Banquets

Lin Da banquet.

A full-course university banquet – how exciting! I built up my appetite all day.

Which was ironic: invariably I left banquets hungrier than when I arrived. For the Chinese it seemed the more formal the occasion, the more carnivorously exotic the food. I took the obligatory nibbles, nodded, smiled, and secretly wished for something simple, like noodles.

What got me were the thousand year eggs. “They’re not really buried for a thousand years,” I doubted.

“No no no,” the department chair assured me. “More like one hundred days.” The jellified result was striking: egg white turned translucent charcoal, yolk deep forest green. Though surprisingly neutral in taste, it coated my mouth with a fine, Oxy10-ish film that persisted the rest of the evening, no matter what I ate or drank afterward.

Aside from sport eating, banquets were stages for local entertainment – very local, provided by the banquet attendees themselves. After the meal, people took turns standing and singing in a kind of formalized karaoke, minus the screen and lights. Not everyone volunteered, but it was fairly obligatory for each organization or department to be represented. We foreign teachers were expected to exhibit a bit of Americana: “Star-Spangled Banner,” “O Susanna,” “Gilligan’s Island.”

Occasionally others showcased different talents – instrumental music, or dancing. After two banquets I decided I’d had it with the cheesy American songs and prepared a different act: devil sticks. You may have seen devil’s sticks before – two thin sticks used to strike a larger, counterbalanced stick, causing it to tilt and spin midair. Pros light the middle stick on fire. I’d picked up some more modest tricks back home from my brother, and began practicing them with fury once I’d decided to embarrass myself this way.

The next banquet turned out to be in downtown Beijing, thrown by the president of my teaching organization in conjunction with government officials. It was the fanciest (read: unappetizing) spread I’d seen, with more than a hundred people in attendance, including a Chinese senator over seventy years old, attended by a bodyguard. The stakes were high, the pressure on. What if no one performed quirky acts like devil sticks at banquets? What if it would be considered uncouth and rude?

The senator’s seat was beside the performing area, so I stood not five feet from her, wielding sticks that resembled nun chucks flashing in the air, the bodyguard glaring the whole time, and me praying, “Please, God, don’t let me screw up and hit her!” I had visions of losing control and crashing the weighted stick into the elderly senator’s face, causing a heart attack and death, whereupon I would be arrested, convicted as a CIA operative and imprisoned in one of those horrible Chinese prisons my mother warned me would kill her if I ended up in.

Miraculously I didn’t flub once, not even on the high spinning toss. And miraculously, everyone applauded – the most appreciation coming, of course, from fellow teachers grateful my performance meant they wouldn’t have to sing.

That was the last off-campus banquet I was invited to. I wonder if I was deemed a security risk.

Lin Da banquet.

Giving a brief speech, accompanied by a translator.

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