Dinner with Mr Wang and Mr Deng

From about April to October 1st, our company institutes a one-and-a-half-hour lunch break. Never mind that the receptionist likes to play pop music at excessively high volumes, the extra half hour is meant for us to sleep. Anyway, it means that by six o'clock, I am very hungry. Fortunately, there are many restaurants in the vicinity of the company. One is a hu lu tou restaurant, which is a fairly prevalent dish here in Xian.

I usually go there once a week. It consists of 'mo', a type of round bread, which you break into pieces yourself. Add in some rice noodles, mushrooms, quails eggs, herbs, spices and sheep intestines and it makes for a good dish. It seems the phrase 'sheep intestines' does not have much appeal, but if we eat sheep meat, why are the intestines any different? And, indeed, sheep blood, as someone quite accurately pointed out to me last week.

Anyway, at about 6.05pm, after parking my so-rubbish-it's-not-worth-stealing bike, I walk into the hu lu tou restaurant. Just as I think it's fairly empty, I see, at a table in the corner, sit Mr Wang and Mr Deng.

Mr Wang, more generally known as Wang Zong, is an important person in our company, project manager for various projects at home and abroad. I first met him properly during the spring outing our company arranged in April. He has, as a fellow translator pointed out at the time, a tremendous 'ability to summarise', which is great in an age of waffle, guff and spew. He spoke to me about Chinese culture, and is convinced I should become a Chinese professor (possibly because he knows I can never learn power station engineering). Probably about 50-55 years old, he has spent his entire life in a power plant. A power plant in China, particularly the 'old days', is a life. The power station complex consists of schools, hospitals, leisure and, of course, a job.

He speaks directly, to the point, without airs and graces, and with a thick North Eastern accent that makes it even harder to understand what he says. And I knew when I bumped into him evening, it would be more of the same intense listening practice. A warm welcome to sit down and join him and Mr Deng (project manager for a power station in Indonesia) was followed very closely by a sharp call to the waitress for another bottle of baijiu.

Baijiu is the Chinese liquor of choice. If you are a man, and especially if you don't smoke like me, then you need to be able to drink baijiu. Fortunately I can, so I quite welcomed the entire bottle being poured into my glass.

Firstly we ate 'liang cai' (cold dish), which is like the first course of a two course meal. During that, we drank the baijiu and spoke about many topics. Being a foreigner and an Englishman, we mainly spoke about foreign affairs, England and China. Not unlike many Chinese, Mr Wang spoke at length about the humiliation suffered by China from 1842-1949. They don't necessarily want to be number one, and they dislike, even mock, America for trying to be so. But they do not want to be bullied. They admire Stevenson, Watt and Britain generally for being a small country yet able to produce many famous inventors and conquer half the world's land mass.

The main course was eaten quite swiftly. Afterwards, the beer was finished, and more was talked about. I tried to ascertain exactly why Mr Wang would work for our company, at a time when working for a state-owned company is seen as a perfect job. He gave a full and detailed answer, which I completely failed to understand.

A short time afterwards, we left the restaurant. I unlocked my bike - correctly identified by Mr Wang as 'that one that no-one would want to steal' - and rode home.