To improve his Chinese writing Tom, who is studying the language here in Beijing, has started to write a daily diary. He showed me an entry. I understood it all except for one word. No, sorry, I meant to say I didn’t understand any of it except for one word, and that was my name, Aidan, and it was written in English, so I’d have been hard pressed not to score at least one point in the reading Tom’s diary game. I asked Tom how would you spell a foreign name like Aidan using Chinese characters. He explained that you’d probably do it phonetically, taking the Aye-dan sound and using the words it most sounds like in the Chinese spoken language. So my name would translate back to English as Love Egg. I asked Tom what his would be. He said Soup Mother.
Two days after I arrived in Beijing, Soup Mother’s brother Tim and his girlfriend Manchi landed and we spent the next week ticking off the tourist boxes around China’s capital, as Tom introduced us to the ways and whys of Chinese culture. We ate and drank far too much than is good for us, especially as most of the food consisted of baozi (pronounced bow-sa) and jiaozi (pronounced jow-sa), meat filled Chinese dumplings. When I landed I asked Tom what cultural etiquette I should be aware of. He said none, and that in China there’s a lot of spitting and throwing things on the floor at meal times anyway. This pleased me, as I can be an embarrassing enough meal partner even with a knife and fork, let alone chopsticks. When we went for a meal with Tom’s “dad in China,” one Professor Yuan, I proceeded to make a series of Chinese social faux-pas, thus reminding Tom that there is indeed a lot of etiquette to be aware of, and I was breaking many of them.
One of these was quite charming: In China, it is not proper to thank someone too much when they take you out for a meal, as it shows the other person that you are not as good a friend to them as they are to you. He pointed this out as I was thanking Prof. Yuan every 60 seconds, whether for beer, food, or opening the door for me. I pointed out to Tom that I would probably never get to repay the debt to the Prof., so I was justified in presenting myself as an unworthy friend. Although that wasn’t why I was dribbling food down my chin. That was because I am an oaf.
On February 14th, Tim and Manchi flew back to England, so Tom and I decided to do what best befits single men on Valentines day: we took a 28 hour train ride to the South of the country, polished off an Economist (available in China) and stuffed our faces with pot noodles all the way there. Sadly, at some point between consuming my first pot noodle around 12pm on VD, and my third and final one at 10am the following morning, I caught a case of man flu. Now, I’ll be the first to accept criticism that men play up colds. But when we arrived in Guilin and settled into our otherwise comfortable hotel room, Tom explained that the reason the room was cold was because in south China there is no such thing as central heating. So in the absence of a hot cup of tea and something resembling heated walls, my man flu did indeed prove justifiably debilitating. However, that didn’t stop our ‘holiday within a holiday’ from being fun, as we repeatedly and unwillingly found ourselves guests to unstoppable Chinese hospitality, meeting people on our days out and ending up being guests as they paid for meal before we could protest.
These people showed me that China, although cold on the outside, is warm and hospitable on the inside. Unless you’re a victim of human rights abuse. But for the sake of niceties we’ll brush them under the rug for now.
