The Dim Sum Drama (Flash Fiction Part 6)

This is the 6th part of the story. The previous parts are here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

Babutai pauses and looks around, enjoying the astonishment of his audience. “Chef Chow’s cleaver is very sharp. He sharpens it every day.”

“What happened next? Did Chef Chow hurt anybody?” We ask and urge Babutai to continue. He takes his time to finish his coffee and his snack.

“You want another coffee and another snack?” One of us asks.

Before Babutai can answer, his cell phone rings. After finishing the phone call, he says, “Ladies, I got to go. Lau asks me to go to Bamboo Palace right now.”

“But you haven’t finished your story yet. What happened last night?” We asks.

“Next time. I have to go now.” He says and the next moment he is gone.

Babutai doesn’t have to finish what he wanted to say since rumors swirl in the community. Soon afterwards, the story comes out, which varies here and there in details. The one I’ve heard, which I think is the most credible since everybody cherishes her own version of truth or untruth, is that Chef Chow had been in love with Lau’s wife Chrysanthemums for years. When he heard women’s scream that night during Lau and Arjiang’s negotiation meeting, he immediately suspected that Chrysanthemums might be hurt. So he took the big knife from the counter and rushed out. Needless to say, he saw Lau holding a chair above his head, and he was about to throw it. Chef Chow didn’t have the time to determine who’s against whom, but he had always had the unexpressed grudge against Lau, who was the reason that Chrysanthemums couldn’t marry him. So he pointed his knife at Lau and yelled at him for three minutes, expressing all his frustrations, anguish, and disgust. In particular, he dwelled on the fact that Lau had been very bad tempered and very arrogant towards Chrysanthemums and made her life a hell. Lau was surprised that Chow hated him so much. Lau knew that Chow and Chrysanthemums liked each other as co-workers, and he didn’t realize that Chow considered him a monster who had bullied, subdued, and exploited Chrysanthemums for two decades. Lau was so shocked and disoriented at the revelation of this love affair that he went to a bar nearby, which he had never entered before, and got drunk. The next day, when Lau woke up and became sober again at about 11AM, he realized that his wife and Chef Chow were gone. They disappeared. So he called Babutai, who was telling us the story outside of the Korean cafe at the time, and asked him to come to Bamboo Palace.

My friend Pammy had another version of the story, in which Chef Chow is not a real chef. Chow is a distant cousin of Lau and knows little about cooking. He is just an assistant to the real chef, but Lau likes to give Chow a “chef” title as a way to inspire him to strive for higher goals. Chow couldn’t bring his wife to America for various reasons, and after waiting for a couple of years, his wife married somebody else in their hometown. Chow has tried to run away with Chrysanthemums many times, but financial concerns have prevented them from achieving that. Recently Chow has come up with a new way of convincing Chrysanthemums to run away with him, but Pammy doesn’t know the exact detail of this new plan of his, but it is rumored that Chow has conjured up a sinister plan. Anyway, Chow utilized the meeting of Lau and Arjiang, waited until Lau lost his temper so that Chow could wield his cleaver. And finally Chow took the opportunity to make it clear that he and Chrysanthemums are lovers. And after that, the lovers just took off.

“But where did the two lovers go?” I ask Pammy and Dodo two weeks later when we meet.

“Nobody knows.” Pammy says. “Babutai told me that Lau filed missing persons report for both his wife and his daughter. He claimed that his wife was kidnapped by Chow and his daughter was kidnapped by Arjiang. The police, after some investigations, didn’t believe Lau. They think his daughter married Tony willingly and his wife ran away with Chow of her own volition.”

“I mean poor Chrysanthemums. She is either married to Lau, who is impossible to live with, or she is running away with Chow who has no skills and no income. Oh, poor woman.” Dodo says.

However Chrysanthemums is not as helpless as we think. She is trying her best to explore life in the limited circumstances that life has offered her. And she and Lau will have a good fight eventually.

(To Be Continued Here)