Dinner Extravaganza

Not going to lie, it has been cold. Frozen nose hairs and breath condensing and freezing into intricate ice crystals on the edges of my scarf.

There have been a few interesting developments in the last week, mostly centered around meeting the mayor of Ha’erbin for dinner last Sunday and again Wednesday.

A friend of a friend was visiting from the US last weekend. It just so happened that his father is music composer and happened to have some sort of business relations with a music publisher/ distributor here in Ha’erbin. It also turns out that the composer’s brother is a major in a large city in southern China, and the publisher/ distributor is possibly the mayor of Ha’erbin. I say possibly for three reasons. One, I only know her surname, two I cant seem to find her listed online, and there, of the locals I have asked, none have known the name of the mayor. She has held the position for 20 years, she said. I would assume someone would know. But, whatever, she says she is the mayor and has taken us out to dinner twice.

The first dinner was just my brother, our American friend and her visiting American friend (fluent in Cantonese and English), his cousin the interpreter (from Mandarin to Cantonese), the mayor and the mayor’s friend and college age daughter. It was quite the affair, semi awkward. Way too much food. There is a Chinese custom, unclear weather it is modern or traditional so it might not be fair to describe it as a custom, maybe better to say a practice; a practice to treating people to dinner, ordering extravagant amounts of food and not eating most of it. Apparently you must order outrageous amounts of food to demonstrate your commitment to doing business with your dinner guests (ie impress them by wasting food and money). If you don’t shovel food onto the table, your potential business partners will think you are not genuinely interested in making a deal with them. The monumental dinners are also used to sustain business relations, as in the case of this particular Sunday. The mayor apparently wanted one, to show respect for the visiting American’s father and politically powerful uncle, and two to smooth the road for distributing a new CD in southern china.

Dinner was good and we gorged. There were 20+ dishes of very well done Chinese food. Smoked eel, pig slaughter stew (sauerkraut with pig organs), sushi, various vegetable and meat stir fry dishes, crabs, cold Chinese style cold salads, bite size fish, boiled dumplings and on and on. Conversations varied, but were stunted by significant language barriers. The cousin, a native of Guangzhou, and fluent in Cantonese and partially fluent in Mandarin, gave translation to his visiting American cousin while I gave translation to my brother and our local American friend and vise versa to the mayor. I also tried to make small talk with the mayor’s friend and her daughter, while trying to tune out the English conversations my brother was having with the other two Americans. It was a bit hectic.

Wednesday the whole deal happened again. The mayor picked us up and drove us to another fancy restaurant, a seafood restaurant. I had not seen a restaurant like this before, it was very upscale. Our table wasn’t just a table, it was a room. The building had been designed very similar to a hotel. Our room had a closet for coats, its own bathroom, a couch and a big round table for 12. The table could have easily been replaced with a bed if the restaurant went under, or needed to host a conference. In attendance were my brother, our local American friend, the mayor, 4 dudes (“the man” sort of dudes, older, super fat, politically powerful, wealthy, and self acknowledging), a music composer, and two college music professors. One of the dudes was possibly the provincial minister of education, one was a director for CCTV (Central China TV, the main 10+ channels nationally), and the other two held high level university administration jobs. This meal was much less awkward. My brother and our American friend mostly talked to each other, while I listened and joined in where I could with the larger Chinese conversation. As it turns out, everyone but the music student were old friends, often go out to dinner with each other, and frequently play mahjong. Dinner was equally extravagant, but less was ordered, so we actually managed to finish about 50% of it. Since it was a seafood restaurant, fishy things were on center stage. Nothing too fishy though, fish, shrimp (both fried and raw), sushi, squid, abalone, scallops, and other strange sea creatures unidentifiable and with confusing Chinese names. It was all really good, although raw shrimp are just too slimy and cold to be really desirable.

I was a bit hesitant about going to the second dinner. I can’t help but thinking the mayor had some underlying motive, which she still might have. Her stated purpose was to introduce us to more people in Ha’erbin, which she accomplished. She also said that our American friend should tutor the two music teachers in conversation English, which they probably could use. One of the music said one sentence in English, “my English poor.” The other one sang a sentence or two “I want to study oral English,” although it was unclear whether the singing was intentional or just an unfortunately funny accent.

On the ride home, after talking to the major’s driver for some time as he ‘accidentally’ took two wrong turns and doubled our driving time by driving 30km/h for most of the way, he asked for my phone number and invited my brother and I go drinking and eat lamb kabobs over the next weekend.

Last night my brother, another American, and a Chinese guy, his girlfriend and I went to Pizza hut. It was pretty much Pizza hut in the states, with some major differences. In China, pizza hut is a nice restaurant. Very clean and expensive (relatively, it’s about the same as the US price). The pizza’s are cooked in the same style as in the US, but the toppings are different. Very different. We had a curry chicken pizza with chicken some vegetables and curry saucy instead of tomato sauce and a salmon seafood pizza, with raw salmon, squid shrimp, wasabi, and a white cream sauce instead of tomato sauce. Both were pretty good. There was also Chinese style potato salad which was not good.