Off The Rickshaw: A Libertine's Guide to Living a Healthy Life of Debauchery in the People's Republic of China - Volume 2

This is the second installment of Keith Petit's two-part Off The Rickshaw series. The first volume, "On Smoking," was published in July of 2010 and has since appeared in Vibe, Men's Health, and Better Homes and Gardens. This, his second volume, "On Drinking," is likely to be the final installment of the series. The author, quite frankly, doesn't want to get into any of his other vices, and sincerely doubts that his readers would care to hear about them.

About the Author: Keith Petit does not currently drink or smoke, and has never drinked nor smoked in his entire life. He is an active member of the Nanchong Women's League of Teetotalers and Contract Bridge Players, as well as his local Joy Luck Club, JLC Lodge No. 451. He does not recommend smoking or drinking to his readership, however badly his writing may drive them to swallow the contents of the nearest open container within reach of the keyboard.

If at the end of this article you remain curious about the infinitely hued and shaded spectrum of human depravity, the author suggests that you check out Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller from your local public library, making sure to avert the steely, menopausal glare of your local public librarian.


Volume 2: On Drinking

~*A TWOPARTITE, TWO-PART FUGUE IN TWO PARTS*~

When I pause to consider the vast, beer-bellied body of literature about alcohol - and all of the great literature written by alcoholics - I figure that I really ought to be quoting Ernest Hemingway or Malcolm Lowry or Christopher Hitchens at the top of the page. But to my mind, no one has put it more succinctly than Homer Simpson.

"Beer: the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems."

By that infallible Simpsonian logic, I cannot advocate drinking any more than I can recommend abstaining from it. In China, there are certain social predicaments (called banquets) that alcohol will enhance significantly. But there remain other, more important facets of your life (your job, your reputation, your liver) that alcohol will not enhance at all. So in general, and in China in particular, the author recommends that you enjoy alcohol in moderation - and when your boss won't let you, at least enjoy it in abundance.


On the Varieties of Chinese Liquor

The many nerve tonics of China can be metabolized and broken down into three families of liquor, somewhat akin to their alcoholic cousins in the West. There is beer, there is wine, and there is alcohol.

But already, in this early stage of classification, things have gotten more complicated than they really ought to be.

Due either to a flawed translation, or a deliberate obfuscation intended to get everyone shamefully sloshed very early in the night, what the Chinese call "wine" is often, in fact, hard liquor. Baijiu – literally "white alcohol" – is among the most potent substances known to non-Russian man, but its name is rendered in English as "white wine," something, clearly, it is not.

On the flip side (and here, the brewing companies are probably the culprit), what the Chinese call "beer" is what we in the West would call "pisswater."

I will address these confusing misappropriations in further detail as the night progresses. Which reminds me, I gotta go to the shop real quick. But bear in mind that when you accept a glass of wine in China, you will more than likely find yourself staring down the barrel of a shot glass. And after you've put away a Chinese beer, or five, or ten, you will suffer all of the urinary distress of drinking an equivalent amount of Western brewskis, with none of the more pleasant side-effects. In China, nothing you drink is quite what it seems. Remember that. Beer is water. Wine is vodka. Ignorance is strength.


The Five-Second Plan

The Chinese are far better at making five-year plans than they are at making plans for the evening. Hopefully, on an unsuspecting Tuesday night, getting completely trashed isn't anywhere on your agenda. But then, This Is China: your agenda doesn't matter. On an unsuspecting Tuesday night, around 9:30 in the PM, you will receive a phone call from a friend, a stranger, or (in all likelihood) your employer. He will invite you out for some "white wine." Sounds good. When? This weekend? No, your boss says. Now. I am waiting for you. Outside. You part the blinds and see that, yes indeed, a black Lexus is parked there, idling just outside your window. From here on out, the narrative of your unsuspecting Tuesday night collapses into a totally fatalistic Choose Your Own Adventure book in which the choices have been blacked out from the text. You can make decisions, but they don't mean anything. You can run, but you can't hide. You can hem and haw, you can turn down the invitation outright, you can terminate the call and toss your phone under the bed like a live grenade. You can even mention to your employer that you have to work in the morning. So do I, he'll say. Whatever you do, short of suicide, your prolonged existence in China amounts to your accepting the invitation. And your accepting the invitation amounts to your consuming more alcohol than you really ought to on a school night. At the behest of your boss, no less. Well. Hell. At least he's buying.


