DAY 1: Asked counterpart if 9am meeting was
acceptable. She says "10am is better, 9am too earlier". Then night
before she texts me:
"I'm in the suburb of Beijing .maybe I
can't arrive at our office on time in tomorrow morning .could we meet at half
past 11.I would like to treat you a welcome lunch first ,after that , we can
talk about our working.how about that?"
I think this is a good situation. Plus I need to
register myself at Big Brother foreigner registration in the morning, which
takes 1.5 hours longer than anticipated of painful language
barrier-ridden queuing. Arrive at 11.30, counterpart is running 15 minutes
late. Meet counterpart at 12 midday and head to lunch. Yes! More fabulous food
- this time salad (surprisingly similar to how Mum makes it), silken tofu soup,
eggplant fabulousness and red bean sticky rice that is like crack cocaine on my
palette. No of course I cannot pay, this is a welcome lunch! Counterpart takes
me for a tour of the office, fills out a form in Chinese and realises she
should have told me to bring my laptop. She tells me to go home and enjoy the
lovely—only moderately smoggy—afternoon. Also to pack my bags for a work trip
to nearby Shandong province starting tomorrow. Sum total 2.5 hours of
'work'.
DAY 2: Supervisor rings my mobile a 4.56am. We are
flying out to Dongying and he will pick me up in 20 minutes. Sleepy ride to the
airport ends in breakky at the airport of Hong Kong style soup with dumplings
and noodles. First chopstickful lands on my nice clean skirt, to my
supervisor's immense amusement, then I realise my cup of water is freshly
boiled only after pouring down my throat (reminder this is an indecent hour of
the morning). After a very pleasant flight, we arrive in Dongying at a
chandelier-laden hotel with the biggest rooms I’ve ever seen. I'm told that
today is for xiuxi (rest) in the king-sized bed. Ok, resting
it is! Fresh pair of clean men's underwear is in the bathroom but no
iron?
Phone call at 11.30 announces someone is taking us
to lunch ... now. Ok! Clothes back on. Drive into a gated series of
caul-de-sacs. What? Double storey houses with white picket fences? Are we in
country USA? No it's a Chinese Western-style community, which apparently is a
sign of wealth. Hauled into someone's living room, eat something that tastes
like peanut and sugar but looks like a spider web wound into a little ball with
chunks of tasty dead fly. Not too bad, actually.
Get up again, we are going to pick caomei (strawberries)
in the garden … I’m not sure why. Then back in the car (aha! We are not eating
at the obsessive gardener's East-meets-West house) to a local restaurant. A man
who looks like Santa crossed with Genghis Khan motions to us with his long
stick. I realise there is a big plastic pool of fish next to him—this is a nice
one? He's asking me. I smile politely and then the next minute BAM he's
clubbing the fish with a rolling pin. Surprise surprise, carp for lunch.
It's cooked in a hotpot in the middle of the table, boiled in front of us with
Chinese cabbage and tofu. The waitress comes to stir the soup and carries a
bowl of yellow dough. She is rolling it up into balls and slapping it to the side
of the pot so that they become lovely carp-scented steamed maize breads. My
suspicion is the hot pot is actually supposed to be spicy and they have left
out the chilli (as a token gesture for the foreigner) which is why it's kind of
bland. Two men eat almost a whole 40cm fish while I have a whole one piece
before it becomes too much. Then back to hotel to xiuxi some
more.
Another phone call heralds dinner time! Walk into a
private room hoping this will be a nice cosy end to a rather strange day. Instead,
we find eight men already at the table standing, smiling, and waving us into
three special seats they have allocated to us. I realise my boss is the
distinguished guest of a group of local politicians. Wishing I read over that
chapter on Chinese banquets! Oh memory, why do you only store useless pieces of
information? Let's think: host faces door, 2nd most VIP to his right, 3rd to
his left. Sit where told. Don't eat or drink until the host does. Only drink
when toasted. Be careful of the dreaded baijiu.
Cheers with lip of glass lower than the other person's.
