I Stand Corrected (17 page)

My claim was exaggerated for the sake of pleasing Mr. Han, who looked extremely pleased.

He began the tour of his office compound by proudly pointing to the large marble bust in the lobby. It was of the seventeenth-century French founder of the company.

Well, actually, no. It was a bust of Beethoven.

My face was quick to express confusion; just as quickly, Gilliam pulled me aside. “Don’t ask any questions,” he whispered as we were escorted to Mr. Han’s private office.

He gestured for us to come to the other side of his desk, where his safe was located. It looked like something seen in old black-and-white movies. Carefully shielding the combination as he rotated the enormous ball-bearing lock, he struggled to pry open the heavy door, creating just enough space to reach in and remove what he explained was a very old document. Only it was new.

It diagrammed the entirely fabricated genealogy of an ancient French family. Another document I was shown pictured the family crest, which appeared to include the state flag of Hawaii.

“If you go to the trouble of falsifying your company’s history, it should at least look historically accurate,” I murmured to Gilliam as we followed Mr. Han to a restaurant on the second floor of the building next door, which he also owned.

We stepped into a private dining room flanked by giant cement foo dogs, and before we took our places at the table, the gruffly likable Mr. Han offered the first of what would be many toasts that evening by holding up his glass and saying,
“Ganbei.”

As is the practice in China, our host knocked back his glass of wine like a shot of tequila. He waited for me to follow suit, whereupon Gilliam took pains to explain that I had a medical condition and would, well, die if that kind of drinking was expected of me.

With its inky red color and a smell that reminded me of old leather bindings, I knew, even before tasting the wine poured
to the very top of my glass, that it would be special. Rather than swigging it down, I did something that is perceived in China to be a social rejection of the host: I sipped. That first sip was warm reassurance that absolutely nothing could possibly go wrong as long as I took my time getting to the next.

Mr. Han—fearing I was dissatisfied with the wine because I was so slow drinking it—showed me the label on the bottle: Château Lafite Rothschild. All I could think of was that the price of that single bottle of wine—emptied during the first ten minutes of dinner that night—must have cost several times Mr. Han’s total annual income years before.

The custom of toasting dates back to the Middle Ages, when people were not above poisoning their enemies’ wine. To prove that the wine the host was serving at his table was not tainted, he would pour a small amount in his glass and that of his guest, and they would drink together, at the same time, in a display of mutual trust.

Chinese wines are made from any number of ingredients, including bamboo leaves, cassia flowers, and ginseng. All share a base of grain liquor. But China is also the world’s biggest importer of Bordeaux wines, and it is soaking up top vintages. Wine consumption has doubled twice in the past five years, but
baijiu
remains the most popular liquor and is served liberally at dinners. So it was
baijiu
—between 80 and 120 proof and with its smell and taste of paint thinner—that was poured immediately after Mr. Han’s obligatory display of Château Lafite Rothschild.

In China, toasts are not limited to the meal’s beginning and ending. Instead, they are scattered generously throughout and announced with the word
ganbei
, which means “empty the glass.” Half a glass of wine sipped slowly during the course of the entire meal is known to move me to something as close to louche as possible, so you can see where even just one
ganbei
might lead.

As treacherous as it can be for the guest, partaking in the inebriated merriment at a Chinese table is a sign of goodwill; denying that pleasure to the host brings a possible loss of face.
At banquets, it is not uncommon for the more savvy Western businessmen, aware of their own limitations, to be accompanied by a drinking stand-in. On one’s own, it is best to employ false excuses based on health issues, for if you do not make a plausible excuse known before the first toast, you’re in it for the long haul.

What fails to happen can matter as much as what happens, and declining anything from one’s host in China—even with a seemingly legitimate excuse—throws a gloom over the shared celebration. As a guest of Mr. Han that evening, I moved out of my comfort zone to keep him happy. It takes only a few sips of alcohol to make the familiar seem strange to me, and the strange familiar. I began the evening with a straight-backed propriety, but sipping my way through the meal reduced me to a disheveled heap. When Mr. Han raised his glass to offer our final toast with the noxious
baijiu
, I slumped forward onto a plate in front of me of slices of dragon fruit and pineapple. Gilliam helped return me to an upright position for the sake of the toast. Black seeds from the dragon fruit stuck to my face.

