri-La didn’t take any chances. Geng was told she must repay all travel costs related to her visit to America if she left the hotel within three years. She wasn’t deterred. Next stop, the CIA’s West Coast branch, located at Greystone, a historic winery in the heart of Napa Valley, home to gourmet restaurants, specialty farms and hundreds of wineries. Within just a few miles of Greystone, Geng was able to sample French bistro cooking, Italian pasta and pizza, visit a Dean & DeLuca specialty food store and tour farms producing organic vegetables.

On the first day of class, Geng showed up at the CIA’s high-ceilinged kitchen--a maze of $250,000 French stoves and hot tub-sized stockpots--dressed in her neatly pressed jacket and white chef’s hat. The stainless steel counters were piled high with donations from the 32 corporate supporters of the program. There were boxes of U.S. top choice beef steaks and pork ribs, gleaming Alaskan salmon, oysters that just hours earlier were in the Pacific and bags of nuts. There were sweet peas, fingerling potatoes and endive from nearby farms.

American bistro-style cooking, with its emphasis on seasonality and informality, was the focus of the lessons. Bill Briwa, a CIA instructor and former chef at Thomas Keller’s famed French Laundry restaurant in nearby Yountville, secretly hoped to wean the Chinese chefs from their European roots, which tended to be more formal and “sauce-centric.” For several days, he guided the seven chefs through a series of dishes: beef tenderloin with glazed onions in balsamic vinegar, pan-roasted squab with Cabernet cassis and roasted shallots, soft-shell crab and cauliflower grenobloise.

For Geng, the sole woman and the only chef not trained in the hot kitchen, there was a lot to absorb. It helped that Briwa was a master of the self-deprecating gibe, using humor to tell his students, “Relax, nobody’s perfect.” While others joked in Mandarin or nodded off behind a stockpot, Geng scribbled notes.

After a couple days, Briwa unleashed the chefs in the kitchen with instructions to create something for lunch. American bistro was history. Out came the well-tested recipes that had won accolades back home. Geng used a piece of top-grade American beef to produce a lemon grass-infused salad. Her friend, Shang Yuan Xin, who worked in the Furama Hotel Dalian, made a spicy Dalian-style soft-shell crab flavored with ginger and soy sauce. The Alaskan salmon was thinly sliced and served sashimi-style.

But in the midst of this gastronomic fantasy, Geng felt uneasy. Back home, price almost always trumped quality. She served farmed Norwegian salmon on her salad buffet because it cost 25% less than the American variety, and most Chinese wouldn’t know the difference. U.S. beef may be more tender but its Australian competition is a lot easier to get in China and 15% to 25% cheaper. Years of cost-cutting made it impossible for Geng not to make these calculations.

Money wasn’t the only barrier. Many ingredients commonly found in the CIA kitchen weren’t very appealing to the Chinese. Briwa urged his students to try a sliver of California Sareanah cheese with a slice of quince jelly. Geng didn’t want to offend her host, but just a waft of the pungent cow’s milk cheese made her nauseated. In fact, many Chinese are lactose-intolerant, lacking the enzyme needed to properly digest milk products. Back in her kitchen, Geng made her staff taste the dishes with cheese. The same with olive oil. “Too rich,” she says.

Which raises a delicate issue. In their eagerness to exploit the world’s fastest-growing economy, many Americans believe that all they need to do was get rid of those pesky tariffs and corrupt officials and U.S. goods would flow into China. But aside from some brand-name luxury goods, specialty products and high-tech machinery, it is not easy to find goods bearing the “Made in USA” label. When Wal-Mart opened its second store in Dalian last year, it entertained customers with Western-inspired rap dancing, but 95% of the goods for sale were manufactured in China.

What if the Chinese don’t need or want what the U.S. has to offer?

Growing up in modern China, Geng was accustomed to the contradictions of a society with one foot in the new millennium and the other a century behind. What she hadn’t expected was to find a different set of paradoxes play out in Gold Mountain, the fabled land of paved gold streets that had been a magnet for poor Chinese for more than 100 years.

The month before she had left for America, a Chinese fighter plane and American spy plane had crashed over China’s Hainan Island, triggering the first diplomatic crisis of the newly installed Bush administration. The Chinese press had depicted America as a hotbed of anti-Chinese sentiment, with hostile voices calling for retaliation and a boycott of Chinese goods. Much to her relief, Geng had discovered a country that was far more hospitable than she had imagined.

In her desk at the Shangri-La, Geng has kept some menus from her gastronomic journey, whose highlights included homemade sausages served with white sauce, potato puree and sauteed prunes at Thomas Keller’s Napa Valley bistro, Bouchon, and a sweet dessert soup topped with edible flowers at Rick Bayless’ famed Frontera Grill in Chicago.

