And here’s the most incredible thing: over the course of a two-hour dinner, bai jiu (a clear distilled spirit of 40-60% alcohol) would be the only beverage. No water; you had to wash everything down with hard liquor. And more: if you wanted to quench your thirst, you needed to be part of a toast. As Sue explained in her mother hen voice, “Don’t you dahyr bring that glass to your lips unless you’ve given somebody cheers! That’s why I always sit next to someone I know, so I can go, ‘Ahram, cheers!’ when I need a drink.”
Yes, that was the truth. The entire table would refrain from touching their glasses until the top social-tier had begun toasting each other, then everyone would join in and take turns raising their glasses to each other or walking over to an honoree and standing to have a drink with him while he remained seated. Standing up to show deference was an added honor when making a toast, as were lowering one’s glass below the honoree’s when clinking them, and downing the glass completely and tipping it upside down to show it was empty. To signal this impressive feat (basically it was taking a tall shot of sake, vodka, or a similar clear alcohol), the toaster would call out “Gan bei!” which meant “Bottoms up!”
Everyone loved Grant and Sue, they were usually the life of the party, so they would each receive a lot of toasts, and Sue would always decline the gan bei in a funny way. Standing with an excitable (i.e. Chinese) man toasting her, Sue would say in a booming, Australian voice, “You gan bei. Me meiyou gan bei!” All the Chinese speakers would smile because meiyou (pronounced “mayo”) meant “there is no” or “not have” and Sue was using it to try and say “no” or “will not.” So, in effect she was saying “There is no bottoms up!”
The way the toasting would work out, the men in the most prestigious seats would generally remain seated and let people come to them as the toasts worked their way like social order dominoes around the table. Dinner guests spaced their drinks out over the course of the meal by taking many turns raising their glasses or standing to drink with each of their friends at the table. Toasting served as a way for people to introduce themselves to the host and his friends- who had significant gwan-shee, and it also broke the ice between strangers of equal social standing. And, obviously it was a happy way for old friends to show affection to each other.
Although it was necessary to wait for the toasts to refresh oneself, once the toasting began there was a chain reaction of opportunities to have a drink. It was actually quite awkward as I made and attempted a succession of toasts because I had to either try and repetitively slide my stubborn chair backward or stand straight up and try to avoid buckling with the seat cushion pressing into the back of my knees. All the standing for toasts, in a way, nullified the need for the extra-long chopsticks. As long as we were up to drink we could have reached out to scoop some food into our bowls.
The most movement was for the highest honor-giving: making a pass around the table to make a toast with every seat. This did not happen often, but there were a couple times I went out for a dinner with a new group of people and Aunt Fong had me stand up to pay tribute to my hosts. She led me around to initiate the standing toasts and introduce myself to each guest; I was equipped with my tall glass in one hand and a bottle of bai jiu in the other, so I could refill my glass after each bottoms up. I knew the bai jiu was volatile, mind you, I refused to drink it unless strongly socially obligated, and I was sneaky about refilling my glass with very conservative pours (I held my fingers tightly together and gripped the bottom half of the glass in a sleight-of-hand attempt at blocking my hosts’ vision of my drink level), but their eyes were watching me and they made sure I emptied my glass with every drink.
Circling the table, I thought after my first drink Wow. That was a little much. I need to sit for a mome… after the second That’s enough. This was a bad i… After the third drink my mouth was numb to the burning sensation of the alcohol, after the fourth I forgot whether I was going clockwise or counterclockwise around the table, the fifth How many people are at this dinner? And who are they? Whatever number was after fifth What’s going on? Is this- is this China? I’m sitting down.
All right, I’ve embellished, but there were a few times when I had to sit down and turn away from the table to steady myself after drinking too tall a glass of bai jiu. I missed American culture, where I could choose my own beverage or, if out with friends, call it quits after a drink or two. The peer pressure in a Chinese business dinner was not very unlike the atmosphere in a college fraternity house party. I hated being socially forced to drink, especially when it was the sweet, vengeful bai jiu. One time, I saw Ahram successfully wave it off and I assumed she got away with having tea either because she was a lady or there was something forceful about the way she chuckled and said, “Actuarry, I don’t want dat.” (Not mocking, that’s how she actually spoke.) Whenever it was offered to me, I gladly accepted light beer as a compromise.