Though my son was endlessly amused, having never seen me in such an undignified state, I was the only one at the table appalled by my condition. Rather than a sign of degradation, my inebriation was viewed as a welcomed show to Mr. Han that the elaborate dinner he hosted had been a great success. Staggering out of the restaurant—with no wish that anyone, including Gilliam, accompany me in my semiconscious haze—I insisted I could make it back to the hotel on my own.

Mercifully, the cool night air restored a degree of sobriety, and I reclaimed enough cognitive thought to decide to include a lesson on wine protocol in my book.

A splitting headache was waiting for me the next morning, but I managed to write the lesson on the practices of Western drinking. Its introductory sentence was banging against my brain as I wrote it.

Most important, make sure you know your own limits in drinking alcohol
. At the dining table, the bottle of wine should be placed in front of the host. If there are more than six guests, another bottle of wine should be stationed at the other end of the table.

If you are the host, it is nice—but not necessary—to offer your guests their choice of red or white, no matter what kind of meal you are serving
. Wineglasses should be filled, from the right, half to two-thirds full. When pouring and refilling, it is best to hold the bottle around the label to prevent slippage and to twist the bottle slightly, which will disallow drops from falling from the neck of the bottle onto the tablecloth. If you are the guest, don’t reach across the table for the wine. Wait for it to be offered. It is the prerogative of the host to offer the first toast. If it is apparent a toast is not forthcoming, a guest can propose the first toast (before people start eating) as a way of thanking the host for bringing everyone together and the hostess for her generous hospitality.

After I had composed this lesson on wine protocol, it occurred to me that there was another, separate issue that required equal consideration. Though unable to recall a great deal of the previous evening, I had a vivid recollection of the various noises made at the table, which convinced me to amend the lesson I had already written on table manners. Advice on the inadvisability of making noises—at and away from the dining table—required face-saving aplomb. I was able to provide some degree of it by drawing from my family experiences.

When W. and I were wed on the Amazon River by the captain of a Peruvian supply boat, the ceremony was followed by a feast of monkey meat. It was little wonder the legality of our marriage certificate didn’t manage to make it across the border and we had no choice but to repeat the wedding in the States.

The week before, a distraught W. made a call to my office to inform me that he wanted to tell me something. He suggested discussing it over dinner that night.

I phoned Candida immediately. “What can it possibly be?” I asked her.

“He’s already married,” guessed Candida.

“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “He couldn’t have hidden a wife—not for a year.”

As the words crossed my lips, I remembered W.’s admiration of the man in the Amazon with two wives. When, that night, I met W. at the restaurant, the knot in my stomach had taken the place of an appetite.

W. and I sat facing each other across a table, and hovering directly above was a forbiddingly empty caption balloon. W. ate his dinner; I rearranged mine on my plate. W. lingered over dessert; I sipped tea. By the time W.’s espresso arrived, I couldn’t stand waiting any longer.

“What was it you wanted to tell me?” I asked with an expression that projected mortification in advance.

“This is so embarrassing,” was his ominous preamble. “If I tell you, you won’t bolt, will you?”

Solidified fear lodged in my throat. “Of course not,” I managed to say. It wasn’t an entirely truthful answer.

“The thing is,” he said in a voice that rose barely above a whisper, “I make a sound.”

I was sure I’d misheard.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I make a sound,” he repeated.

By no means did my confusion disappear, but overwhelming gratitude took over.

W. was relieved as well. “I feel better now that you know,” he said.

“I’m glad you told me, darling, but we’ve been together for almost a year, and I think I’ve heard all the sounds in your repertoire.”

“Not this one. I make it when I draw. You’re not around when I draw.”

