dilettante

Whatever you do, don't drink the White Wine

(the saga of my trip to China last year continues, to give me something to post, you something to read, and all of us something to combat all of the bad press China's been getting lately.)

Physically speaking, I have felt slightly loopy ever since we got to China. After riding the elevator in the hotel or when I haven’t eaten for a while, I have brief moments of dizziness, like my brain spins 360 degrees in my head and then comes to a halt, rocking slightly. I don’t know what causes it, but it feels slightly like vertigo. My left leg is covered in itchy mosquito bites and though the first days I was bounding and invincible, exercising and going without lunch and forgetting to drink water, now the rings appear under my eyes. When I brushed my teeth this morning I spat blood; my tongue is raw. Did I burn it on the shaozi, or am I dessicating in the Beijing heat?

Monday, 20 May: I did not think it would happen to me but it has: I am tired of Chinese cuisine. Last night (19 May) we wandered the restaurant row until Molly had her ‘good feeling.’ Every waitress we have encountered tries to talk us into chicken with cashew nuts, pen marks all over the entry in the English menu. Instead, we ordered noodles with spinach (delicious), steamed broccoli (a welcome, basic dish), spare ribs (very fatty), and a boiled fish dish that arrives in an enormous bowl of steaming broth. There are more hot red peppers floating in the bowl than there is fish, and each bite is also full of red peppercorns. Patrick feeds me the cheeks of the fish, which he says are a delicacy. Again, the meal is cheap and tasty--¥88. We cross the street and encounter the same tiny flower-selling girls we had to dodge the other night [these very young—maybe 9 or 10 years old—girls sell fake roses, hounding anyone who doesn’t look Chinese with their “hello flower” singsong, repeated over and over and over until you either buy the flowers or run away]. X gives one some stickers [which we had brought just for this purpose] and this stops her in her tracks. We have to leave to keep her from shoving them back at us, and when we turn and look back at her from some ways down the block she is standing stock still in the same spot, just staring at the shiny stickers in her hands.

We return to the same Hutong restaurant we visited with some Europeans the day before and I am marginally successful at ordering YanJing beer and some snacks—weird boiled peanuts and spiced sunflower seeds. After we order, we see the waitress leave the restaurant, trot off down the alley, and return a few minutes later with a big package of the sunflower seeds. So accommodating! None of us really like the peanuts but we eat them anyway, for something to do, because we are the only customers out on the patio and there is nothing for us to look at. There is some sort of large dinner party going on inside the restaurant, and eventually Molly takes my phrasebook and decides to crash the party. What we learn when we finally develop the courage to go in and join her is that we have stumbled upon a work party for the restaurant [likely why there were no other customers] but that the owner is there, and he is exceedingly friendly and insists that we drink ‘rice wine’ with him. There is much shouting of "Gan Bei!" and clapping. This beverage resembles not wine so much as a sweet kind of battery acid that he can guzzle like soda water but which renders us blithering idiots in a matter of three tiny shot glasses. We were worried that turning them down would be rude, and I have a sort of ‘tough girl’ complex, so we kept toasting along with them, even going so far as to smoke a couple of their super-toxic, sick-making unfiltered Chinese cigarettes. No wonder everyone in China is coughing and hacking all the time.

We sang Beatles karaoke with them—so much more tuneful when really sloshing drunk—and the owner came on to Molly in the bathroom, even though his wife (who was extremely sweet and had been translating for us the entire time) was just outside. At that, we stumbled home. I cannot remember the walk itself, but I remember walking arm-in-arm with Molly, talking loudly about what a nice person I thought she was, as X walked nearby to protect us while Patrick raced at top speed toward the hotel so that he could be sick. Somehow we got home, and up to our hotel room, and after ridding myself of the horrible substances in my stomach, I somehow found myself outside the hotel room, in my stocking feet, and without a key card. I rode down the elevator in my confusion, got to the lobby and happily recognized my surroundings, so I rode back up to our floor and staggered back down to our door. All of the doors have little illuminated doorbells, which I recall thinking was very thoughtful, and I pressed ours so that X could let me in.

When no one answered the door, I had a moment of panic, thinking that I had just rung the wrong doorbell and that some poor sleeping person was going to pop out and yell at me in Chinese. I hurried back to the elevator to start the process again. Enter the lobby, recognize things, breathe a sigh of relief. Press the button for the eighth floor. Stand outside our door (this is the right one, yes?) pressing the doorbell rhythmically, wondering where I lost my shoes. I love those shoes! And my bag—where’s my bag? My notebook? Oh, no, my wallet! Ding dong. Ding dong. Ding-a-ding-a-ding dong. No answer. I rode down to the lobby and repeated the process. Finally, X woke from his rice-wine stupor and opened the door, and I fell upon him in grateful rapture, exclaiming something about being so lost, and not feeling well, and oh, there are my shoes and my bag, thank god! What was I doing in the hall? X just mumbled “Mmm-hmm” and fell upon the bed, as did I, fully clothed.

Posted by care at April 28, 2003 05:45 PM | TrackBack