Beijing Duck

We had a large group, 47 people, and all our meals were pre-planned, and pre-paid. After a long day in Beijing, we went to a downtown restaurant for dinner of Peking Duck.

The restaurant, as were nearly all of those attended, fairly large and shiny. I expect that restaurants and menu details were chosen specifically to cater to Americans. My aunt and uncle visited China in the early 80's, and they reported being served dog at one point. We were never served dog.

The place setting was pretty much the same at every meal. A small plate, a small bowl with a soup spoon in it, chopsticks, usually the plastic kind, and a glass tumbler. We were quite confused about the bowl. Was it a rice bowl, or a soup bowl? We were always served a soup course, but in some cases it came with its own bowl, as it did that night in Beijing. Food was served family-style on a large lazy susan in the middle of the table. Just like all my favorite Chinese restaurants in the US.

The food in Beijing had the heaviest sauces of anywhere we ate. The duck was very good, mouth-melty and smoky in flavor. We wrapped it in a thin rice pancake. It was very fatty, so I didn't have much, on account of my body's propensity to turn fat into arterial blockage. A very marked propensity, that.

Nearly every lunch and dinner began with a few cold dishes already on the table. These were things like sliced cucumbers and precooked meat. The meat bits weren't smoked, really, they were more like bologna or something. Or maybe pickled roast pork or something. Not very spicy though, with little or no vinegar, either. So maybe pickled isn't a good word. I came to appreciate these more and more, at least the vegetables. Because there was very little oil in them, and the were a nice fresh taste, it was quite refreshing to snack on them while waiting to be served the hot dishes. Though I wish they'd throw in one or two with a bit more spice or vinegar.

This particular meal was unique in that at each table (we took up 5 tables) a few Chinese students were seated at each table and shared the meal with us. The students at our table mostly ignored them. They were tired and shy, and the room was quite noisy, making conversations difficult. The two Chinese students at our table were also somewhat younger, 13ish, than our students, who were 16ish, which didn't help things. They sat together, which didn't help in conversation starting, though I'm sure they felt shy, too.

Most meals came with one glass of beverage prepaid. This could be either beer or soda. The choices of soda were Coke or Sprite. The beer was quite good; occaisionally we were served wine, though it wasn't up to the standard of the beer. Lots of the land we saw would be excellent for growing grapes, though that isn't going to happen until the farmers stop subsistence farming on it.

We were warned to not drink the tap water, and to stay away from ice, which was made from the tap water. Rainbow, our tour director, said, "You aren't ready for it."

Chinese never drink cold water. They brew tea with it, which does two things. First, it boils the water, purifying it. Second, the tea infusion also acts as a preservative, and mild anti-biotic in and of itself. So tea was what we drank at meals, and at other times, we relied on bottled water. I didn't see much in the way of diet soft drinks.


But the strangest part of this meal came somewhere in the middle. The room was decorated with many pieces of Chinese-style art, in the form of the tall paintings affixed to scrolls hanging on the wall. A man who seemed to be in charge of the operation came over to our table and mentioned to one of the students that all the wall hangings in the room were for sale. As I've described before, the prices were very attractive, and so commenced about 20 minutes worth of a buying frenzy, wherein our group proceeded to buy about half of the art hung on the wall in the restaurant where we were eating a meal.

I didn't participate. It was just too touristy for me. Besides, I didn't think I had room to carry the scrolls in my luggage, either. The moment struck me as bizzare and surreal. I felt a little embarassed, honestly. That's just my stuff, I guess.

The volume of food we were served was far more than we could eat, this was an gesture of hospitality primarily, though I think there was another subtext as well: We have plenty of food now.

It wasn't always that way. As recently as 30 years ago, there wasn't enough food for everyone in China, and people starved. The food ingredients that we were served were all very familiar: corn, zucchini, tomatos, string beans. Not a lot of peas, but a few. We saw potatoes being grown on terraced hillsides where I would have imagined rice being grown. Potatoes seem a much better choice, though.

We weren't served much tofu, though this is probably because we were American. We had rice at every lunch and dinner, except in Xi'an, which has always been a wheat culture rather than a rice culture. There we got noodles and dumplings.

The bean paste in the baked items did not taste the same as what I've had here in the US. It lacked a certain edge of something; a something that I never quite liked about it. I don't know if that was to cater to us either, or merely the result of using fresher ingredients. Anyway, much better.

Finally, the soup course came. In Beijing and Xi'an the soup course came dead last, while in Chungqing and Shanghai it was about two thirds of the way through. At this meal, it was a corn soup. The broth was thickened with cornstarch, there were kernels of corn in the soup, and very little spice or even salt in it. I didn't find it as appealing as some of the other soups we were served.

The situation with the Chinese students improved near the end of the meal, as people got up and circulated among the tables. The Chinese students thought that one of our students (who is Chinese-American, and speaks Mandarin as her native language) reminded them of Cho Chang, a character in the latest Harry Potter movie. That seemed to loosen things up a bit. They all wanted a picture taken with her.

We got back on the bus, finally, and headed back to the hotel, falling asleep almost immediately. It had been a hard day.