So today marks a leap year meaning we get that rarest of experiences - February the 29th. This may not seem hugely exciting. However, back in the 1920s, when Harry Craddock was mixing cocktails at the
I considered writing the Charlie Chaplin up for Raiders of the Lost Cocktail. I decided not to in the end though. Partly I wanted to write up a drink that combined Lillet with apricot brandy, and partly I was not sure if the Charlie Chaplin qualifies as being ‘lost’. I have occasionally seen the Charlie Chaplin on bar menus. Still, the name of the drink is rather old worldly, as is the use of sloe gin, so I won’t argue with anyone who wants to label it a lost drink.
The one bar where I have drunk a Charlie Chaplin was a little Japanese place in
Today’s Mixology Monday, hosted at Martini Lounge is all about shooters. Shooters are really not my thing. Designing a shooter seems more about finding an amusing name than about creating a tasty drink. Maybe they have a place though. The Austrian barman at a little place I sometimes visit here in Shanghai has a habit of mixing his favorite customers a quick ‘shot’ as they leave. He usually mixes up rum, lime, and something sweet, and the quantity is probably something less than a full drink. It can make a friendly and pleasant end to the evening.
Generally though I just don’t like shooters so I had trouble thinking of anything for this Mixology Monday. But perhaps Pink Gin could be considered a shooter? I was very skeptical about Pink Gin the first time I tried it so I think I either made it on a shot glass or made a very small quantity in a rocks glass. Actually it isn’t so bad. It isn’t something I ever really drink, but there is something quite nice about room temperature gin with bitters. If you really and truly enjoy gin then you should also enjoy it at room temperature, right? So why not try a shot of Pink Gin?
Simply put a couple of dashes of bitters into the glass, tilt the glass to distribute it evenly, then add the gin. If you enjoy the taste then slowly savor it rather than tossing it back. If you don’t like the taste then toss it back and go make something else.
A few weeks back I found a shop here in Shanghai selling Marie Brizard liqueurs. There seems to be a company importing them from Hong Kong into Shantou. Unfortunately the Shanghai store has decided to stop stocking them in favor of Bols. It is hard to understand why they would do this given that Bols is generally crappy and Marie Brizard is generally good, but there you go.
Anyway, having realized Marie Brizard was quality stuff after trying their Apry while in Cambodia I grabbed a few more flavors as soon as I saw it. I picked up crème de cacao, orange curacao and anisette. I also grabbed a bottle of Get 31 peppermint liqueur. I was especially pleased with the anisette because I hadn’t seen this before in Shanghai.
All of the flavors were pretty good when I compared them to Bols. The only slightly strange one was the crème de cacao, which seems to have an odd herbal taste in addition to the chocolate. The Get 31 tasted OK but had a strange sediment in the bottle. I took it back a few days later and exchanged it. Exchanging it was a little funny. I was standing in the front of the shop showing the assistant that my bottle had a sediment while the other bottles did not. There were three of us standing in a line behind the display holding bottles of crème de menthe up to the light and peering into them. A dozen or so pedestrians on Huaihai Rd. stopped to watch the foreigner checking the crème de menthe bottles. I guess they thought they were seeing a crème de menthe inspector from France doing a random crème de menthe inspection.
Later that night I happened to take out the Anisette bottle to show a friend while we were having a drink in Le Garcon Chinois. The Japanese woman behind the bar seemed to have some kind of a sixth sense for anisette. As soon as the bottle came out of its bag she abandoned the drinks she was making at the other end of the bar to ask where I had found anisette in Shanghai. She said she needed it to make a drink called Shanghai. I’d never heard of this drink before, but after she mentioned it to me I did notice that the odd bar in Shanghai has it on their menu, always made with Pernod since anisette is hard to find. Anyway, I eventually got around to making a Shanghai myself.
Shanghai
1 1/2 oz Jamacian rum
1/2 oz lemon juice
1/4 oz anisette
1/4 oz grenadine
Shake with ice and strain into a cocktail glass.
There seems something old fashioned about sweetish but extremely rummy drinks like this one. The anisette adds interest to what is really just a very simple rum punch, and takes it away from being just a sweet and sour type of drink. It is good if you want a very mild aniseed drink.
This month’s Mixology Monday, kindly hosted at Jimmy’s Cocktail Hour, is all about whiskey. Note, simply whiskey, not necessarily whiskey cocktails. I should have lots to say about this month’s topic but somehow I don’t.
Of course there are many things I could cover. I could choose a favorite whiskey cocktail and write about that. I could write about my family’s ritual of drinking tea with whiskey in the morning on Christmas Day. I could write about a favorite whiskey, maybe Lagavulin or Laphroaig. (more…)
I dropped into Trader Vic’s recently opened Shanghai restaurant last night for a Shanghai Expat (www.shanghaiexpat.com) hosted cocktail party. The service at Trader Vics is five star, the Polynesian décor takes you a world away from the grime and grind of Shanghai, and the food and drinks are not half bad. However, you can’t help thinking the cocktails could be better. The drinks are by no means bad, but when patronizing the joint that invented the Mai Tai it is depressing to drink a Mai Tai that is merely a shadow of what it could be. (more…)
December was an interesting month for me in that I had several run ins with locals here in Shanghai. I wrote about one of these already in my earlier post on queue jumpers. Run ins like these are a rare thing for me. I guess that on average they occur only a couple of times a year. For some reason though, I had three such encounters during December. This was remarkable not only for the frequency of said events, but also because it got me thinking about Chinese culture. You see, in every one of these recent encounters the Chinese responded by bringing a racist, xenophobic, or ‘international’ dimension to the incident. It seems difficult for Chinese to treat foreigners simply as people.
Regular readers will remember that the queue jumping woman I encountered in early December said that the fact that I ‘had a big nose’ (i.e. was a westerner) gave me no right to tell her what to do. An everyday disagreement about queue jumping thus became a racial confrontation.
A week or so later a pimp grabbed me in Nanjing Road. Nanjing Road is a major shopping street, but the large numbers of tourists in the area mean there are also aggressive pimps who target single male foreigners. After he grabbed me I told him to get lost in English (‘fuck off’ to be accurate), he took offense and started to gather a crowd to support him. In his own words “Chinese law protects Chinese people! A foreigner cannot speak like that to a Chinese person in China! A foreigner in China has no rights because China belongs to Chinese people!” I called the police to see what would happen. Pimping is (surprise surprise) illegal in China, so it was difficult to understand his astonishment when ‘the law’, which after all exists “to protect Chinese people” took him down to the station while the foreigner was left free to continue on his way. Happily in this instance some of the crowd were quite supportive of me. I think some locals also get fed up with the numerous scam artists that make a nuisance of themselves on Nanjing Rd. It could have gone differently though had his two pimp friends, who were originally being quite threatening, not had the good sense to vanish after I made the phone call.
Then last Wednesday night I was crossing Nanjing Rd. at Xikang Rd. and ran into another incident. I had the green pedestrian light and a car was coming along Nanjing Rd. about to turn into Xikang Rd., and showing no signs of giving way to me. I decided to cross anyway. He was forced to choose between stopping and hitting me and decided to stop, but stuck his head out the window to call me a ‘sha bi’ (stupid cunt). I ask him what his problem is (I do have the right to cross the road on the pedestrian signal after all) and the conversation ran a predictably fruitless course. I was careful not to swear at him though and stuck to explaining traffic law. He made to get out of the car, and since he had four friends in there with him I decided to back off. He got out of the car anyway, and punched me in the head from behind as I walked away, screaming “How dare you disrespect a Chinese person in China!” along with other racist abuse. He landed a couple of ineffective punches before I grabbed his hand and held it. I wasn’t at all hurt and stayed perfectly calm. As he hit me he was screaming at passers by to support him in beating this ‘western (white) person’. Nobody seemed very interested in ‘beating the western (white) person’, but people were curious and a crowd gradually developed. I asked him if he was done, let go of his hand, called the police, and moved in front of his car to stop him from leaving.
The police quickly arrived and started asking questions. Despite the large crowd of people only one local was prepared to stand as a witness to the unprovoked assault on me. A passing foreigner also acted as a witness. We ended up down at the police station (just me and the five guys in the car), where proceedings were basically a waste of time. The police were relatively sympathetic but since they were not traffic police they did not want to get involved in the traffic incident side of things. Nor were they interested in charging him with assault. Instead they approached it as a matter best resolved by a mutual apology. The driver of the car lied and said I hit him first, as well as ‘swearing at him in English which he couldn’t understand’, thus provoking him to attack me. This was totally untrue but what can you do? I pointed out to the police that he was missing skin on his knuckles from hitting me while my hands were not the slightest bit red or bruised, but they weren’t interested in considering this as evidence. Maybe this was fair enough – I could have kicked him or something for all they knew. Eventually the police pressured him into apologizing (they took him into a side room, said something to him, and he came back and apologized). I wasn’t required to. Pre- and post- apology though he maintained the attitude of an arrogant and aggressive prick. Meanwhile the police were not all that helpful and carried on saying that as a foreigner I didn’t really ‘understand’ the situation. I asked them to explain to me the part of the situation I didn’t understand, or even just identify the aspect of affairs that was causing me difficulty. They either couldn’t or wouldn’t.
What was remarkable about all of this though? The remarkable feature was the discovery that in a confrontation with a foreigner, Chinese inevitably make the foreigner’s ‘foreignness’ somehow relevant, however irrelevant it may be in reality. One would think that a queue was a fairly simple concept. Chinese have no problems grasping what a queue is, how it works, and why it is desirable. However, the moment a foreigner tries to protect their place in a queue they are guilty of trying to bully Chinese people. Similarly, ordinary Chinese are ill disposed towards pimps who grab customers in busy shopping districts. However, the moment such a pimp gets called up for grabbing a foreign customer the pimp is likely to object on the grounds that the foreigner is insulting Chinese people. Finally, right of way on a pedestrian crossing seems like a simple enough affair until it is a foreigner trying to cross the road, in which case they may get beaten for disrespecting a Chinese driver. Even if the foreigner escapes without being attacked, threatened or insulted, they are likely to end up listening to a condescending explanation that the whole situation occurred because there is something about China that, as a foreigner, they simply don’t understand.
Of course there is nothing unique about these sorts of attitudes. A certain level of racism and xenophobia is probably part of human nature. China is unusual though in the prevalence of such attitudes. In most countries maybe just one in ten confrontations would inspire a xenophobic and racist reaction, while in China the ratio would be much higher, perhaps closer to nine out of ten.
A couple of nights ago I dropped into the recently opened Henry’s Brewpub in Shanghai. The beer there is US style. It is nothing like the English beer brewed at Galbraiths in Auckland, but it isn’t too bad. The prices are also reasonable, only 30 RMB a glass, compared to at least twice that for the Bavarian wheat beers at the Shanghai Paulaner. (more…)
A few weeks ago I had the chance to visit Yang Chen Lake to try the famous crabs. Yang Chen Lake is located near Kunshan, halfway between Shanghai and Suzhou. The crabs from this lake sell for fantastic prices in Hong Kong and Taiwan. The high prices created an incentive to pass off crabs from other lakes as Yang Chen crabs and in response the local crab farmers association introduced a system of tagging individual crabs. Before long of course people were faking the tags and everyone was back to where they started.
Since my ex-flatmate from Taiwan was on a business trip in Kunshan so on Sunday morning I hopped on the train to Suzhou to pay him a visit and check out the crabs at the source. Rather than joining the huge ticket queue inside the station I found the little kiosk selling platform tickets and bought one of those for 1 RMB. Once you have a platform ticket you just need to find your train, jump on, and hope there will be a free seat. Eventually the conductor will find you and sell you a real ticket. If you are unlucky you can end up without a seat but for short distances it doesn’t really matter. Queuing in the station for half an hour to make sure you have a seat on a half hour train ride makes no sense.
After about half an hour or so I arrived in Kunshan and took a motorcycle taxi to my friend’s hotel. There were no ordinary taxis available. It is a little weird to be deposited of the back of an old motorcycle outside a hotel and then have liveried doormen open the door for you. It’s weird in a good way though.
I had a quick minibar beer with my friend (A-Guo). The cheerful cleaning lady who pointed me to the room had enthusiastically gushed that on such a clear day I’d be able to enjoy some fine views from the 20th floor. While A-Guo used the bathroom I stood at the window and took a couple of moments to appreciate the grey apartment blocks, grey sky, and grey canals of Kunshan. I was strangely reminded of Chinese ink landscapes on paper scrolls. A semi-demolished sports ground directly below provided a splash of color, though the debris strewn grass suggested a future more in keeping with its grey surrounds. I thought back to the cleaning lady as I surveyed the scene and had the sense that I was missing something. Perhaps you really need to be Chinese to get these things.
We headed downstairs and jumped in a taxi, a real one this time, out to Yang Chen lake to try the crabs. For some reason Yang Chen lake crabs (otherwise known as hairy crabs) are a famous delicacy in China. Personally I don’t rate them that highly. The flesh is sweeter than most crabs, but they are also smaller and more fiddly. I don’t think the flavor is special enough to justify the hassle and I’d just as soon eat a larger sea crab. I may be wrong but I also imagine that sea crabs live in cleaner water than the Yang Chen lake. Kunshan is a massive industrial area and while the lake is some distance from the factories you have to wonder how clean it is. I’ve heard rumors that the prices of the crabs follow the movement of futures in heavy metals. Actually I made that rumor up myself just now, but I think it’s a fine one and worth repeating.
Near the edge of the lake you reach a big strip of crab restaurants. They all have unimaginative names like ‘Crab King’, ‘Golden Crab’ etc. As we walked along the strip I thought of my own name for a crab restaurant - 蟹谢你*.
The restaurants all back on to the lake, so you get to see your crabs before deciding where to eat. After wandering up and down the strip we chose a restaurant with healthy looking crabs.
The idea is that each diner eats both a male and a female crab. I can’t taste any big difference between the two, but the male is bigger than the female (or possibly it is the other way around). You dip the crab in sweet vinegar flavored with ginger, and accompany the meal with some warm Shaoxing wine. Shaoxing wine is a type of rice wine from the city of Shaoxing, located a few hours away. You can drink the wine straight, but people tend to infuse it with a little ginger and sour plum. We drank a ten year old bottle; it was decent but not exactly Lagavullin.
The lunch was good. I thought the simple and cheap chicken marinated in Shaoxing wine and sesame oil was tastier than the expensive and potentially radioactive crabs. The crabs were good though, and much cheaper out at the lake than they would have been in Shanghai.
By the time we finished lunch it was close to dusk so we just took a quick walk around the lake and headed back to Kunshan. We were going to take a bus back into town but a guy in a van picked us up at a discount to the standard taxi fare. Back in Kunshan we checked out a couple of little bars but found them extremely dead. A-Guo then decided we should go for KTV since his company was entertaining a group of local suppliers. KTV is not really my thing, especially KTV for business people, but once in a while it can be OK so off we went.
If you go to KTV with a group of friends you sit in a private room with a TV and sound system and sing songs. There generally is not a lot of drinking because everyone is having too much fun fighting over the mike to bother with finishing their drinks. If you are a foreigner people will expect you to sing the lamest songs from the English song list. You inevitably have a mike shoved in your face as The Carpenters’ Yesterday Once More starts up. Chinese people are socially and culturally clued up enough to realize that all foreigners love singing Yesterday Once More - “especially the part where he’s breaking her heart” and of course there is that other good bit where it goes “shing a ling a ling”.
KTV for business people is slightly different. You sit in the same private room but the group is normally male only, and each member of the group is supposed to order a hostess to sit with them and chat. The hostesses make sure your party spends lots of money on alcohol by playing drinking games. If necessary the hostesses also help individual group members stay sober by drinking their share of the booze when they lose in the drinking games. The whole set up with the hostesses is thus a little weird. The hostesses will compete against the guy she is sitting with and challenge him to drinking games, but when her guy gets involved in a drinking game with another guy or another hostess, she will simultaneously step in and help him out by drinking his share. So your hostess is highly dangerous but simultaneously your guardian angel. You could see this as a metaphor for all kinds of male-female relationships. Most of the hostesses will also come home with you at the end of the night if you want them to, though this varies according to the individual. Obviously there is singing as well, but since the hostesses are keeping everyone busy drinking nobody has much time to fight over the mike.
A-Guo and myself arrived later than everyone else, at about 9pm or so. KTV usually starts at around 7.30pm and the real aficionados get there very early to pick the best looking hostesses. We sat down, a group of about eight hostesses were sent in, and I let A-Guo send the first group away. Sending the first group away seems to be a bit of a ritual. The customers get to look discriminating and the shop gets to look like it has a ton of hostesses on hand. Basically everyone looks good. A second group came in and after A-guo picked one from that group I did the same.
A KTV joint usually aims to have more hostesses than there are customers on any given night. The hostesses pay a small stipend to come in to work each day. If they don’t get chosen then they not only don’t get paid but are out of pocket for the night. Provided they get regular business though the money is very good compared to what they would get elsewhere. Most of the girls are pretty but uneducated and would otherwise be working in a factory or a small shop earning maybe RMB1000-1500 per month. In KTV they can earn RMB200 a night simply to drink with customers, and maybe four to five times that if they go home with them. It is lucrative and easy work for most attractive and personable. For the rest it can be extremely competitive and unfair. Obviously a lot of the girls end up hating each other and after a few drinks you can might get to listen to the story of why Brilliant Jade from Anhui is a certifiable bitch.
The girl sitting with me, Yawen, was from some town I’d never heard of in Jiangsu. She had come to Kunshan to work in an electronics factory, left the factory to work in a small fashion boutique, and then left the boutique to work in a KTV and save money to open her own boutique. She was nice but had few topics of conversation besides money - natural enough when you are short of it but boring nevertheless.
We played some drinking games, mainly 猜拳 (or ‘guess fists’), which involves two people simultaneously flashing their hands at each other and guessing the total number of fingers extended. The loser has to drink. I’m very bad at it because I never play, and Yawen was very good at it because she plays every night. Naturally I ended up drinking a fair bit. Luckily the booze was mixed quite weak though.
In KTV you usually drink Chinese 白酒(baijiu), which is a clear spirit. Baijiu is usually distilled from grain, typically sorghum, but can be made of almost anything. Baijiu is something like a very fragrant vodka, and not necessarily fragrant in a good way. The flavor profile is not always well balanced, and can include some bizarre esters. In KTV people often pour the baijiu into jugs packed with ice cubes, stir to chill it and let the ice melt a bit, and then decant it into small pouring jugs. I have no idea why this seems to be the practice in KTVs and nightclubs, and I never noticed people drinking baijiu this way in restaurants. I think the custom is a vague take on the cocktail (sometimes they add lemon wedges, wasabi nuts, tea or other flavorings), and has taken off in KTVs, bars and nightclubs because they are seen as appropriate locations for a mixed drink, while restaurants tend to be more traditional. In restaurants people tend drink baijiu straight, possibly warming the bottle in a bowl of water during the winter.
Later we played a very dangerous dice game with hazy rules in which the loser was going to have to drink a largish jug of baijiu. I was within one dice throw of being the fall guy but saved myself with a triple six on my last throw. I think a double six would have been enough to save me but everyone was very impressed in any case. My hostess asked for my phone number after seeing my dice throwing skills. Seeing the number of sixes people were throwing though I had to wonder whether or not the dice were weighted. I’m sure they were, and I guess all the sixes makes the evening exciting.
The group I was with was mixed Taiwanese and Mainland Chinese. Overall the Taiwanese were reasonably restrained with the hostesses, while the mainlanders were getting involved in some heavy duty groping and pawing. One of the Mainland guys came over to my side of the room and challenged me to drink. I joined him in a glass. As I put my glass down he grabbed my hand and sort of forced it onto my hostess’s tit. Needless to say she absolutely loved this. I’m not sure what he was thinking. Maybe he had seen lots of western porn movies and expected more enthusiasm from me? I apologized to the hostess while continuing to drink with the guy. He calmed down a little but then began asking for my number, saying we would go out together in Shanghai and he would pay for everything (”何先生! 我埋单. 我埋单…”). I gave him the number hoping he would go away. He was plastered and drinking far too fast. I drank a glass or two more with him, then let my hostess keep him company for another glass or so. He just wouldn’t stop drinking though.
I decided to pop off to the toilet, partly because I needed to take a pee and partly in an attempt to lose this idiot. I didn’t bank on him jumping up and following me into the toilet. So I unexpectedly found myself in the toilet with a drunken moron. He was grabbing me by the shoulder still talking about how we would go drinking together in Shanghai and he would pay for everything, while checking and rechecking that my phone number was correct.
This was all getting very tiresome, but more disconcertingly I was wondering what the hell he was doing in the toilet with me. A room in an upscale KTV joint usually has its own toilet, accessed through a door inside the room. This means that you don’t need to go out into the external corridor to get to a toilet, and also means that everyone in your group knows who is in the toilet and for how long. Besides being annoying the situation was thus getting embarrassing. First I act less than enthusiastic about groping a strange woman’s tit and seconds later I disappear into the toilet with another man. If I didn’t get him out of the toilet fast everyone was going to assume we were enjoying a booze fueled quickie. Now some people can probably adopt a relaxed attitude to all of this, maybe thinking “So we had knocked back a few drinks and were feeling pretty loose. Hell, who hasn’t had a homosexual encounter?” I admire this attitude. Admiration is precisely where I draw the line though, and at the end of the day this is an attitude I must leave to others.
I needed to get him out of the toilet and fast. I tried vainly to end the conversation. It didn’t matter that I called his mobile to demonstrate that the number I had given him was in fact correct, he simply refused to shut up and leave the toilet, and kept grabbing my arm and talking about going drinking. So what did he want? Was he in fact gay? There was only one way to find out. Groping for some clarity I reached into my pants.
He fled.
Ahh! A heterosexual!
I heaved a sigh of relief and used the facilities in peace.
When I walked back out he was no longer sitting beside my seat and had moved back to the other side of the room. The unsophisticated approach to resolving awkward social encounters is underrated.
The rest of the evening was uneventful enough. At around midnight the hostesses all disappeared, changed out of their uniforms, and returned in normal clothes, giving the signal that it was time to go. We paid up and left, some alone and some with their ‘girlfriends’. To keep the crab theme going we went to a restaurant for crab flavored rice porridge.
The crab porridge restaurant was Taiwanese style and it was interesting to see that most of the KTV girls, who came from all over China (Suchuan, Dongbei, Shanxi, etc.), knew how to make Taiwanese style tea (otherwise known as Minnan style tea). There was a tea set sitting on the table and they immediately got to work with it. The Minnan style of tea drinking is very specific and forms the basis for the Japanese tea ceremony. Minnan style tea is very potent and served in tiny cups, making it like the tea equivalent of espresso. The etiquette for brewing the tea is fairly relaxed, unlike the complicated Japanese tea ceremony, but making tea this way is still not something that most young Chinese women can do. Outside of Taiwan, Fujian, and parts of Guangdong, where everyone makes tea this way, this style of tea drinking is more like a hobby that a few old men get into. Obviously the KTV had lots of Taiwanese customers, which with Kunshan being full of Taiwanese was no surprise.
After the crab porridge I found a taxi and headed back to Shanghai, finally getting home around 4am or so after the driver got lost crossing Shanghai. For some reason the driver spoke Mandarin with me and dialect with everyone else. The problem was that nobody in Shanghai could understand anything he said in dialect and I ended up ‘translating’ for him. He spoke perfectly fine Mandarin, but his dialect was different enough from Shanghainese to make him unintelligible to the locals.
* ‘Crab’ in Mandarin is pronunced ‘xie’ in a rising tone, while ‘thank you’ is pronounced ‘xie’ in a falling tone. So ‘蟹谢你‘ would mean either ‘the crab thanks you’, or maybe ‘thank you crab’, but would sound very similar to a simple ‘thank you’ (谢谢你). It is a little laborious to explain but kind of clever.
What is it with jumping queues in the supermarket in China? And why are middle aged female queue jumpers far and away the most evil?
I headed down to the supermarket to pick up some stuff for dinner, in a good mood because I was making 烧酒鸡 (chicken with rice wine and herbs) using real Taiwanese 米酒 (rice wine) - from the iconic pink bottle.
The Taiwanese stuff in the supermarket is all on shelves labeled “imported goods - country of origin China” by the way. You have to wonder. If the stuff is really Chinese then why is it in the imported foods section? And if it comes from Taiwan, and if Taiwan is a part of China, then why do they need to plaster ‘China’ all over the shelves? Practically everything in the supermarket is Chinese, but only the Taiwan section is specifically labeled as Chinese. Why is Taiwan getting special treatment?
Also, would it kill them to actually incorporate the word ‘Taiwan’ in there somewhere? They seem desperate to make the point that Taiwan is a part of China, while being allergic to the word ‘Taiwan’ itself. There is something slightly irrational about all this. The word ‘Taiwan’ in itself does not imply that Taiwan is a country. The Chinese themselves refer to ‘Taiwan province’ after all. I’m sure the manager of Carefour could use the word ‘Taiwan’ in his imported foods section without being trucked out to Xinjiang and shot - and if somebody really does have to be shot I’m sure the manager could arrange for it to be one of the shelf stackers.
I admit it probably isn’t worth anybody getting shot over, but still it would be nice to be able to buy Taiwanese produce from a shelf that said ‘Taiwan’ somewhere. Or if the Taiwanese shelf has to say ‘China’, then logically they then need to plaster ‘China’ across every other shelf too? At least we would get some consistency, and maybe the guy who walks around putting the stickers up could receive a young patriot award or something.
Anyway, I get to the checkout with my bottle of Taiwanese rice wine from China, or if you prefer Chinese rice wine from Taiwan, or PRC rice wine manufactured under the illegal supervision of the bandit government of the ROC (on Taiwan, in China), or however you want to phrase it really. As I’m queuing I inadvertently let a foot or so of free space open up between me and the woman in front, and some middle aged dragon promptly slips into the gap.
I really can’t be arsed accusing her of jumping the queue and listening to the inevitable denial. For some reason Chinese women of middle age and above usually deny having jumped a queue, while men usually apologize. Anyway, rather than talking I just tap her on the shoulder and indicate with my thumb that she should be behind me. Incredibly she says that she is queuing and asks what I want. Well fuck me sideways with a chainsaw. . .
I ask her what she thought I was doing standing in a queue if I wasn’t queuing? Did she think I was waiting for spring to arrive? Another denial, and she adds that me having a big nose (i.e. being a foreigner) doesn’t give me any right to tell her what to do. That remark pissed me off no end. Why do Chinese introduce some racial or international dimension to every minor conflict with a foreigner?
Things were soon deteriorating badly. Before long people were turning round to watch and she was screaming that I’d assaulted her (the tap on the shoulder), injuring her arm. Unbelievable. Anyway, before the thing was finished I well and truly lost my temper. There was the inevitable (and unfortunate) 干你娘* and it was all downhill from there. There were insinuations that she had learned all about 插ing** on her back and was a regular 北港香炉*** (a phrase which nobody in Shanghai seems to understand). People were getting out cameras and taking pictures and stuff, so I am probably going to end up on some Chinese hate site with a death threat or something.
After she started screaming assault I suggested we go find a doctor and I cover her (undoubtedly enormous) medical bills. I guess the idea was calling her bluff or whatever. It was a bad idea of course because if we had got as far as the doctor it would likely have ended up with me forking out a few hundred RMB, to say nothing of wasting hours of time. Luckily one of the managers stepped in and defused things a little. Still, I may avoid that supermarket for a few weeks.
The previous week in a different supermarket an elderly man tried the same trick. Admittedly my own approach was slightly different and rather than do the shoulder tap I just asked him where he thought he was going. His own approach was slightly different too though, since had cut in using the non-confrontational ‘I’m a little lost but maybe I’m in the right place’ strategy. Anyway, he politely got back in the queue behind me and before long we were having the friendliest of chats. He checked carefully through my shopping (it was a bit disconcerting to watch him but he’d been so amicable about the queue jumping I felt obliged to let him have a rummage) and told me I shouldn’t be paying extra for skinless chicken thighs when it would be so easy to skin them myself, and that I should really be drinking Chinese wine instead of foreign stuff.
So a potentially heartwarming Shanghai story was derailed at the outset because a middle aged dragon couldn’t admit she was trying to jump a queue, and instead we ended up with a completely disgraceful scene getting recorded on film. It makes you wonder.
At least the chicken turned out pretty well.
* This means “fuck your grandmother”.
** This is a verb meaning ‘to stick (into)’, and happens to be part of the phrase ‘to jump a queue’ in Chinese. Of course since it also applies to other meanings related to ’stick’ it has potential for impolite double meanings. What I said was she must have learned about 插-ing in a 理发店 (literally a barber’s shop, but the reality is that most of them are brothels).
*** This phrase literally means ‘north harbor incense burner’ and comes from Taiwan. Taiwan has a big temple to the goddess Mazu in a place called North Harbor. The temple is one of the busiest in Taiwan and every day thousands of people stick joss sticks in the incense burner there. Thus the phrase ‘north harbor incense burner’ is less than respectful when applied to a woman in Taiwan because it means that everybody has stuck their joss stick in her. Mainlanders tend not to understand this one though.
You are currently browsing the archives for the Shanghai category.
