I volunteered for a banquet?

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I have two Chinese friends in Nanjing. One is a girl who I ran into on campus. I was standing there with a bewildered foreigner look and she very generously stopped to help me. I really like her because she was so willing to help me and doesn’t seem to want anything in return. She isn’t trying to get me to teach her cousins English and she seems to want nothing more than to hang out with me. And she is very helpful.

My other Chinese friend was my real estate agent. She is my age and I go over to her real estate company that’s right by my house a lot. She is teaching me how to embroider a pattern by “Valerie Pfeiffer”. Yeah, you thought it would be by someone named Wang Qin or Li Peng. So my real estate friend called me up this afternoon and asked if I want to go out to dinner with her and her friends. I said “sure”! Little did I know that I was volunteering for one of those Chinese banquets.

I was picturing some 23 year old girls. Instead I got six forty to fifty year old Chinese men doing a business dinner and getting drunk on Chinese bai jiu as is the usual custom. I was wearing blue athletic pants and a pink t-shirt, fit for a casual dinner with girl friends. Imagine me at a table full of old business men getting wildly drunk - the only young, white American girl at the table - with no real purpose for being there. Then picture that when they aren’t talking business I am constantly the center of attention and of all the laughs.

They taught me Nanjing dialect and laughed when I repeated it. I learned “si(4) pi(2) lai(4) zi”, good for nothing person who doesn’t keep their word. I learned “ni(3) shuai(3)” meaning you’re full of crap. I learned dou(4) da(4) si(4) - meaning don’t worry about it or in Mandarin “mei shi.”

They wanted me to teach them some English. “How do you say ‘gan bei’ in English?” “Cheers” I said, but they all said “chaas”. So I told them “qi (the number 7 in chinese) er (the number two in chinese) and then an s”. One guy said “oh, it’s qi er si - seven, two, four. “Chee-are-s”.

After an entire beer glass worth of bai jiu each, which can be something like 80% alcohol, one of the business men started trying to spell the word “English”. “Is this how you spell English?” “E…..N…..uhhh….G…..H….I….N….I”. Everyone started cracking up and he tried again “E, N, G, H”. “No, L” I said. “L .....I …N”. “No, SH” “L…I….H….N”. I was laughing so hard I almost cried and everyone else was too. Since he was very drunk, he kept going on and on very stubborn. When we finally stopped paying attention to him, I looked over and noticed he was still trying to write letters with his finger on the table.

I couldn’t get out of there without the usual impositions on my life. One of the men kept hinting that he wanted me to teach his daughter English. Before I left he tried to get my phone number. Luckily my real estate friend had armed me with “I had never thought of that before”, as my answer. Another business man wanted us all to get together again later in the week. We had already been sitting at that table for almost three hours and I wasn’t so excited about the prospect. Of course, he picked the day I am going to Shanghai for Rosh Hashanah. I got scared they were going to try to get me to go late or give up my Jewish holiday to eat dinner with them. This guy was so persistent. He kept talking to me through my friend because sometimes I wouldn’t understand him, but this time I did. “Tell her we want to do this again on Friday,” “She can’t she’s going away on Friday”. “What time is she going away on Friday?” “In the afternoon”. “Could she go later on Friday?” “How about Thursday?” and on and on. Thursday I have class and he tried for Wednesday. But it was Monday night at the time! That would be planning another dinner the day after tomorrow - crazy and not the usual for Chinese people one has just met. I thought I’d be stuck there forever and was about to text Holly and tell her to call me and I’ll pretend something came up when they said “zou, zou, zou”, let’s go. So I was released from the scene with nothing more than a confused feeling and some funny memories.

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