‘You need to show you’re not a dumb Westerner. They had set up the competition by talking about their boss being such a great drinker. I couldn’t have cared less, but they kept emphasising this, as if they were throwing out a challenge. If you walk into their trap and you do it their way and don’t win, basically you are down-graded in their eyes. If you avoid the challenge altogether, you’ll lose their respect. By working out how they do it, and winning, you get a lot of kudos. They think, “This guy’s got standing. He’s smart”.’
The toasting isn’t the only challenge this executive has to deal with. Another is food.
‘They serve up all kinds of food. I’ve eaten rice sparrows. The sparrows eat the grains of rice at the rice harvest. They puff up and can’t fly. The farmers net them and drop them, as they are—feathers, beak and all—into boiling oil. They come out like black squash balls. You chew the whole lot up. The Shanghai fairy crab is another special dish. First they’ll have the big white worms you dig up from the sand. Then they bring on the crabs. Once in Shanghai I was sitting next to a Chinese lady engineer. She picked up the crab, pulled its feet off and twisted the top shell off the bottom shell and sucked up the meat, roe and everything. They serve tortoise in its shell. They take the lid off and you tear into it with your chopsticks. Snake, duck feet, chicken feet, pig intestines chopped and fried in chilli …’
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