Country Driving [89]
Cao Chunmei stayed with Wei Jia while the men went to a restaurant across the street. We hired a private room, where after another brief argument the grandfather was given the seat of honor, facing the door. Wei Ziqi studied the menu for a good five minutes before ordering. When the waitress brought a bottle of 120-proof grain alcohol, he examined the seal. “Can you guarantee this bottle isn’t counterfeit?” he said.
The waitress seemed surprised. “I’m pretty sure,” she said. “But I guess I can’t say for certain.”
Li Ziwen took the bottle and ran his finger along the cap. “I don’t know,” he said. “There’s a lot of fake baijiu nowadays. The fake stuff is bad for your health.”
So is the real stuff, I thought to myself. Wei Ziqi sent the bottle back, and the next one as well. Finally the waitress returned with Red Star Erguotou. “We can guarantee this one,” she said.
Wei Ziqi poured the Erguotou into shot glasses. The food began to appear, dish by dish, and each arrival inspired a fresh round of commentary. At a well-organized Chinese banquet there are no lulls in conversation: as long as you have food, you have something to talk about.
“The fish-flavored pork is better than the one we had the other night,” Wei Ziqi said. “But the iron-plate beef at this place isn’t as good.”
“It’s a little salty.”
“These beans are OK. Just OK, though.”
The waitress brought a dish of dried beef. Wei Ziqi tried it and said, “This doesn’t taste right.”
One by one, the men tasted the beef and complained.
“No, it’s not good.”
“It’s too old, I think.”
“If you eat that you’ll get sick.”
Wei Ziqi called the waitress into the room. “This dish is bad,” he said. “You should take it back.”
The woman removed the dish. The next time she entered the room, Wei Ziqi complained that they had failed to put the duck’s head into our soup. “You should do that as a matter of course,” he said sternly. