First-person Narrative from China

 

Greetings from Emei Mountain, China,

     Southwestern University has concluded its spring semester, delayed and rescheduled because of the tragic Sichuan earthquake.  As the term came to an end, we all, staff and students alike, were tired and distressed.  We unwound with banquets and parties, acknowledging a job well done under difficult circumstances, and anticipating higher achievements in the new school year 2008-2009 that begins in September.
     In the first photo attached, you see a celebration with friends and fellow teachers at a fine Chinese restaurant on the Fourth of July, the United States of America’s National Day.  We ate Chinese delicacies including duck’s tongue, goose tongue, and eel, and toasted with Chinese spirits and beer.  The restaurant owner and servers came over to toast us, as did guests at other tables.  Here you see me sharing a ‘bottom’s up’ with a guest from another dining party.  The man in the black shirt, standing, is Nick, another English teacher and my good friend who arranged the venue and suggested the dishes.  His father-in-law is seated to Nick’s left.  At the left of the picture is Sunee, a great-hearted Chinese lady from Thailand whose American husband, Cecil, also teaches in my department.  In the second picture, you see the stacks of beer bottles at a recycling station a short walk from the campus.  We at the university generate our share of the empties.  Thanks to Cecil for these pics.
     So let’s talk about food and drink in China.
     There are three pillars of Chinese hospitality, especially where men are present: tobacco, alcohol, and food.  Next time I will talk about Chinese cuisines.  But first, the accompaniments, which, in many situations particularly among males, eclipse the food for their social significance: tobacco and alcohol.
     During meals, celebrations, and sometimes even office meetings, alcohol and cigarettes are important parts of the proceedings.
     Back in the States, I have occasionally appreciated a cigar: HavATampa, or, when I studied and taught at the University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati’s own brand, Ibold, not connoisseur quality but a bit of the local color.  When we were kids in college, classmates and I smoked cherry-flavored Swisher Sweets cigarillos, our misguided way of feeling sophisticated.  We also drank Boone’s Farm and Annie Green Springs rot-gut pop wines.  Folks my age will remember those fads, and shudder: we were young and didn’t know any better.  Ah, innocence!  I and friends in Chicago more recently would enjoy a glass of wine and gourmet cheeses as a weekend diversion, or attend a wine or cigar tasting.  In China, tobacco and alcohol are staples of social life.  Gradually assimilating to the Chinese customs, which I at first declined, for example, I now accept when a cigarette is offered, and carry them myself to share with others.
     As a Buddhist I accept the Five Precepts: respect life, property, sexuality, truthfulness, and sobriety.  Don’t these vows preclude smoking tobacco and drinking alcohol?  Some think so.  More properly, the Precepts are guidelines rather than prohibitions, intended to make us mindful of our behavior and its consequences for oneself and others.  Also instructive is the figure of Mi Lo Pu Sa, the Chinese rendition of the Buddha Maitreya: the rotund, jolly figure gracing the entrance halls of Chinese Buddhist temples.  Westerners know him as the ‘Laughing Buddha’ from kitsch gift shops: rub his belly for good luck!  (A thing Asians never do.)  Mi Lo is free to partake of the world’s pleasures (hence his well-fed appearance) because he is not controlled by them.  This is wisdom indeed.
     China is the world’s largest producer and consumer of tobacco.  About 60 percent of Chinese men over age 15 smoke, and younger boys are sometimes seen smoking.  A far smaller proportion of the women, probably about 4 percent, smoke.  When they do, it is almost always in private or among themselves, and not around the men.  The 350 million Chinese smokers are almost a third of the world’s total.
     There are some quality Chinese cigars, but the ‘Great Wall’ cigars that come five to a pack for a three yuan (about 40 cents US) are poorly manufactured, unravel easily, have a harsh taste, and the smoke does not provide a pleasing aroma.  You get what you pay for.
     China’s output of 2 trillion cigarettes a year is about 40 percent of world production.  There are dozens of brands and variations within brands, with many major cities having their own local factories and labels.  Some are cheap: a pack of Tianxiaxiu, made here in Sichuan Province and smoked by laborers, goes for two yuan.  Exclusive brands favored by the well-heeled and the Communist Party elite (= often the same thing) can run 80 yuan a pack.  It is no cheaper to buy by the carton of ten than the individual pack; a carton is just the price of a pack multiplied by the number of packs
     In China’s hierarchical society, there is an association of rank with the brand of cigarettes one displays.  Out of curiosity I have tried numerous brands.  If I happen to display a cheap brand, common workers such as bus drivers, or students, are satisfied, but university staff and restauranteurs around the university tell me that, as a professor, a person of some social standing, I should be smoking more upmarket kinds.  I now stock both tiers of brands, to bring forth according to the social setting I am in.
     When offering a cigarette to someone, pull two cigarettes from the pack and hold out both to one’s associate.  He takes one, and you take the other.  If you are offering to several people around a dining table or meeting table, offer successively two at a time, beginning with the highest status person present (a workplace boss, or the father of the family), or else hold out the pack itself so that the men may take directly from it.  Then take turns with the matches or butane lighter, to light up one anothers’ smokes.  If you are the one distributing the cigarettes, you can offer to light the highest-ranking person’s cigarette, although a lower-status man who hopes to score points with the bigwigs is likely to knock your hand away so that he can grovelingly do that himself.
     There is an increasing number of articles in the bigger Chinese newspapers about the health hazards of smoking, signaling a rising but still low-key official campaign against smoking.  An example is an article in the Beijing-based English-language newspaper China Daily, which laments that the main characters in a popular TV show, The Bund, portraying Mafia life in 1930s Shanghai, smoke, and that viewers are imitating the hero’s ‘cool’ style of holding a cigarette with three fingers. [1]  Cities increasingly prohibit smoking in public places.  For a time the building of new cigarette factories, including joint ventures with overseas concerns (reviled in the media as evil exploiters of the babes-in-the-woods Chinese, though their relocation of jobs from the US to China is welcomed), was halted.  But it does not seem the social smoking will diminish any time soon, especially in the countryside.
     Now to the second mainstay of Chinese hospitality, alcohol.
     My Aussie colleague Trevor from my days at Hubei University in Wuhan referred to the key Chinese alcohols as ‘the three joes’: bai jiu, white wine, hong jiu, red (or brown, which is the same thing in Chinese perception) wine, and pi jiu, beer.  Besides the play on the pronunciation of jiu, much like ‘joe,’ is the Australian slang expression ‘Joe Blake,’ meaning a snake.  Some kinds of Chinese wine, notably bai jiu, are infused with herbs such as ginseng, or insects, scorpions, and snakes, which are believed to impart medicinal value to the drafts.  At Trevor and his wife Isla’s apartment at Hubei University, I sampled the snake wine they had purchased on their own trip to Emei Mountain.  Americans have the expression ‘snake oil,’ meaning a dubious panacea, based on the bogus medical cures legendarily sold by traveling merchants and showmen in Wild West days.  In China, a literal kind of snake oil persists as a folk remedy.
     What is popularly translated by the word ‘wine,’ jiu, is really hard liquor.  The Chinese have been making such drinks for thousands of years, and are quite skilled at it.  While the Mesopotamians brewed beer 4000 years ago, the Chinese seem to have the lengthiest history of high-grade alcohol.  Arabian merchants introduced grapes and drinks made from them to China in the second century BCE, but those wines did not catch on.  The Chinese turned grapes into brandy, a drink which seems to have originated here, and continue to produce wonderful fruit brandies.  In collaboration with French concerns, the Chinese are beginning to produce red wines on the European pattern.  Many of these are overly sweet, or so dry one’s face puckers.  Some ‘Great Wall’ wine (remember ‘Great Wall’ cigars? – the Great Wall icon is a widely used marketing icon in China) are a palatable balance of the two poles.
     The most common alcoholic drink of specifically Chinese derivation is bai jiu, ‘white liquor,’ a sweet-tasting, colorless spirit that comes in proofs of 30 to 65.  It is sold everywhere in grocery stores, snack stands, and in restaurants.  It is made from cereals, rice, sorghum, and wheat, and fermented with yeast and sugar.  When filtered and bottled, it is called cui jiu.  If distilled after fermentation, it is known as shao jiu, a stronger drink more common in the north of the country.  Wu liang ye is a related ‘five-grain spirit’ made from wheat, rice, barley, sorghum, and maize.  Chinese like to put things into lists.  The ‘five grains’ are usually catalogued as rice, millet, barley, wheat, and sorghum, although in some old lists oats, maize, or soybeans substitute as the fifth element.  The five-grain liquor is quite good, and the price is almost as high as that of the premier Chinese vodka, mou tai.
     When first getting a whiff of bai jiu, one recognizes how powerful it is.  On first taste, one feels the firewater in one’s sinuses, the perfect illustration of why taking a drink of strong alcohol is called, in American slang, ‘a snort.’
     Many Chinese liquors are seen as aphrodisiacs.  There is a kind of brown wine, hong jiu, that goes under the brand name, ‘Strong husband’: not strong in the manner of a sturdy and steady provider and protector for his family, but strong in the sense of potent in bed!  Remember, Jim from the US, when you and I were walking around Emei’s ‘Snack Street’ two summers ago, a young Chinese man talked with us for a bit.  When I pointed out bai jiu to you, he remarked, ‘It makes you strong – strong for sex!’  In actuality, it increases the desire but diminishes the performance.
     While women seldom drink in public, among the men, a meal usually begins with a glass of bai jiu from a large jug on the restaurant register counter, or else from a bottle purchased on the spot or even brought with us.  In China, unlike in the United States, it is OK to carry outside food and drinks into a restaurant.  When that round of stronger liquor is finished, the men proceed to drinking beer.
     My Aussie colleague Karen, from Wuhan’s Hubei University, dubs bai jiu ‘rocket fuel.’  By contrast, Chinese beer has lower alcohol content than European or American beers.  But it comes in bigger bottles.
     Tsingtao, China’s most famous brand of beer, exported worldwide, is named for the city that was once a German colony.  (The city’s name is spelled ‘Qingdao’ by the Pinyin system of turning Chinese sounds into the Latin alphabet.  The beer name retains the older Wade-Giles romanization.)  Being good Germans, the settlers, in 1903, established a brewery which continues today.  There are presently three Tsingtao factories.  One turns out the top-flight product for export.  The output for the domestic market is considered premium, too, both for quality and by a correspondingly higher price than other brands.
     Despite the renown of Tsingtao, Harbin Beer began brewing even earlier, in 1900, by the Russian colonizers in the northeastern Chinese city of that name.  It is almost as good as Tsingtao.  The Harbin Brewery was acquired by Anheuser-Busch, which exports the beer to America and Europe, though its international market share is much below that of well-advertized Tsingtao.
     The beer called Snow (a six-pointed white snowflake in an orange circle on a green background is its logo) is made here in Emei.
     The draft beers one encounters are often watery.  One learns which sidewalk barbecues and cafes serve good draft or water the stuff down.
     Many folk here in Emei prepare their own homemade wine.  It has a hazel color, thick liqueur-like consistency, and sweet, mild, brandy-like taste.
     Then there is mou tai (also spelled mao tai), China’s most famous alcoholic beverage.  This smooth, clear sorghum spirit is distilled exclusively in Guizhou Province.  It is named after a town there, where a certain combination of water percolating through rock and a climate nurturing benign airborne microbes is said to provide the right conditions for its creation.  It is produced in versions ranging in alcohol content from 35 to 53 percent.  It has a brewing history dating back to the Han Dynasty in 135 BCE, and won a gold medal at the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco (that year’s world’s fair, named for the opening of the Panama Canal).  Mou tai became popular nationally and internationally when Chairman Mao, who did not care for bai jiu, was served it instead, and used it to entertain Richard Nixon at a state banquet during that American President’s historic visit to China in 1972.  The taste merits its acclaim.  But it is pricey: a quantity about that of a quart costs 450 yuan, about US $55.
     During meals, the host will propose an initial toast for everyone, and then anyone present may toast another or the entire group.  Some men tap their glass on the table to alert the diners that a toast is about to be made.  The toast usually takes the form of gan bei, ‘dry the glass’: drink it all down.  (Even when drinking brandies or grape wines, the Chinese drain the glass, rather than sip for the taste.)  The host or the person proposing the toast is pleased if you drain the glass with enthusiasm and flourish.  If you are concerned that you are being pressed to drink too much or too fast, you can invoke gao xin mai mai lai, ‘happily, happily, slowly, slowly.’  Or say sui bian, ‘as one pleases,’ meaning drink as much or as little as you wish.  Premier Zhou Enlai (1898-1976) only touched his glass to his lips when toasting.  If you say, ‘I will drink like Zhou Enlai,’ it will be accepted.  Now, people acknowledge the potency of bai jiu, and do not typically expect one to go completely gan bei with a glass of that product; gan bei usually involves beer.  Everywhere in China, it is acceptable for someone who does not care to partake of the beer or spirits to refrain from doing so (although one’s manliness is gauged by one’s ability to hold his liquor).  One can respond to a toast with tea, or soy milk, or even a bowl of soup or rice porridge.  Be warned that at some banquets and at weddings the host will have water in his bottle or glass instead of bai jiu, and only appear to be drinking.
     Beware of contradictions in the drinking ritual.  Once I was generously, so I thought, filling a friend’s glass with beer after he had emptied it.  He scolded me for trying to get him drunk.  Each person, he said, is allocated a separate bottle of beer, and drinks it himself.  Yet often I see people, especially the hosts at dinner gatherings, filling others’ glasses.  The same person who chided me for filling his glass from ‘my’ bottle I noticed on another occasion pouring beer into other people’s glasses from ‘his’ bottle.  When I pointed out this discrepancy, he could provide no explanation.  I infer the real rule is: be considerate, but have a good time.
