As I have explained in Chinese to various people:
[I have a roommate (from Guangdong); my roommate has a (older male) cousin; this cousin has a (older female) sister; this sister lives in Beijing and is very rich.]
Thus, so it goes, I found myself last Monday in a VIP room in one of the most expensive restaurants in Beijing. We were driven, my roommate, his friend, and I, by that type of Chinese servant-driver who is entitled to eat with everyone at the main table, but not to join conversation. He may chat in the car, if conversation is struck up, but he likely won’t speak much otherwise. He is always around, opening doors for you, unsmiling, commenting (if asked) on which might be the fastest route, or the most expensive plot of real estate.
He picked us up, already carrying Joe, my roommate’s cousin (that is his English name). We drove to Joe’s sister’s apartment, located in the Beijing equivalent of the Upper West Side, where we had tea. At the restaurant, we were met by two uniformed valets for each of the six us, and ushered inside my a maitre d’ who knew Joe’s sister. Our room had the largest windows. It had a flat-screen television, a private bathroom, a sitting area with leather couches and a cloistered stock of beer and wine. Western wine is extremely expensive in China.
The central room of this restaurant was a cavern filled with sequestered pools of water, and lines of refrigerated shelves tucked into nooks made to look like they were carved from rock. In this room could be seen every animal and every plant that the restaurant might use to make food. The pools were filled with hundreds of living lobsters, crabs, clams, salt water fish, freshwater fish, bottom dwellers, snails, sea urchins, shrimp, prawns, octopi, turtles, and eels. The shelves were filled with carcasses of land animals, their children, their limbs, their organs; and plates of completed dishes extending all the way down past the island of tall green foliage and into the dark rear of the cave. Somewhere back there were regular tables, with people eating at them in the low light.
We could not sit at the table until she sat first, because she was the host, and in our little Confucian hierarchy, the highest. We waited while she used the private bathroom, standing and talking. “At these kind of places,” Joe said, “we have to follow these rules.
The chicken feet I liked, though the pig’s feet yielded only scraps of cartilege in my mouth. The giant crabs were difficult to eat, because I’m not used to eating them, and the bamboo was hairy, and like a squash. There weren’t any dishes that I recognized, save the pile of dead crab. The TV was on through dinner, but not so that you could hear it. Towards the end of the meal, a man came in and performed a dance while twirling dough. We laughed and clapped like royalty. I thought we were going to eat the dough, but we didn’t. I don’t know what they did with it.
As we drove home, we passed Tian’anmen Square. That is still the only time I have seen it.
