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For the third time in as many days, we failed to pay for dinner. As we picked out the dishes we wanted, a casually well-dressed man shadowed us and entered the room we planned to eat in. No big deal. Such is the celebrity status afforded many foreigners in China. People follow you around and linger during otherwise uninteresting interactions. We thought nothing of him, until he intruded upon our conversation. Later he brought his 10 year old daughter into the room, and forced out of her improbably properly pronounced English. Despite ourselves, we were impressed.

Half-way through dinner, after he had made it clear he would by us dinner and we had invited he and his family to join us, dishes vied for space on the table. The sickening smell of baijiu lingered over the cigarette smoke and uncomfortable silences. The man, a Mr. Chen, boss of the karaoke bar opposite and owner of various other establishments, explained the excessive ordering. “There is a Chinese saying,” he noted, “‘Anyone with a full stomach cannot be homesick’”. The piles of food before us represented his small effort at assuaging in us whatever homesickness might remain there, despite our feeling quite at home wherever we were.

Mr. Chen’s 10 year old daughter rolled her eyes, heaved a huge sigh, and sank her head down on the table. I couldn’t blame her. For the whole evening she had been explaining in perfect Mandarin what her father and her father’s friend and their Southern, baijiu-affected accents had failed to get across to us. And now he entreated her to yet another irksome task: singing. In lieu of trekking across the street to her father’s place of business, for what would surely extend to hours of singing Chinese songs (difficult for the two of us who can’t read characters) and probably more drinking, we had compromised by trading a few songs around the dinner table. After a rousing performance of “10 Little Indians”, FBR followed with a slightly more complex if not earnest rendition of “Out of the Woods”.

After that we called it a night, only to find our hotel crawling with policemen. We spent a not interminably long but tense hour filling out the official but hardly ever conformed to paperwork to register foreigners every night they stay anywhere in China. Even though everything was in order, they asked us where we worked in Beijing, where were we going, claimed we couldn’t bike all the way to Hong Kong by the time our visas expired.

I in turn asked them why they checked the passports for all the foreigners, suggesting that perhaps in a few years, what with the inevitable increase in foreigner traffic, they would soon tire themselves out with such activities. The nicer, older officer got quiet and nervous, and looked down, but the younger more truculent officer forged ahead with his paperwork, glancing, annoyed, at his watch throughout the evening. Though I felt like pointing out a that an excellent way to avoid waste time collecting information on foreigners was to not collect it in the first place, I held my tongue.

After the departure of the police, Mr. Chen dropped by the hotel. Though his pronunciation had not improved during the evening, he made me to understand he was none-to-impressed with the local authorities. I must admit that earlier we were all slightly annoyed at Mr. Chen’s generosity. We wanted a quiet dinner, by ourselves, without the pressure (almost constant in the past two days) to speak to and entertain large crowds of people. Thanks, however, to the meddlesome nature of the local law enforcement officials, I think we were all reminded of the value of positive interaction. Interaction with people who like you and don’t want you to do paperwork will always be superior to those who don’t like you and do have papers needful of filling out. Thanks, Mr. Chen.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 7th, 2007 at 9:18 am and is filed under Jim's Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.