     I have been, on the one hand, advised to participate in the drinking rituals with leaders during formal banquets.  This, I am told, shows I am adapted to Chinese culture.  On the other hand, I have also been told that I should sit there looking befuddled and unable to drink, that I am expected to fit the stereotype of a ‘foreigner’ who does not know the customs; if I act like a Chinese, leaders will think me too forward.  The latter is more likely to happen in outlying areas like Emei, while in the larger, more cosmopolitan cities, ‘foreigners’ are more easily accepted.
     In most places in China, when toasting, one downs the whole glass of beer, then shows the glass to the fellow toaster(s) to confirm that it has been gallantly emptied.  Note that in China, beer is served in glasses about twice the size of a Western shot glass but less than half the size of a water glass, so the quantity of beer imbibed at one gulp is not excessive.  In Beijing, one leaves a little left in the glass.  By not taking all the golden liquid, one shows an abundance, i.e., the ‘gold,’ which, by sympathetic magic, indicates prosperity will come.  Few Chinese drink red grape wines, but I have learned that when one does so, a little of that kind of wine should be left in the glass as a talisman and harbinger of prosperity to come.
     As for soft drinks:  Tang, in various fruit flavors, not just the powdered orange drink I grew up with and which in the 1960s was touted as used ‘by the astronauts,’ is available both as mixes, and already made up in individual or two liter size plastic bottles.  There is a coffee-cola that is…well, funky.  It tastes like cola that someone dumped coffee grounds into.  I tried it out of curiosity, even though this combination of ingredients sounds strange to an American.  There are tasty grape and peach sodas.  I have never seen diet sodas in China.  I don’t drink diet sodas, so that’s no hardship.  Diet sodas taste like chemicals to me.  ‘Just for the taste of it, Diet Coke,’ mewed the advertising.  Who are they kidding?
     Tea, an Indian discovery, is China’s pervasive drink.  Even in the summer, people drink hot tea.  Teahouses are everywhere.  Bars or pubs on the European and American pattern, though, are rare.  The drinking of alcohol is done in restaurants and karaoke houses.  Sadly, the pub operated by my friend Ryan has closed down, for Ryan’s department, tourism, is being consolidated from Emei to the university’s Chengdu campus.  Then it will be phased out when the students currently enrolled in the program process through to graduation.  The administration has decided this vocational major does not jive with the university’s engineering and academic emphasis.  Too bad, because ours was one of the best-rated tourism programs in China.
     Though we have the saying ‘All the tea in China,’ China has as interesting a culture of alcohol as of tea.  Ancient Chinese shamans used alcohol and whirling dances to get into altered states of consciousness in order to contact the supernatural realm.  The 14th-century historical novel The Romance of the Three Kingdoms speaks of Chinese generals of the second century CE drinking heavily, but then rousing instantly to perform feats of derring-do when enemies attacked.
     In the novel A Dream of Red Mansions, written in 1750, both men and women of the upper class drink heavily.  Today most Chinese women do not drink or smoke so much in public, although I have seen some do it, and even out-match the men in ‘bottom’s up’ challenges.  Two of the aunts in a family I know can outdrink the men, much like the character Marion Ravenwood (played by actress Karen Allen) in the 1981 movie Raiders of the Lost Ark, who drank the Nepalese yak herders under the table.  Once during a birthday party when the bai jiu and beer flowed freely, I wanted to complement the aunts on this, but did not know how to say it in Chinese.  The male friend who had invited me and who was helping translate things I could not express myself replied, ‘I will not say that.  It is insulting to the men.’
     Chinese poets of yore used liquor to fire their imaginations.  Drinking games required participants to recall and recite poems, or compose poems, or complete one anothers’ lines in an emerging group poem.
     Take Cao Cao (155-220 CE; his name is pronounced ‘Tsao Tsao’), a general, politician, and poet.  On the completion of a certain pavilion he commissioned, Cao Cao rejoiced with wine.  ‘The wine had inspired Cao Cao.  He called for writing brush and ink stone, intending to celebrate the Bronze Bird Tower in verse’ [2].  There is an association in Asia between the fine arts and the martial arts.  The samurai of Japan studied tea ceremony, meditation, and calligraphy.  Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh was a poet, and Mao Zedong was a poet with a fine calligraphic hand.
     At a party at Hubei University, after sharing a gan bei with bai jiu, a woman present said that, in keeping with longtime Chinese custom, it would be proper for me to compose a poem.  I essayed a bit of doggerel:

