We got back to the hotel around five. I was planning on a quick nap to feel human again, and then a light meal at the hotel restaurant. I was tired enough that I was actually looking forward to the sheet-covered wooden board that masqueraded as my bed.
“See you for dinner at seven,” I said to Wing as he opened the message he just collected at the front desk.
Without waiting for his response I headed straight for the elevator. I passed a man pushing dirt around with a filthy mop and had the elevator in sight when I heard footsteps gaining on me.
“Heh heh,” he said, as I reached for the button, “Good news!”
“Really?” I asked, hoping he had found an earlier flight back to Hong Kong.
“We’re having dinner here with our hosts from the PLA.”
“Dinner?”
“Yes, they will be here soon.”
“For Christ’s sake, Wing, you must be fucking kidding me!” I thought as I said, “That’s great. Please call me when they get here.”
Despite my lack of enthusiasm, this was theoretically a good thing and in any event I was ready to tuck into a plate of General Tso’s chicken and a bowl of hot and sour soup, followed by a few orange slices and a fortune cookie. Back in my room I managed to splash some water on my face and lay down for a few minutes before Wing knocked on the door.
I was worried about the business conversation, and hoped the soldier would be there to help with the translations. Otherwise the back and forth would be bounded by the limits of Wing’s Mandarin, and we would be spending the next two hours exchanging pleasantries like “soup good food,” “China big country,” and “America far away.” Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad.
Wing and I sat down in a private room off the main dining room at a large circular table on which sat a glass Lazy Susan. About ten people were already there. The soldier was not among them.
Introductions were made in the usual Asian way. One by one, we shook hands, then, facing one another, each presented, with two hands, a business card to the other. This had happened a few days earlier in Hong Kong too. It’s intended as a form of respect, but I found it a little awkward. If each person uses both hands to present a card, there comes an uncomfortable moment when one of them has to take a hand away to accept the new card. It was a game of chicken – who was willing to risk offending the other by releasing his own card first? Not knowing when to let go, I decided not to. They each eventually caved, which is fortunate, otherwise I might still be standing there.
One reason that cards are exchanged in this manner is to give the recipient time to make a connection between the name, face and title of each person. Most of the cards were printed only in Chinese – a few had English on the reverse side, though no one tried to greet me in English – and the names were hard to understand, much less pronounce. We sat down around the table and I realized that I had no idea who was who or who did what. And why did all these army people have cards anyway?
Several waiters and waitresses, who had been standing by the walls, came to the table, opened beer bottles and filled our glasses. One of the hosts, a thin man missing a front tooth, stood up to make a toast. I figured he was in charge, so I took to thinking of him as “the colonel.”
I worried I wouldn’t be able to make sense of Wing’s translation.
“Mutual China-America cooperation and friendship, and the great city of Changsha with the visitor of honor from New York and the great teleconferencing mutual benefit of friends.”
I was right to worry. We were also back to teleconferencing again. Terrific, I sighed to myself.
“Gan bei!” exclaimed the colonel as he began drinking his beer.
“Cheers!” Wing translated.
I had a sip of my beer and put it down. I then noticed that the colonel and all his lieutenants had emptied their glasses. Wing had emptied his too.
“You’re supposed to finish,” Wing said, “Gan bei means empty your glass.”
“I thought you said it meant cheers.”
“Yes, heh heh, same thing,” Wing said.
I had been to college and was good at this, so I didn’t bother pressing the point. I chugged my beer and placed the empty glass on the table. The colonel and his lieutenants smiled and said something.
“They say you very good drinker,” Wing translated.
I was a good drinker, and maybe this would be a nice evening after all.
Before I had a chance to order my General Tso’s chicken, one of the waiters placed a plate of food on the turntable. The colonel then rotated the dish to me. It was unrecognizable – nothing like the Chinese food I had grown up eating. I wasn’t sure if it was meat, vegetable or fish. It didn’t look like any of these. Several of the lieutenants were smiling at me and motioning for me to eat. One of them, a lady, even said “please.” She was one of the few who had English on the back of her card. I decided to think of her as the “foreign liaison officer.”
I understood that it was an honor to be offered the first taste, but a quick sniff was really all I needed to determine that it wasn’t stomach-worthy. As they eyed me cautiously I recalled that in ancient times, the Chinese Emperor would have a food taster test his meals to ensure they were safe. I considered insisting that someone else have a go, but instead relented and took a bite of this slippery treat.
The battalion – as I started to think of the group – looked pleased as a waiter filled the small shot glasses in front of each of us with a clear liquid. I took a whiff and recognized it immediately. This was definitely something I knew from back home – jet fuel.
Another one of the men stood up, made some remarks to me and cried, “Gan bei!” Down the hatch went the jet fuel.
Wow! I checked to see if flames had scorched my seat.
“This is called bai jiu or white wine,” Wing said.
“Wing, there’s no way this is white wine.”
“Oh, yes, heh heh, white rice wine,” he clarified. “They like to drink it a lot a lot.”
At least it would help me get the food down.
The Lazy Susan spun again and I continued to sample unrecognizable foods that to my Western palette were either too soft, too slimy, too fatty, or all three of these at once. Several times I thought, “dog meat, I bet this is dog meat.” Evidently the Chinese palette was much broader than what I was accustomed to. As soon as I sampled each new dish, the rest of the battalion would dig in.
Every so often one of them would stand up and toast me individually with a glass of bai jiu. The ones on the far side of the table would walk around to make their toast with me.