Toastmasters International

The Chinese love to propose toasts. Or, I don't know - I'm not really sure whether they love it or not. Do songbirds love singing? Do crickets love chirping? Duz lolcats luvz cheezburgerz? Who knows? Who cares? It's what they do.

Whereas most American nights on the town are merely kicked off with a toast, Chinese benders live and die by the toast. A toast in America is a one-time thing: the brittle clinking of fork to glass, or a "let's get down to business" pregame huddle.

In China, the toast is a recurring nightmare. It is a tender one-on-one moment that serves two purposes that I am aware of. A: It establishes rapport (thus, a connection) with a valuable social contact. And B: It ensures that said valuable social contact is at least as drunk as you are.

Everyone is expected to toast everyone else at least once. If there are ten people at table, you must toast nine of them. (You wouldn't toast yourself because that would be weird.) And all nine of the people at table must toast you in return. Now, I'm no mathematician, but I would imagine that toasting nine people and nine people toasting you adds up to an astronomical, disastrous number of toasts. Either that, or it's just eighteen. Please do let me know.

During a toast, you must look your toasting partner in the eye and express (in Chinese or in Chinglish) your hopes and aspirations for your shared future as drinking buddies and business associates. A useful expression to know is tian tian kuai le, which translates into Chinglish as "happy every day!" If Chinese isn't your strong suit, the Chinglish version will also suffice. You might want to mention how overjoyed you are to be toasting the person you are toasting, whether you know who they are or not. It is, after all, entirely likely that you met them five minutes ago but completely forgot who they were after that oh-so-memorable 27th toast with Vice Principal Liu. Either way, you must act as though you are ecstatically happy to meet so-and-so and in full possession of all of your senses. It is important not to appear drunk, however drunk you may be, however drunk everyone else assuredly is. Saving face is everything. Which invites the question: what does face have to do with anything when everyone is shitfaced? My dear reader, I have not the foggiest fucking idea.


The Social Lubricant Network

The Chinese do not drink their beers straight from the bottle for public health reasons, and they do not drink their beers in pint glasses, for logistical reasons. They drink their beers from shot glasses. This helps out the lightweights of the banquet scene, who can carefully mete out their drinking and abstain from shots as their field of vision starts to blur. Likewise, it benefits the boozers, who can rapidly put away beerstuff by hooking up with other boozers via the toasting system described above. Vice Principal Liu! You again? Happy every day, man! Clink. It's like Facebook for alcoholics.

There are two kinds of toasts in China. There is the gan bei toast. Gan bei translates to "dry the glass," and when someone proposes a gan bei toast, you are obligated to man up and "chug" or "pound" the booze. Then there is the xiao he toast. The xiao he, or "little drink," involves a ginger sip of the glass from both parties. To mix up the two toasts - to take a shot when the other person is just sipping - is a minor faux pas that can be glossed over easily enough by making a few extra toasts on the side. But what cannot be forgiven is drinking independently. If the party starts to get slow, and it will, you are not allowed to pour yourself a beer and drink it. Should you grow weary of the company, and you will, you cannot abscond to a dark corner and drink by your lonesome. To botch a toast is a slight but forgivable gaffe. To quit drinking before everyone else is a mere act of wussiness. But to drink while others are not drinking is a deadly sin.

When the Chinese go out drinking, they drink as a unit. They drink together, they giggle together, and they puke together. They have a system. They pace their drinking as a means of separating the men from the boys. Or the women from the boys, for that matter. When everyone at the table is drinking at the exact same rate, the lightweights are the first ones to be TKO'ed, while the heavyweights are free to remain in the ring until there is blood all over the mat. A kind of intramural drinking hierarchy unfolds: Dean Wang can't hold his liquor; Vice President Liu can't even hold his chopsticks at this point; Mr. Pan, however, seems to possess a liver of titanium alloy.

Drinking in China is almost always competitive, and the Chinese have a system, the sheer organization of which puts March Madness to shame. If everyone were to start drinking independently of the toasting system, it would inject chaos into the all-important ranking schema and we'd have another Bowl Championship Shitshow on our hands.