Something you may already know about the Chinese is that it is very common for their face to become flushed whenever they drink alcohol. I don’t understand the genetic reason for this, nor do I much care, but I find it a peculiar trait, like the way they have dry, crumbly earwax as opposed to the waxy, liquid substance in the ears of every white person (go ahead, look it up). Anyway, it was not uncommon to see a group of men walking in dress shirts and black slacks, two or three with rose pink or puce faces, one perhaps stumbling, at one in the afternoon.
I remember, one spring afternoon, seeing some young college students helping their friend who was dragging the tops of his feet against the sidewalk as he struggled to keep pace with his designated hoisters, carrying him with his arms spread across their shoulders. It was still the lunch hour, so I stood perplexed, thinking Did he get into a car crash or something? He was wailing and tears were streaming down his red face- maybe he got into a fight over a girl? Noticing my stare, my Chinese friends told me he was just having a hard time handling his alcohol, best to ignore him.
Ever naïve, it dawned on me that the culture of drinking is nearly universal, it only changes forms between societies. American binge drinking is an atrocious menace responsible for thousands of traffic fatalities and yearly freshmen deaths at university campuses, but of course ours is not the only nation with a drinking problem. The Chinese, while seemingly very cautious not to mix alcohol and cars, loved to get carried away with friends and colleagues as a standard practice. In my observation, drivers declined to have any drinks and no one would goad them “Just one…” I don’t have the drunken driving numbers on the national level to corroborate this; it was always plain who the driver was and his teetotal status was strictly kept.
One young man I met told me he was thinking about going back to school to change careers because he couldn’t abide all the drinking required of him as a businessman, where every deal was sealed over dinner by a show of alcohol tolerance. It crossed my mind that without the regular opportunity to get loaded at dinners and expel emotions in the KTV (karaoke) clubs, the overworked Chinese would reflect on their lives, trapped in a gray, decrepit communist state, and become either crack-brained or suicidal. Problem drinking there, as often here, was society’s pleasurable stress-relief valve.
That night, eating with Grant and Sue, the Korean teacher Ahram, and the collection of officials from the university, I was thankfully given a large bottle of beer to drink from as I sampled new foods during our dinner’s many rounds. I mentioned before that the food in China was strange, usually lying in a pool of oil and prepared either boiled or stir-fried. When the serving girl brought out vegetables, they were either limp greens on an oily platter (no one eats salad in China) or crispy or steamed vegetables like lotus root and corn on the cob. The lotus root was a new favorite of mine, but the flavorless corn was well below par for the tastes of a native Iowan. With the many meat dishes, there were a large variety of kinds and spices, but a sameness connected them all. Nearly every meat dish was served chopped up, bones and all, and served spiced, oily, and often served barely above room temperature.
A meal of steamed corn, bean soup, various and mysterious limp vegetables, some kind of oily meats, and sliced melon.
Being an American, I have never been that interested in the path the animal takes from farmyard to table, nor have I ever been subjected to witness the work of the butcher. Looking at beef and chicken cuts, shrink-wrapped in plastic white trays in the grocer’s refrigerated, brightly lit display, I have had convenience in choosing my meat and ease of mind in divorcing it from any breathing, bleeding creature. However, it has seemed to me that the conventional cuts of meat must be fairly obvious to a trained butcher. For example, in every bucket of fried chicken are the main parts of the bird: breast, wings, thighs, and legs. The Chinese would also eat the feet and head (not the beak or skull, mind you), but the rest of the bird would be chopped into unrecognizable bits. Considering that Chinese consumers can choose to pick out their bird live, as we do with lobster, and watch it killed and maybe cleaned in front of them (as we don’t), I expected that they would all be expert in cleanly dividing the meat into its standard portions. But no, they took that naked hen and chopped it up, I imagined with two cleavers like the Muppets’ Swedish chef or a drummer on a snare solo. The meat was truly that messy. Every bite, and I mean that- no exaggeration, had bone and tendon in it.
The Chinese prized the nutrition in the bones, and so I learned to chew around the big bones and grind up and swallow the little ones. My aunt Fong would offer me a straw when we had beef bone soup so that I could follow her lead and suck out the marrow. Me: “What? Shen me? (‘shun-muh’)” Aunt Fong: “Mm! Very good!” Sluuuuurp.
On my aunt’s adamant insistence, I tried sucking out some beef marrow for myself. I rate it two thumbs down.