Her favorite? Well, she admits somewhat guiltily, it is the Cheesecake Factory, the popular Detroit-based chain restaurant featuring more than 20 varieties of cheesecake. Of course Geng never tasted the namesake dish, given her dairy aversion. What brought her back twice was the friendliness of the staff. “In China, you’re guest and servant,” she says. “In America, you’re friend and friend.”

The mental snapshots that are Geng’s most memorable souvenirs of America extend far beyond the $10 glasses of wine and the boisterous lessons in the CIA kitchen. They include the unexpected sight of homeless people sleeping on the streets of San Francisco. Or young women discarding their cigarette butts on the streets of Chicago, where the chefs attended the National Restaurant Assn. trade show. “I thought in America everybody cares about the environment very much,” she says. On the other hand, her chain-smoking companions were horrified to discover that the country that fancied itself the global champion of individual liberties treated smokers as if they were criminals.

“Everyone wants to go to America. They want to work there, want to live there,” she says. “They think life is very good in America. They think money can come very easy. I don’t think so. Why do people think they can change their life by going outside, if they cannot change their life here?”

With winter approaching and the war on terrorism scaring off tourists, business at the Dalian Shangri-La was unusually slow. But customers arriving in November got a treat, a Tex-Mex promotion featuring Mexican music and CIA-inspired barbecued chicken, grilled corn and beef tacos. The advertising posters credited “Chef Cindy, trained in America.” Geng warned her boss that her shopping list included a few pricey American products, such as pecans. “I told him if you want me to do this promotion right, I cannot use cheap things or the guests won’t like it.”

A few months earlier, Geng had endured a grueling 25-hour train ride to take part in the CIA’s final China cooking seminar, at Shanghai’s Pudong Shangri-La Hotel. It was a chance to rekindle old friendships; Busby and his wife, Barbara Alexander, taught the class, and several of the chefs from her America trip also took part. It had been just eight months since their first meeting, but Busby was struck by Geng’s more assertive nature. Still the only woman in class, she didn’t hesitate to ask questions about a delicate smoked salmon rillette or offer advice to a struggling classmate. “We saw a much more confident chef,” Busby says.

On the last day of class, Geng bid farewell to her teachers, smiling when Busby said he hoped to see her again soon. On her way out the door, she was pulled aside by Glen Ballis, an Australian who had recently joined the Shangri-La Pudong as executive chef. He had been impressed by her cooking skills and her “ability not to be overwhelmed by the male-dominant thing in the kitchen.” Would she like a job? Another door had opened.

By the time the CIA packed up its trunk of spices the final time, more than 1,600 Chinese food service professionals had passed through its classes. Yang Ying Chen, who had accompanied Geng to America, is helping plan a new California restaurant on the drawing board at the Kerry Centre Hotel in Beijing. Chen Gang, a sous-chef at the Grand Hyatt Shanghai, has added several of the CIA’s dishes to his menu, including a salmon with a creamy white bean veloute that one customer ordered three times in a row.

Busby, who had sneaked into Chinese kitchens whenever he got a spare moment during his visits, brought back some new wok skills and a deeper appreciation for a culture that has perfected the art of creating more from less. His favorite meal, the one that haunts his dreams, was an early morning bowl of steaming hand-made noodles bought from a street vendor in Shanghai. “They’re remarkable in their ability to make something magical out of very little,” he says.

The future of the CIA’s innovative China Foodservice Education Initiative is uncertain, since the U.S. Department of Agriculture rejected the school’s application for another round of funding. In this age of fiscal responsibility, it is far easier to justify spending money on changing people’s buying habits than their attitudes. A spike in Chinese purchases of Alaskan salmon or California almonds can be easily documented. It’s more difficult to measure the expansion of culinary creativity in a luxury hotel in Shanghai or the effect of a young Chinese woman’s warm feelings toward America.

The U.S. devotes millions of dollars a year to promoting sales of U.S. beef and wheat, but the nation’s most influential export may be the attitude that anything is possible, that mixing the flavors of the world can produce a meal worthy of an emperor, that being born poor is not always a ball and chain.

Geng now understands that doors swing open--as well as shut--even in China. Her move to Shanghai was quashed by the Chinese government, which insisted that the Shangri-La fill that job with a local. But she has gotten permission to go to Beijng this year to be trained in the hot kitchen, which would take her a step closer to a hotel management job.

In her apartment, she has several bottles of California wine that she brought back from America, along with a wine dictionary and some cookbooks. Before visiting the Napa Valley, the only imported wine she had tried was too bitter for her taste. Then, she took a sip of Kendall-Jackson Chardonnay and was smitten. “I am saving it for a special occasion,” she says with the confidence of someone who knows that day will come.