As a cartoonist, W. worked from home. What he had said
was true: I left for my office in the early morning, before he sat down to draw, and I didn’t return home until after he had put his drawings away for the evening. W. explained that he suppressed the noise during the weekends.

“What kind of noise is it?” I asked him.

“I can’t tell you,” he said. “But I gather it’s loud.… I mean I’ve been told it’s loud.”

“How loud?”

“The couple who lives below us thinks I’ve set up a machine shop,” said the man for whom I would forsake all others.

The noise made a point of introducing itself the day we would be joined in legal matrimony. The wedding was held on W.’s family ranch in Northern California. That morning—as I walked across the courtyard toward the cottage where W. was drawing—I heard what I assumed was the sound of farm equipment, but each step brought me closer to the realization that W. was powering the noise.

I stood outside the door long enough to decide not to open it. Instead, I went to the main house to have breakfast with my future mother-in-law. “How long has he made the noise?” I asked. “Since he was a little boy,” she explained, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. “But I think it’s better if you referred to it as a ‘sound,’ ” she suggested. “It’s a far more attractive word than ‘noise,’ wouldn’t you agree?”

The Collinsworths were arriving later that morning. Each member of my family would display a uniquely disturbing brand of eccentricity; one in particular had required a three-day pass from a mental institution to make the trip. It seemed to me that I was in no position to ask questions I wasn’t willing to answer myself.

“Of course, you’re right,” I told the woman W. loved best. “It’s a sound, not a noise.”

Despite my mother-in-law’s distinction between making a noise and making a sound, it is equally likely that both—heard by those other than the Chinese—will result in varying degrees of embarrassment for Westerners. This I made clear in my amendment to the lesson on table manners.

I
couldn’t bring myself to visit the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall, which exhibits skeletons stacked in piles and old photographs of corpses lining the streets. Affirmation of life for me was to be found in a Muslim-style tomb containing the headgear of a fourteenth-century eunuch, buried at sea, whose expeditionary journeys from Nanjing reached as far as Southeast Asia, India, the Middle East, and East Africa.

Zheng He had been a mariner, an explorer, a diplomat, and the fleet commander of naval expeditions during the Ming dynasty. Years before my visit to Nanjing, I heard some part of his incredible story from a Chinese colleague in Shanghai. For fear of putting my colleague on the spot, I withheld questions, the first of which would have been the most obvious: Given Zheng He’s dashing flair and unquestioned bravery, who would have deliberately truncated the physical evidence of his manhood—and why?

Answers were found in Nanjing.

Zheng He was captured as a child by the Ming army in Yunnan Province. He was castrated and placed in servitude to the emperor, whose son, Zhu Di, was Zheng’s age. As a young man, Zheng accompanied Zhu Di on military campaigns against hostile Mongol tribes on the northern frontier, and thereby earned both Zhu Di’s trust and respect.

With time, Zhu Di’s armies would also occupy Nanjing.
When Zhu Di became emperor, he ordered his court in Nanjing to construct a vast armada of nearly two thousand trading vessels and warships and named Zheng He its commander in chief.

Zheng He returned from travels to Brunei, Thailand, India, the Horn of Africa, and Arabia with the exotic novelties of ostriches, zebras, and giraffes; and his fabled exploits were recorded by Western writers, who changed his name to Sinbad the Sailor.

After exhausting my way around all that had been memorialized of Zheng He in Nanjing, I did what I do in a city I do not know: I headed for the market. Regardless of where in the world they happen to be, open-air markets are always a lively congregation of everything local; the one in Nanjing was no exception.

I am not as tall as my son, but my height is still considered extreme in most parts of China, and people stare at me as though studying a creature capable of feeding from the topmost leaves on trees. I wandered the market in no particular direction but word traveled quickly—or so it seemed—for it was not too long before locals congregated in a semicircle, nodding among themselves as if agreeing on my oddity. After a short period of intense staring, some asked to take my picture, while others encouraged me in the direction of various food stalls. Trying my best to be agreeable, but unwilling to purchase skewers of squid and octopus, I sought safety in the market’s grain stalls.