To be a heavyweight in China is a great honor, and you will gain much face in this country by drinking everyone else under the table. If you grew up in America and cut your teeth on all the fine high-gravity lagers that your neighborhood Conoco station had to offer, you will almost certainly be considered a heavyweight in China. As a Westerner, drinking among the Chinese is almost too easy, like playing a video game with cheat codes activated. Over the course of the evening, you will successfully tuck away an uncountable number of watered-down Chinese lagers. By 10 PM, everyone else will be stumbling around like defective marionettes, flinging sauteed eggplant all over the floor. And by the end of the night, you will have beaten the game, i.e. everyone else will be vomiting in the squatter toilets while you sit there at the banquet table, alone, bored off your ass, noshing on cold cucumbers and feeling more sober than when you arrived.

I should add that the above paragraph applies only to beer nights. Baijiu nights are different. When it comes to Sino-American drinking relations, baijiu is, alas, the great equalizer.


The Translucent Scourge of the Far East

As a rule, the Chinese cannot handle their beer, but I have seen them perform incredible feats of baijiu absorption.

Baijiu is somewhat analogous to vodka, insofar as it is a clear liquid that is more alcohol than anything else. But it is also far worse than vodka. It is far worse than any fluid - bodily or otherwise - ever concocted by man or beast. I can't physically stomach baijiu. Most Westerners cannot. Regardless of the loss of face involved, I will always refuse baijiu at banquets, both because I can't bear the agony of drinking it, and because I don't want to wind up passing out overnight in a construction site. For chemical reasons that can't be entirely related to alcohol content, baijiu will (in the parlance of our times) "fuck you up" in the sort of way that, believe me, you do not want to be fucked up.

Richard Nixon had the dubious pleasure of sampling the Cadillac of baijius, Maotai, when he graced Chairman Mao and Zhou Enlai with his jowly, hemorrhoidal presence back in 1972. A man with a strong genetic predisposition for Bitter Beer Face, it remains hard to tell from the photographs just how disgusted Nixon was after his first Chinese gan bei. But the banquet, in the end, was a rollicking success, leading Nixon to proclaim, "If we drink enough Moutai, we can solve anything." It is my hope, for the rest of the world's sake, that the Sino-American policy of Maotai diplomacy has long since been discontinued.

~*TO BE CONTINUED IN PART TWO OF THIS TWOPARTITE, TWO-PART FUGUE WHICH IS POSSESSED OF TWO PARTS*~

Freeze The Gorillas

Skinner: Well, I was wrong; the lizards are a godsend.
Lisa: But isn't that a bit short-sighted? What happens when we're overrun by lizards?
Skinner: No problem. We simply release wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the lizards.
Lisa: But aren't the snakes even worse?
Skinner: Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat.
Lisa: But then we're stuck with gorillas!
Skinner: No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.
- The Simpsons

I just named my laptop a couple hours ago. I guess people do that nowadays. What with The Internet. And The Googles. And shit. I named her Adell. Because, dude - she's a Dell.

I've had Adell for four years now. During that time my spine has warped under the dull weight of her increasingly obsolete body. I have lugged Adell around in my backpack for four years. Taken her to coffee shops and bars. Taken her to the park. I took her out to Dennys for dinner once, because I was feeling generous. I have lugged Adell all over the world by now - or at least, all over the parts of the world nobody really cares to visit. I lugged her from the United States to Poland, to Darmstadt, Germany, and back to the States - across the Pacific, to a swarming, metallic Korean metropolis, to Japan, to China, and back to the States - over the Atlantic, to a cheerless mining town in Poland, to a soiled mattress in Berlin, and back to the States - to a wartorn Mexican city, and back to the States - and finally, to China again. I'm surprised she's made it this far. Hell, I'm surprised we've made it this far.

And I remain loyal to her, as I remain loyal to all things old and valuable that I nevertheless treat like utter shit. I don't want a new computer, though I perhaps need one. Over the years, Adell and I have bonded. Have fused ourselves together, as it were. We are one. Patiently and meticulously, I have trained this computer, this Adell, to be as scatterbrained and forgetful and occasionally drunk as I am. I have programmed her in my own image. Any writing that I have done over these past four years, I have done on Adell's dust encrusted, Cheetoh powdered, hair imbroglioed keyboard. Or at least, that is what I would have her believe.

