Lunch

Unlike Europe, client entertainment is de rigeur this part of the world, and I find myself off to a client lunch after a quick visit to their offices, which overlook the Bird’s Nest stadium and Water Cube at the Olympic Village. Naturally, the block of buildings, spearheaded by the tall office building before slanting to three residential towers and a up flip to a hotel is meant to resemble a dragon. As we head towards lunch, it becomes abundantly clear that (a) the philosophy imbued in the masses that ride the subway is a mere cultural expression of the thou shalt not wait ethos and (b) the Chinese do not give a flying flip about lift manufacturers guidelines on the number of people allowed. We get into a lift that is already filled to capacity and make three further stops along the way, as a general shuffle of angling bodies slightly yields room for another seven people (admittedly tiny, but hey!) and you wonder if any of these lifts will actually belch out an overload (something I’ve seen happen with great abandonment in Singapore). Andy decides we should experience cuisine from his hometown which lies in Wuhan province and lunch turns out to be an experience completely different to anything else ‘Chinese’ I’ve eaten in all these years. An unexpected and most surprising offering turns out to be a decadently luxurious soup that’s oddly comforting. An unusual mix between silky, lush pork fat imbibed broth and the stolid comfort of starchy lotus root (with trailing, sticky strands that brought back to mind a graphically pornographic description someone once made). How they eat the way they do and go back to work (thankfully, as a race, the Chinese are diverse and share the skinny bitches with regular people) . Delicious fish in gravy (enough to serve 6), greens from the province gently steamed to retain crunch, rice, a rather odd concoction of spring onion type greens and a surprisingly bland meat product, the lush soup, duck with some kind of winter melon/squash that merrily cooked on a flame as we went through the rest of the meal. Nothing like a business lunch to get the eyelids drooping…. Apart from the culinary, I also discover that while China does have amendments to its 1 Child Policy, it’s not easy for couples to have families. Kat is moving to Shenzen to work before giving birth to her baby in Hong Kong not because as I had naively assumed, that she has family there, but because if she were to stay in Beijing and have her second baby, they would be fined ¥ 300,000 for breaking the one child policy! However, it is apparently acceptable, to go off and have your baby elsewhere and then come back to China. So apart from the nuisance value, you could spend a third of the fine living elsewhere and then come home with a jubilant defiance of the government’s policy. Couples who are single offspring themselves have the right to a second baby, but only if there is a five year gap between the children and there might even be some age restrictions (apart from the obvious of the unlikelihood of having a second if you’re first only deigns to show up when you’re 40!). It feels so bizarre not to have the right to choose something as fundamental as how many babies you will or won’t have (and to think I’d gone into rant mode without this dazzling piece of knowledge!) and even if you are ‘eligible’, to have the Government stipulate when! Like India, the baseline is formidable so while it’s kinda understandable. This place is crazy, and I love it!