Free Mr. China by Tim Clissold Page B

nature of the food, is meant to flatter the guests. I thought back to the factories in the hills and hankered
after some simple, spicy Sichuan dishes, but unfortunately my first guess had been right: the dinner we had that evening with the Mayor of Changchun was an absolute classic.
    It started off, as it always does, with a fight about the seating arrangements. At these events there is a strict hierarchical order to the places at the table and there is always a prolonged
argument amongst the middle-ranking Chinese officials about where they should sit, with plenty of jostling and pushing, each person protesting loudly that the others should take the more senior
places. Once everyone had settled, during the small talk little glass cups appeared beside each guest’s place and were silently filled with baijiu by waitresses who moved noiselessly
through a concealed door in the panelling.
    Baijiu looks like gin but it tastes much stronger. It is distilled from grain and sorghum and there are many famous brands of the drink in China. Wuliang ye or ‘five-grain
liquid’ comes from Yibin in Sichuan, and maotai, the most famous in China, comes from Guizhou, further south. At the lower end of the market, there is er guo tou or ‘the
top of the second wok’, which is distilled in Beijing. A really good bottle of maotai can cost the equivalent of several months’ salary. Baijiu is always taken neat but,
thankfully, in small doses. The idea is to knock it back in one go with a cry of ‘ Gan bei’, ‘ Dry the cup!’ The problem is that drinking baijiu at a Chinese
banquet is compulsory; it is slightly viscous, has a smell like exhaust fumes mixed with a trace of chocolate and seems both fiery and sickly at the same time. It burns the inside of your mouth and
throat and leaves you with a sensation rather than a taste. There is an immediate feeling of heat and tingling that creeps up the back of the neck and radiates out all over the scalp. I already
knew that these formal banquets entailed elaborate drinking rituals designed to get the guests hopelessly drunk, so I braced myself for the deluge.
    Baijiu loosens tongues almost immediately although I’ve never met anybody, even at the heights of alcoholic derangement, prepared to admit that they actually liked the taste. After
drinking it, most people screw up their faces in an involuntary expression of pain and some even yell out. But there were plenty of people who liked the sensation and the atmosphere that a couple
of bottles of baijiu produced at a dinner. It created the best parties and the worst hangovers imaginable and the smell seemed to seep out through my pores the following day. A German friend
once summed up the experience perfectly. She said, in her perfect Hochdeutsch, that when her husband had been out drinking with his Chinese colleagues and had hit the baijiu, it was
as if she had ‘woken up the following morning next to an oily rag that had been soaked in diesel’.
    The Mayor was obviously pleased that we had had a good day. He was anxious for foreign investment in Changchun. Although I knew that bringing substantial foreign investment to Changchun would be
good for his career, I still felt that he was genuine in his desire to see the city develop and improve the lives of the people there. So the baijiu flowed freely and the atmosphere relaxed.
Nevertheless, as the waitresses started bringing in the plates, I eyed the food with deep suspicion.
    The starters were served cold. First, there was a dish of duck webs in a thick yellow sauce. It turned out to be the strongest mustard that I had ever tasted. It sent a searing pain up the back
of my nose and brought tears to my eyes. Next came ‘husband and wife’ lung slices. Mayor Huang roared with laughter as it was translated and poured some more baijiu. He told us
that it was a Sichuan speciality: cow’s lung soaked in chilli sauce. The lungs were followed by goose stomachs, a couple of dishes