          Sage poets of old
          Did ‘drain the glass’;
          May I be so bold
          As to match their ‘class.’
 
By that last word, I meant ‘classiness.’  It was the best scan I could manage on the spur of the moment.
     Alcohol, one of humankind’s universals, transcends time and place.  Consider one of the scenes in ‘Rick’s Cafe Amercain’ in the classic World War II-era movie, Casablanca (1942).  The German envoy Major Heinrich Strasser (played by Conrad Veidt) is quizzing the American expatriate Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart), with the corrupt but sentimental French police prefect, Captain Louis Renault (Claude Rains), observing:

          Strasser:  ‘What is your nationality?’
          Rick:  ‘I’m a drunkard.’
          Renault:  ‘And that makes Rick a citizen of the world.’ [3]

     Are we not all citizens of the world?  To my friends across the miles and around the globe, I raise a glass in joyous salute.

     Sent while tossing back some bai jiu,
          no kidding, it seemed appropo;
               no snake in the bottle this time, though.

Tom Emei Yinshi – the Hermit of Emei Mountain
__________
     [1]  Zhang Kun, ‘Smoking in ‘The Bund’ sparks fire among viewers,’ China Daily, 27 (18 July 2007): 1.
     [2]  Luo Guanzhong, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Moss Roberts, trans. (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2003), Vol. III, pp. 1349, 1351.
     [3]  It is hard to know who to credit for this dialogue.  The screenplay for Casablanca was based on an unproduced play by Murray Bennett and Joan Alison, rewritten by Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, and Howard Koch.  Though crafted by committee, the seamless script was voted the best screenplay of all time by the Writer’s Guild of America in 2006.

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