served him well, he repeated: Fie, fie, fie! Pah, pah!
Afterward we had lunch, all four of us, in the restaurant in my part of the hotel, which was really quite decent and available to clients paying cash and to state guests whose sponsoring organizations had taken a deep breath and decided to register them there, notwithstanding the higher price,rather than in the greasy spoon at the Canadian-built annex. I had been so registered; moreover, on the advice of Miss Wang, at the very beginning of my stay I presented to the maître d’hôtel, who was a young woman probably from the north of China, she was so tall, a silk scarf printed with some flowers. This simple gesture had lifted me to a pedestal of importance I had never enjoyed either at Cronin’s or the Faculty Club, the eateries with which the Beijing Hotel restaurant was now tied for first place in my affections. The quality of the welcome I received, and the news I sprang on Charlie that I lived in the old building—he admitted sourly that he and Toby had checked into the Russian horror, a place of cockroaches and thirty-watt lightbulbs—left Charlie temporarily with nothing specific to patronize me about. I relished the moment. The food came in a rush of dishes slammed on the table; prodded by Charlie, we had ordered too much. Miss Wang would have plunged her chopsticks into the platters like a surgeon who questions a wound, delivering to our plates sea cucumbers, noodles, or whatever else was most slippery without a drop of sauce lost in transit, but Charlie, instinctively the paterfamilias, would have none of it. Under his ministrations the tablecloth soon turned into a gloomy, brown Jackson Pollock, the impasto of drippings richest near his own plate. Again, he was pushing food, particularly rice, with his fingers. I averted my eyes and asked Toby, who had spoken only in monosyllables since we left the Forbidden City, whether he had already graduated from college.
I never went.
And what have you been up to?
I’ve been working on a design for Charlie’s New York office.
Oh.
The answer chilled me. I thought about it during lunch, which ended only when the waiters, impatient to close, gathered in a silent circle around our table, and while Miss Wang and I strolled from the Dongsi mosque through the alleys leading to a maze of hutons that had survived the zeal of the Liberation, peeking into secret and hostile courtyards and admiring an occasional sculpted gate or a roof decorated with dragons, and much later, when I rested in my room. Charlie and Toby had been unable to come with us on the walk because there were drawings Charlie needed to review. He was making a presentation to his clients, colossally rich overseas Chinese planning to build a luxury hotel on the outskirts of Beijing. They had invited him to China. We were to have a drink, though, before dinner, Charlie, Toby, and I.
I WAITED FOR THEM downstairs, in that part of the lobby which doubled as a bar. All foreigners of any note who blew into town—businessmen, journalists, government officials, do-gooders like me, and an occasional fancy tourist—passed through it, as well as a great many members of the Chinese
nomenklatura
and the sort of gilded youth that had begun to be visible in Beijing: children of high officials equipped with one or two items of apparel not conforming to the proletarian dress code, and sometimes looking downright expensive. Cowboy boots, belted trench coats, sweaters that might have just walked out of the Paul Stuart window; they wore them like identification badges. But the background was made upof a less interesting fauna. Sprawled out in 1930s armchairs upholstered with green or brown plush, their legs and feet a menace to passersby, with bottles of beer, cans of peanuts, and ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts on the coffee tables before them, these were the Westerners whose principal occupation was waiting. Men. Overweight, guts spilling over their belts.
Afterward we had lunch, all four of us, in the restaurant in my part of the hotel, which was really quite decent and available to clients paying cash and to state guests whose sponsoring organizations had taken a deep breath and decided to register them there, notwithstanding the higher price,rather than in the greasy spoon at the Canadian-built annex. I had been so registered; moreover, on the advice of Miss Wang, at the very beginning of my stay I presented to the maître d’hôtel, who was a young woman probably from the north of China, she was so tall, a silk scarf printed with some flowers. This simple gesture had lifted me to a pedestal of importance I had never enjoyed either at Cronin’s or the Faculty Club, the eateries with which the Beijing Hotel restaurant was now tied for first place in my affections. The quality of the welcome I received, and the news I sprang on Charlie that I lived in the old building—he admitted sourly that he and Toby had checked into the Russian horror, a place of cockroaches and thirty-watt lightbulbs—left Charlie temporarily with nothing specific to patronize me about. I relished the moment. The food came in a rush of dishes slammed on the table; prodded by Charlie, we had ordered too much. Miss Wang would have plunged her chopsticks into the platters like a surgeon who questions a wound, delivering to our plates sea cucumbers, noodles, or whatever else was most slippery without a drop of sauce lost in transit, but Charlie, instinctively the paterfamilias, would have none of it. Under his ministrations the tablecloth soon turned into a gloomy, brown Jackson Pollock, the impasto of drippings richest near his own plate. Again, he was pushing food, particularly rice, with his fingers. I averted my eyes and asked Toby, who had spoken only in monosyllables since we left the Forbidden City, whether he had already graduated from college.
I never went.
And what have you been up to?
I’ve been working on a design for Charlie’s New York office.
Oh.
The answer chilled me. I thought about it during lunch, which ended only when the waiters, impatient to close, gathered in a silent circle around our table, and while Miss Wang and I strolled from the Dongsi mosque through the alleys leading to a maze of hutons that had survived the zeal of the Liberation, peeking into secret and hostile courtyards and admiring an occasional sculpted gate or a roof decorated with dragons, and much later, when I rested in my room. Charlie and Toby had been unable to come with us on the walk because there were drawings Charlie needed to review. He was making a presentation to his clients, colossally rich overseas Chinese planning to build a luxury hotel on the outskirts of Beijing. They had invited him to China. We were to have a drink, though, before dinner, Charlie, Toby, and I.
I WAITED FOR THEM downstairs, in that part of the lobby which doubled as a bar. All foreigners of any note who blew into town—businessmen, journalists, government officials, do-gooders like me, and an occasional fancy tourist—passed through it, as well as a great many members of the Chinese
nomenklatura
and the sort of gilded youth that had begun to be visible in Beijing: children of high officials equipped with one or two items of apparel not conforming to the proletarian dress code, and sometimes looking downright expensive. Cowboy boots, belted trench coats, sweaters that might have just walked out of the Paul Stuart window; they wore them like identification badges. But the background was made upof a less interesting fauna. Sprawled out in 1930s armchairs upholstered with green or brown plush, their legs and feet a menace to passersby, with bottles of beer, cans of peanuts, and ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts on the coffee tables before them, these were the Westerners whose principal occupation was waiting. Men. Overweight, guts spilling over their belts.
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