The Dubious Monk

Yesterday all us foreigners packed into a van and headed down to Chongqing for a New Year’s banquet. It was a major affair with the mayor of Chongqing, piles of foreign experts and representatives from every consulate but the United States’.

Highlight of the evening was hands down the erhu virtuoso who played. Holy Fuck. The guy who introduced him said that his music was fast and luxurious, tense and supple. “Supple?” asked the girl beside me, “Isn’t that how you’d describe a woman’s breast?” It isn’t, but you know how breasts are awesome? Saying his playing was breast-like is a gross parody of understatement.

He’s the head of the Chinese Erhu Academy or something and he was so good it was insane. Literally. People were gibbering and drooling and busting out of restraints and voting for Bush and claiming they couldn’t be tried for any of their crimes. The guy played a Hungarian folk tune but made it sound as if all music was born with him on the stage right there.

The second greatest moment of the evening was when Andrew was embarrassing himself and everyone around him by speaking his horrible Chinese to a waitress at the banquet and then laughing at how she didn’t understand him. Margie (Margie!) was tactfully (tactfully!) saying that the waitress wasn’t one of his students so of course she wouldn’t be able to understand him, but he didn’t understand at all (and just to emphasize: Margie was making incisive comments that her subject was too dense to understand). He was telling us “But I was just asking her if she had eaten yet” as if we were all idiots who didn’t know about his fancy conversational technique.

So I stepped up. “That’s because you say it wrong (or badly, I can’t remember my exact word choice, only that it was blunt).” Everyone else at the table backed me up. It was very cathartic.

Unrelated to that I’m sure people including Andrew shifted seats around at the banquet so most of the [organization redacted] folk ended up at the same table, but I hung out with Scott and Emily, having champagne and pepper steak and deer ribs.

On the ride back we had parallel political discussions with Scott and I detailing to Jeremy how he’d been sucked in by Republican propaganda, while Andrew was telling Nelia about presidential history. It was so difficult not to jump over the seat and throttle him sometimes. But Scott and I were louder and I’m sure he felt the same way. I try to keep my language clean when I’m around Andrew and Lisa, but it’s so difficult when talking about politics. I kept on retracing and replacing “fucking liar” with “stinking liar.”

And then Scott and I played this awesome new PS2 game called Gun. It’s a western with brothels and preachers and horses and apaches and a healthy dose of awesomeness.

So yeah. Good times.