EATING OUT IN CHINA: ONE NIGHT IN SHENYANG

By James Chan, Ph.D*

In my 21 years of traveling to China, I have learned that the most difficult moment for my American clients is often the celebratory banquet.  I have helped them to remain calm through hundreds of meals featuring sea slugs, turtle shells, jelly fish, seaweed, duck tongues, chicken feet, pig’s brains, duck webs and many more unlikely creatures and dubious body parts.  I thought I was immune to the reflexive disgust that so often grips my clients.  But on a recent evening in Shenyang, I discovered I was wrong.

We had told our customer, a leading heavy equipment manufacturer with 3,000 workers, that we would take them out to dinner to celebrate signing a contract with them.  The deputy director of the factory picked the restaurant—our first mistake.  It was a Korean restaurant, staffed by young waitresses, most of whom were daughters of high-ranking officials from North Korea.  The deputy director told me quickly that the restaurant is located in a building that houses the central intelligence unit of the North Korean government in China. The building doubles as a hotel.

We compounded our error by letting the deputy director pick the food.  Our Korean waitress started putting one dish after another on the lazy Susan.  First came the spicy Korean cabbage, kim chi, then followed by roasted peanuts, raw onions and other uncooked lettuce and sliced vegetables.  She brought out a dish of brown stew which I thought was beef tendon.  I started eating it and thought that, while it wasn’t bad, it didn’t really taste like beef tendon—a favorite Chinese restaurant dish usually cooked with braised beef in a brown sauce.

The dish turned out not to be beef tendon.  The factory deputy director said to me in a clinical way: “It is bull’s penis.”  I dropped the remaining morsel I had in my chopsticks.  I lost my appetite.  The factory director didn’t eat it himself.

Following a plate of cardboard-textured raw salmon, the waitress placed a whole fish on the table.  The slices of oddly pink and slightly yellowish raw fish sit on a hill of white, rice vermicelli noodles.  I picked up a slice of the fish, dipped it in the green wasabi-laced soy sauce.  Something told me not to put that fish into my mouth.  I trusted my instinct and hid the piece of raw fish among the stubble of fried shrimp heads and shells that I had accumulated on my platter by that time.

Then, something horrible happened.  The fish we were eating started to move.  Its head jerked and mouth opened, just like the singing bass that was so popular in infomercials a few years ago.  Was this just a reflex, I wondered, or were we eating this fish alive?  I didn’t want to know.  The fish was fresh, I guess, but I didn’t want to eat it or anything else.

But the parade of disgusting food continued.  Our customer had ordered dog meat.  I refused to eat it, and I noticed that some of our customer’s party was avoiding it too.  I once ate dog stew when I was a child in Hong Kong.  My father wanted to gross me out by taking the family out to have dog.  I understand that dog meat is a delicacy among quite a number of Korean—and Chinese—people.  But while I can take sea slugs in stride, I don’t eat dogs.

The deputy director took his assistant to dinner with us that evening.  The assistant was a real sycophant.  He spent the entire night praising the factory director so shamelessly I felt embarrassed.  Yet the factory director didn’t seem to notice the servile flattery.  And the three other Shenyang men who came with them chimed in on the sycophant’s endless praise of his great leader like a bad karaoke song.  I did notice though, that the director was avoiding eating the dog.

All the while, the Chinese smoked one cigarette after another, while quaffing an expensive, bad-tasting, and extremely potent rice wine they had ordered.  Indeed, by the time the dog arrived, most of the group was drunk.  At that point, the factory director told me that he had gotten his position because his predecessor died in a recent car accident.  Upon hearing this, his assistant became agitated.  He fell off his chair, somehow picked himself off the floor, then, uncertain of his balance, steadied himself by leaning on me.  He put his arm around my neck and his body on my shoulder and whispered to my ear—his mouth touching my left ear.  “He is going to be the director!  He is going to be the next factory director!”  He was referring to the deputy factory director, who, unaware of his assistant’s antics, was bragging about how he had on display 160 bottles of foreign wines and liquor in his dining room while not drinking a drop of it.   While the deputy remained oblivious, another manager dragged the drunken underling off of me and out of the room.

Meanwhile, as the half-eaten fish continued to jerk its head on the platter, the deputy director announced it was time for karaoke.   He ordered the Korean waitress to turn on the large TV set.   The waitress handed him an oversized book that contains the lyrics (in Chinese) of many foreign and Chinese songs.   He picked what seemed to be a VCR tape.   The video showed Caucasian women in California walking, shopping, and crossing the street.   It had the look of a cheap, soft-core porn movie.   Flashing on the screen were large Chinese subtitles that prompted the deputy factory director to sing aloud about the glory of the Chinese Communist Party.   Its lyrics exhorted people to work hard for the good of the country and praised the Chinese people for following the party’s leadership to produce stunting economic results.   I didn’t quite see the connection between this message and the pictures of Caucasian women crossing streets, but the deputy sang with gusto.

The Korean waitress followed the deputy factory director and sang two songs, one in Korean and one in Chinese.   Out of politeness to our customer, I kept smiling all night long.   It was, after all, a business dinner (though I was starved.)

The deputy director had by then left the room abruptly.   I later found out that he had another foreign contact that he needed to entertain in another room.   When he returned, he tried to pay for the dinner, even though he obviously knew that it was our treat.   He took out his wallet and got into a “let-me-pay” struggle with us until we paid, of course.

Dinner that night came to 1,200 yuan ($150, half of which was the price of the disgusting rice wine).

I bid a cordial farewell to our customer and retreated promptly to the Shenyang Intercontinental by cab.   As soon as we went back to the hotel, I ordered a bowl of homely soup noodle (shredded pork with preserved vegetables for $3).   It was good to have finally escaped the banquet, and to have something I could eat!

But it was, perhaps a worthwhile experience.    Having helped so many clients through their cultural shock in China, this disgusting evening in Shenyang gave me a taste of how they feel.

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*James Chan, Ph.D., is President of Asia Marketing and Management, an independent consultant based in Philadelphia. He consults with companies that want to do business in Asia. To view his profile online, go to:www.maconsultants.com/amm.htm.   He is the author of Spare Room Tycoon: Succeeding Independently, The 70 Lessons of Sane Self Employment (www.SpareRoomTycoon.com).   E-mail: jameschan@comcast.net.