I was reminiscing over the weekend about my first visit to China, 15 years ago this month. And I thought I should add one or two stories on here about my drinking experiences during that trip.
My very first night in China (well, if we discount the hellish night I spent in a railway station hotel in Shenzhen, an episode I try not to dwell on), I got extravagantly drunk.
I was visiting an old college friend, his new Chinese wife, his sister and brother-in-law (fortuitously also visiting at this time, although they were nearing the end of their stay just as I was arriving), and his teaching colleague (the only other foreigner in the small Hankou university where my friend was working, and one of only a handful in the entire city at that time).
We'd got fairly well lubricated at dinner, only hours after my arrival. Then we went back to the university guest house where we were all staying to attack a crate of beer we'd bought that afternoon. (I think we'd paid about 30 kuai for 24 large bottles; but a good chunk of that was a deposit on the crate. I suppose there was probably some deposit on the bottles as well. I can't quite recall the basic price of a beer, but I think it was around 1 kuai each; and I recall there being some disgruntlement - amongst Chinese friends I made on the trip even more than the foreigners - because it had but recently gone up from 7 or 8 mao. Ah, those were the days! The crate was a thing of wonder, too: roughly constructed from odd pieces of scrap wood, it was extremely heavy, and difficult, not to say hazardous to carry because of all the splinters and the points of bent, rusted nails protruding from it. It was something of a cheek to charge a deposit on that. But I digress...)
We - well, I - decided that we ought to mark my first day in the Middle Kingdom by getting properly drunk, and I suggested that we ought to do our damnedest to finish the crate off in one sitting. 24 bottles between 6 people should not have been that much of a challenge, and, at first, all of my companions were game to give it a try. Unfortunately....
Well, my friend and his wife had had a big row about something at dinner, and she retired to bed early to sulk. He felt obliged to follow her shortly afterwards, either to apologise or to conduct a sulk of his own. His colleague lasted till around midnight, but then decided that discretion was the better part of valour since he had a class at 8am. So, suddenly there were just three of us, and we weren't even half-way down the case yet. The sister and brother-in-law are from Scotland (well, he's a native, and it's her adopted home ever since she was an undergraduate at the University of Edinburgh), so, they're accomplished drinkers. The sister, in fact, is one of the finest lady drinkers I know. However, I think she quit the pace around 2am, leaving still 6 or so bottles for her hubby and I to polish off. We refused to be beaten.
I'm not sure what time we finished. Probably around 3.30 or 4am, I suspect. Rather than risk disturbing my (Chinese) roommates (in a room I don't think I'd even visited yet), I crashed out on a sofa in the room where we'd been drinking, a mini-apartment the sister and brother-in-law were renting (a room I coveted for myself, since it had a quaint moon arch in the middle of it - but the guesthouse management insisted that it was never "available", though in fact I think it was always empty after my new friends left a week later; perhaps it was being reserved for possible use by another travelling couple). I lost all recollection of the latter stages of the "evening". When I awoke the next morning, groggily, after just a few hours sleep, in an unfamiliar room.... well, for several seconds at least I could not remember where I was; I could not even remember what country I was in; I could scarcely even remember who I was. It was a strangely liberating, exhilarating experience.
And then I remembered I was in China. And I felt immediately at peace.
And I thought to myself, If we drink like that every night, I'm really going to enjoy myself in this country.
No comments:
Post a Comment