Food keeps coming out and I don't get a chance to
eat because I have to stand up every 3.5 seconds for another toast. And for
some reason I have to drink baijiu while everyone else gets
wine. No fair! Ok so finished toasting, now I can eat ... oh everybody is
getting up. What? We're leaving? It's only 7.30 and after all those shots I'm
slightly more than tipsy. Back to dark room.
DAY 3: 1am get to sleep dehydrated—turns out baijiu is
not easy on the stomach. 2am wake to sounds of excited or angry female voice
through the wall. Think my colleague may have a mistress ... struggling to
accept cross-cultural difference while half asleep and suffering from hangover.
Alarms screams breakfast. Then we meet last night's guests in the foyer and
three black cars turn up. Incidentally, black is a bad choice in the most
polluted country in the world, but it's a national obsession. The local
politicians and their buddies get in the black cars in a fluid organised motion
according to a set of rules that is plainly obvious to everyone but me.
An usher quickly shoves a small flower onto my
lapel before I get shuffled into a large lecture hall. My boss is on the panel
in front of me, and I am seated in the front row. In the middle. By myself.
Nobody seems to care that I can't actually read or understand anything the
panel is saying. I don't even know the name of this conference or what it's
about. Each panel member gets up and says about 30 seconds worth of (what seems
like) stirring but serious speech. Then the audience claps for barely a few
seconds after each speaker—for some reason this makes me uncomfortable, as if
there were some international standard for applause that is not being met.
My boss is urgently motioning for me to get up and
leave. I realise the introductory speeches are over, or there has been some
hiatus. I leave the lecture hall but my boss stays in there to give his
lecture. Now I'm stuck with a group of local officials who do not speak English
and can't really understand why I'm there. Or maybe they do, but I don't? I
find out shortly that we are doing a tour of some buildings—a university dorm,
a LED light factory, a 'software park', a real public park, and some government
offices. Each place has a dedicated officer with a headset and speaker to
provide the tour. The head honcho seems to be disinterested, and I don't really
blame him. He likes the 3D televisions, though. Then we are abruptly sitting at
a conference table drinking lü cha
(green tea). The two sides of the table—one side with local Dongying officials,
and the other side with officials from somewhere else nearby—take turns in
giving epic speeches while everybody else sits in silence, trying not to fall
asleep. My boss (returned from the abyss) tells me they are listing their
city's achievements. What the?
Then to lunch. By this time I'm savvy. Not the
stunned mullet I was yesterday. Oh yes, you can't fool me, I know what to
expect. I can do this whole banquet thing, you just watch me.
Walk into the most ornately furnished dining room
I've ever been inside. A whole new set of people here. Head honcho from this
morning is not sitting in the host seat—he is number 2 on the table this time. The host from
last night's banquet is not even in a position of honour here, he's just one of
the participants. Realise there is no lazy susan to distribute the meals like
any other banquet in which I have participated. Waitresses start bringing out
individual meals and Mr Host turns up. Lots of standing and bowing and chasing
others' glasses to the floor trying to get my glass lower than theirs. Mr Host
is apparently the 2IC for the whole city, which is why everybody is suddenly silent,
solemnly listening to his ranting. More individual dishes come out—soups, sea
cucumbers, things that look like prawns but are only a centimetre long,
vegetables, fruit, unidentifiable pieces of fish. I lose count when the whole
crabs start coming out. I have to ask my boss how to eat it—how embarrassing!
Luckily you don't have to do that one with chopsticks.
Then Mr Host gets up and moves to a non-honoured
guest seat. What's going on? Boss seems edgy, he tells me the 'most important
man' in the whole city is coming to dine with us! More toasting, more standing
up and sitting down, more listening to long rants from slightly tipsy
politicians in Chinese. I wonder whether it's acceptable to just get up and go
to the bathroom? Nobody else seems to be doing it, or maybe they're just
subtle. Where is the bathroom, anyway? Did I ever learn how to ask it in
Chinese? Maybe that waitress will tell me. Oh! Everybody is up again. Time to
go. Shake hands with the 'most important man' and get shuffled into a car,
belly aching and head reeling with new information.
What the hell just
happened?