But I waited until a couple hours ago to name her. It seemed like the right time. Before it's too late, I suppose. I'm rather worried about the ol' girl these days. I'm worried about Adell because her cooling fan has stopped spinning. On the plus side, that means she's running a whole helluva lot quieter than she used to. But now she's got these wicked mood swings, you see. Hot flashes. The whole shebang. It's all motherboard menopause up in this bitch.

After ten minutes of typing, Adell gets hotter than doing the Macarena in the summer of 1995. I could cook stir fry on her touchpad. Her home row keys brand my fingertips, her space bar scalds the prints right off my thumbs. She makes writing much more of an adventure than it ought to be. When I start to heat up, she starts to heat up, and just as I'm splicing my last comma, just as I'm hanging my very last participle up to dangle, Adell decides to shut down. Six thousand words vanish from the screen. Those words may as well have never been written. There they go: into the void. I tap at Adell's monitor: darkness there, and nothing more. I exhale and church my hands in my lap. And then my eyes glass over and I sit there real quiet-like. Somewhere in the distance, a loogey is hawked. A moment later, there comes a deafening pronouncement from the laowai's fourth floor apartment. The cicadas scatter. The children scream. Moped alarms go off. Meanwhile, my next door neighbors are sitting around the coffee table taking notes. Fawk, the dad says. Fawk, fawk, fawk chants the kid.

Like many another great innovation, my temporary solution to Adell's little overheating problem came to me serendipitously. Late one Friday night, I discovered that a strategically placed ice cold beer kept Adell at room temperature for just the right amount of time necessary to write a half-ass blog post. As long as I had a beverage close at hand, I could type myself crosseyed. But in this country, a cold beer is hard to find. And the thing about cold beers is, they have a curious way of disappearing.

I needed a more permanent fix. So I began to dabble in feng shui. I pushed my desk into the far left corner of the room so that the computer was sitting directly under the AC unit. Then I cranked the AC all the way down to a couple goosebumps above absolute zero. In short, I turned the room into a meat locker. I'd write for hours at a time that way, hunkered there in the steely breath of the artificial Arctic, teeth chattering all the while, and then I'd step out into the Sichuanese summer and sweat like a hunk of microwaved chicken.

Operation Freezer Burn worked out well enough, for a month. And if I gave Adell a cold beer or two on top of that, why, she ran as briskly and as smoothly as the fastest Atari on the block.

But by meddling with the primal forces of nature, I had unwittingly incurred the spitting wrath of the ancient Chinese Gods of Interior Design. Feng shui translates to "wind and water," in English. And in the weeks that followed, there would be wind. And there would be water. The AC started leaking. At first, it merely dribbled. Then it started raining. Then it started hawking loogeys across the room. I often had to shield poor Adell from the barrage. For a time, I hid us behind a crude protective wall of cardboard and aluminum cans. But eventually, after one too many loogeys in the face, I caved: I moved the desk back to the other side of the room so that me 'n Ms. Adell were out of spitting distance. Better an overheated Adell than a drowned one.

Still, she wouldn't even boot up without a little climate control, so I kept the AC on, despite its relentless slobber. This presented yet another problem: the AC started slobbering so much that the floor was beginning to puddle. So I solved that problem by blanketing the floor with dirty towels. But I'll have you know: dirty towels soaked through with AC runoff don't, as a general rule, smell terribly inviting after the third or fourth day of writing. So I had to wash the towels. But my washing machine leaks, too. So I had to use still more towels to soak up the washing machine runoff. And eventually, I had to wash those towels, too.

Jesus. If Adell were cool enough to let me open PowerPoint, I'd show you a flowchart. It's hard to explain. I'm a complicated man, and I lead a complicated Sino-Bohemian existence. Lots of ins, lots of outs. But in sum, what I do every day is this: I use a bunch of towels to soak up the water left behind by the washing machine, which I use to wash the bunch of towels that I use to soak up the water left behind by the washing machine, which I use to wash the bunch of towels that I use to soak up the water left behind by the AC unit, which I use to cool my laptop, Adell, who has an internal fan that doesn't turn. And I use Adell to write blog posts: sloppy little snippets of my mind that I send tottering out into the world on their tiny little matchstick legs.

And I smoke in order to write. And I overdose on Nescafe in order to write. And I drink a bit of formaldehyde beer in order to write. And all of these are bad habits. Well, then. Maybe I should give up writing. That might just solve everything. That might just freeze the gorillas. As it were.