The foreign liaison officer even came around to make a toast.
“Cheers!” she said.
“Oh, your English is very good.”
“Ah?” she replied.
“Cheers!” I said.
“Oh, cheers!” she smiled back as we finished off our shots.
Wing sometimes got toasted too. But they weren’t toasting each other. It didn’t take a mathematician to figure out that I was drinking a lot more than they were.
Despite my better instincts I kept eating and kept drinking, washing the food down with beer instead of bai jiu whenever I could.
“He said you very good with chopsticks and wants to know where you learn,” Wing translated for one of the lieutenants.
“My dad taught me to use them when I was a kid. I come from a small town, but we had four or five Chinese restaurants there. We have Chinese restaurants all over America.”
This seemed to surprise and amuse them.
“Which is better, the Chinese food here or the Chinese food in America?” the colonel asked.
I thought for a moment how best to evade this diplomatic trap, but the bai jiu had started to get the better of me.
“It is an impossible comparison since I believe that many of the foods here are not legal in America.”
Wing coughed lightly, paused, said “Heh heh,” then conveyed my response in an agreeable tone. The man answered Wing happily and the battalion smiled, then continued chattering lightly among themselves. Wing looked down at his plate.
“What did he say?” I asked, pressing for the translation.
“Yes, heh, heh, Chinese food. Very good, heh, heh. America, heh heh, yes,” Wing blathered nervously.
I was certain Wing didn’t have the courage to translate my original statement. That was probably a good thing.
As the eating proceeded, it become clear that we were all digging into the same common dishes without using any sort of serving utensils. The only way to transfer food from the common dishes to our own was by using chopsticks – the same saliva-covered chopsticks that just came out of our mouths. Wasn’t this an enormous violation of basic hygiene? If one of us was sick, wouldn’t we all now be sick? What if someone had a communicable disease?
At the Chinese meals I had in Hong Kong—and certainly the ones I had in the US—there were always serving spoons, or sometimes two sets of chopsticks, a “public” set for transferring and a “private” set for eating. Yet the battalion was completely fine with all the double dipping.
They must do it all the time, I thought. Was I being culturally insensitive? I considered the possibility that I was framing this in terms of my own background and that I needed to be more accepting of other customs and less judgmental of foreign cultures.
Then I pulled my head out of my ass. Of course this wasn’t my problem! They were being insensitive to the realities of hepatitis, H Pylori, stomach flu and god knows what else. I had dined in 40 other countries, and never saw this to be the practice. How could five thousand years of Chinese culture miss out on such a basic advancement in human health? And considering, as I learned later, that the hepatitis infection rate among Chinese people at that time was at least 1 in 10 and I was dining with 10 people, what were my odds? I had unwittingly entered into the food version of Russian Roulette. In later years I would come to call this type of dining the “Wheel of Death.”
The difference between Russian Roulette and the Wheel of Death was that there were no winners in the Wheel of Death. Everyone had to eat.
This can't possibly be a good thing.
I decided then and there that I could no longer partake in this unhealthy practice. Even at the risk of insulting the People’s Liberation Army of China, I was going to have to find a way to avoid foreign saliva for the remainder of the night, no matter the cost.
This line of thinking prevailed for a while. The colonel and his lieutenants took turns toasting, and shouting gan bei as I pushed food around my plate. One advantage I had was that the new dishes came to me first, so I could fill up a little before the contamination stage (though who knows what was going on in the kitchen).
A young lieutenant with thick glasses slurred a few sentences then ended with “gan bei!”
“Respect for drinking…much business…telecom service…drink…trust…happy,” translated Wing.
I couldn’t tell if Wing’s translations were improving with the bai jiu.
Despite a few attempts on my part, broad statements like this were the closest we got to talking business.
A few more gan beis and I was eating directly from the common plates, not even bothering to transfer anything to my own plate first. My inhibitions were rapidly disappearing.
“Tell Lieutenant What’s-His-Face that I’m part Irish, so alcohol has no effect on me,” I said to Wing.
I felt like I was back in college playing silly drinking games. I just couldn’t quite figure out why I was doing it in Changsha with the Chinese army, and why they were interested in voice mail, or business in general.
I later learned that the Chinese army was much more involved, especially in those days, in business – almost any kind of business – than it was in the typical things you might associate an army with, like fighting and killing. I also learned that it’s a Chinese custom for business people to get very drunk together, and spend very little time talking about the relevant business issues. Only if you’re plastered out of your head does the real truth come out, and so if you haven’t gotten to that stage with potential business partners, they won’t feel that they can trust you. Who knew that American college life would provide such thorough training for doing business in China?
And just like in college, I kept drinking, laughing, toasting and drinking until all at once I didn’t feel so well. Wing hadn’t had as much to drink as me, but he wasn’t in good shape either. His translating had turned into an occasional low mutter to himself. Suddenly, he got up, staggered to the corner and slumped down onto a couple of chairs. This didn’t faze the wait-staff in the least.
The lieutenant to the left of Wing was faring only slightly better. His face was red and he looked unsure of his whereabouts. The men were all lighting up cigarettes now and he stood up momentarily, perhaps to ask for one, then sat back down and pulled his chair in as if he had just arrived. He then put his face down on the table and went to sleep.
I said my goodbyes and stumbled away from the table. Soon I was back in my room, though I have no recollection of the elevator or the hallways. I puked in the bathroom, and passed out on the bed.
I had survived the Wheel of Death. Now only a hangover and a flight stood between me and Hong Kong.
Shanghaied 