Speaking of soup, I cannot get through a discussion of the cockamamie cooking methods of Chinese cuisine without mentioning one unbelievable dish, one meat that I could manage to eat without bones in every bite. At a home-cooked meal, the main course we once had was chicken soup. That is, a whole cleaned chicken sitting in a weak, yellow broth. The broth we sipped with our spoons had less flavor than a single bouillon cube. I have never tasted thinner soup. I think it was only water and oil. And the chicken itself we comically tried to peel apart with our chopsticks. No one brought out a knife to slice cuts off for each guest; we twisted the flesh from the bone and often partnered to hold the meat and strip off strands like pigeons struggling with a large bread loaf. Besides the impractical hassle, it tasted bad, too. I thought I had traveled around the earth to visit another world, where the people didn’t have the sense to know how to prepare and eat chicken, or even realize that the way they were doing it lacked sense altogether. It was as if the natives had never prepared or eaten a chicken before, but I knew they were far more acquainted with the tasty creature than I was. Some of them had chicks in their house and pet roosters that would stalk the sidewalks. Small city residents saw live chickens every day.
Chickens strutting outside someone’s house.
This is not to say that China was without tasty meat dishes- or protein dishes. China was a tofu lover’s paradise with bean curd in every shape, texture, flavor, and smell. Grant and Sue’s favorite meat dish at the restaurant, and an internationally famous dish, was the roast duck. This was a meat that was at least shaved thin by a cook and served mostly free of bone. We ate it wrapped in a thin pancake with scallions and dipped it in a sweet bean sauce. Quickly assembling a wrap and dipping it while the automatic lazy Susan rotated by was a test of timing and chopstick dexterity.
My favorite dish was the braised pork (hong shao rou/ 红烧肉), served hot in a round, black stew pot. China has not only different varieties of pork than America, but they also serve it in a way contrary to American expectations. Meat, fat, and skin were served in one three-layered, bite-sized piece. Stewing the meat this way made the pork succulent, sweet, and tender. I have complained about a lot of things in China, but without reservation I will say that their pork was far better than American pork, and I come from America’s largest pork-producing state.
Do yourself a favor and find a Chinese restaurant than can prepare this. Tell them you want “hoang shao ro.”
I fully realize that eating skin, fat, bones, feet, and chicken heads (cheeks, eyes, and brains) is repulsive, a near abomination, to Americans raised on diets of white meat chicken, ground beef, and thick steaks; really, raised on a diet of processed foods- foods processed far from view or thought. Well, tastes are individual, and I am a man with a big appetite and an adventurous palate, so take my word on this for its relative worth when I say the comb was the tastiest part of the chicken, the feet and knees were the best parts of the pig, and pickled chicken feet were not that bad. I eventually grew to like them. I avoided the blood sausage completely and I am fairly confident I avoided dog, but like I said, most meat dishes were chopped up into unrecognizable bits, so it is possible that the “beef” wasn’t always beef. I will move on so readers with weak stomachs won’t get sick.
After many rounds of new dishes and over an hour’s worth of toasting, as bellies swelled to capacity, the tempo slowed down and the feeling became very relaxed. Diners leaned back in their chairs, some might smoke (smoking was common in China, but not as much as I expected, though I once caught a little farm girl with a cigarette in her mouth), then the serving girl would clear away the empty platters and combine dwindling remainders together, and guests could even sip their drinks at will.
The last round was signaled by a dessert platter: watermelon, orange slices, dragon fruit, and sometimes a mildly sweet pastry. I think I ate a record amount of watermelon in China, or at least a personal best. Once springtime arrived, local farmers would drive trucks full of the round fruits (not oblong) into town every day, and a crowd of shoppers (not a queue- remember, this was China) would bring one home as a daily staple. After the meal, the group would polish off the thin slices of watermelon and lethargically pick at the dragon fruit, pausing to let the large meal settle and finish off the last remaining bits of the evening’s conversations.
Then, when the pause lasted for too long a moment, the group implicitly shared the understanding that the long affair was over. Grant or Sue said, “Well, all right then” and the whole table heaved themselves to their feet, using the chair backs and table top for support. Any contents remaining in the bottles were poured into glasses, and we all held our glasses high in the air and gave one final “Gan bei!”
After that, the real entertainment began. If it wasn’t clear who was footing the bill, if payment had not already been arranged and settled beforehand, then dinner guests would fight (push and shove, but not punch) for the check. It was at the same time alarming and charming to see them insist, “No! No! No!” and reach over their friend’s shoulder to snatch the check away. They each had honed techniques to get the winning end of this aggressive ritual and earn the prestige of paying for the meal. In American, I was used to “going Dutch” with friends, or seeing little scenes that might go back and forth for a few verbal rounds, each person saying, “No, you paid for it last time” or offering other pleas before the eventual payer holds his ground with something firm and the others graciously say, “If you insist.”
