The Gourmet Brewman part 1: Hot Pot

At the restaurant we were given a table on the second floor. The deal was 40 Yuan for all you could eat and drink. As we walked in there was many a wildly exited local greeting us with their wife-beaters rolled up to their chests. They made a pretty picture smoking cigarettes out the corner of their mouths, dropping ash on their exposed bellies, while gambei’ing the hell out of the local beer. In the end some of the locals came over for a couple of toasts, they were a friendly, rather hedonistic lot, controlled hedonism though, most of them rolled off home at ten, I wish I had that much sense.

The Scot I was with, was of a type of laowai I’ve observed several times since: Married to a local woman, he was doing his best to integrate with the local culture. He was very keen to do all the ordering in Mandarin, and order the stuff most laowai would never touch: pig brains, chicken hearts, tripe, some of the weirder types of fungi etc. He had been in China for some years but ordered from memory not from the menu. There are many laowai like this, they speak English at work and with their wife, who they met early in their China experience; they never have had the opportunity or time to educate themselves properly in the language — measure words to quantify nouns, train timetables, and all the different characters which sound like ‘zou4’ remain a mystery to them. While these hardy characters wouldn’t like to admit it, the alienation factor of living long term in a place they barely understand must be overwhelming.

The Chengdu hotpot was as spicy as its reputation, but did not give me the dreaded ring of fire.

That next day I went out shopping with a colleague, and stumbled across something quite strange: In an underground mall we spotted a somewhat darkened section—consisting of what seemed to be a few tea shops. My companion, still in his China honeymoon period, wanted to investigate. We went into several of these tea shops; they were all pitch black. At first I could see nothing, but only hear somebody offering us a table. After 30 seconds or so I could see quite a few people dancing—and beyond some shadowy figures sitting at tables. On the way out, I saw a few alluringly dressed women. My colleague wanted to stay, I insisted on leaving. I assumed the places to be daytime brothels of a kind. I felt quite vulnerable in the pitch black—who knows what kind of gangster was lurking in the murk.