In China, they do not acquiesce. Whoever has the bill might hold it above his head or at an arm’s length away from his opponent, like a playground game of keep-away. Or, if trying to thrust cash on his friend, he would jam it into his friend’s pants’ pockets, or if his friend were playing defense with his hands already in his pockets, then the money would be dropped in the shirt or jacket pocket.
I once witnessed a great battle between Uncle Jiang (Aunt Fong’s husband) and his sister. Family honor was on the line. They knew each other’s tricks. From the dining room to the hallway, riding down the elevator, and out of the lobby and into the parking lot, she thrust cash at Uncle Jiang and he blocked or riposted every advance, opening her hand and stuffing the bills right back in. They chattered at each other like two squirrels fighting on a tree trunk, and I watched silently from the sidelines. Uncle Jiang’s sister made a brilliant strategic choice and gave the money to me, the stunned third party. Uncle Jiang wasn’t having it, so he snatched it right out of my frozen palms and stuck the money in his sister’s purse as she tried to walk away. As persistent as the widow in Jesus’ parable, she clung to the door of the taxi cab as Uncle Jiang and I tried to make our departure. I was sitting in the front passenger’s seat, and the window was open a crack. She made the winning move, dropping the wad of cash into my lap as the driver took off. There was nothing Uncle Jiang could do. He would have to wait to repay his sister another time.
Two odds and ends related to meals and restaurants: like the two English teachers in New York had suggested, I tried to find a local restaurant on the food streets which I knew and trusted. This seemingly simple task was made difficult by the unintelligible signs and haphazard set-ups of Chinese shops and street-side restaurants. If you were not literate in the written language and culture, you were not going to be able to approach a restaurant counter and sound out “taco” the way you might to a Spanish speaker at a Mexican restaurant (which, unlike the average unmarked restaurant in China, would have traditional Mexican architecture or a Mexican flag to help distinguish it to passersby). The dishes in China were many, strange, and puzzling, and even if you knew the name of a favorite, the locals probably wouldn’t grasp your pronunciation attempts. So what I did was scan the open-door restaurants and street vendors, looking for anything familiar I could recognize and use as a stepping stone to boldly request an order from a stranger in a foreign language. Relying on my very limited vocabulary, I spotted the characters for “beef noodles,” stopped into the four table small restaurant, and said the name of the dish in a very plain sentence with a voice that was quiet but nonetheless clear in pronunciation. They brought me out a big bowl of beef noodles (mostly noodles with a couple tidbits of beef) that cost only one American dollar, and I ended up returning to this same restaurant for the same meal several times.
Some places advertised “California” beef noodles. Most of the beef noodle shops I visited were run by Hui people, a Muslim minority, not the majority Han Chinese.
The other thing: the Chinese, like healthy eating advocates in America, were always stressing the importance of breakfast. As a typical morning greeting, they would ask, “Have you had your breakfast?” Growing up and going through school in America, I heard classmates say countless times that they never ate breakfast. It was a common thing to skip, and people seemed to take pride in nonchalantly boasting that they never ate breakfast. In China, the attitude was the opposite; casually forgetting breakfast would have been a shock. They made sure to be up early to fill up on noodles, fried pastry sticks, potato and egg pancakes, hard-boiled eggs, soup, steamed buns, and congee (rice porridge).
My school’s P.E. teacher once got me breakfast when I told him I hadn’t eaten. An English teacher, Miss Liu, heard about it and said, “Small Black bought you breakfast!? Small Black is our leader.”
Lunch was likewise a big meal. The lunch “hour” was around two hours long, so people could enjoy a big meal with family or colleagues and take a mid-day nap. Dinner could be big, but it didn’t have to be. It was usually only a large affair if friends were gathering together at a restaurant or entertaining guests at home.
Perhaps it was all the strange food in China- its unsanitary preparation from farm to street market to kitchen to table- that caused me weekly stomach sickness. I made sure to always boil my water or drink from a water cooler, so I didn’t suspect that. Of course, the ever-present crowds of people and filthy environmental conditions could have been the main culprits or contributors. All the large meals, doused in oil and red chili sauce, and the unwanted glasses of alcohol certainly never allowed my stomach a moment’s peace. The dinners were at times tasty and fun, but no moment in China was ever pure bliss. Every intriguing bite concealed the potential for pain.
The answer to why I got sick so much in China: I never saw any health department grades in any restaurant windows, but I did see places thawing out their squid in a side alley.
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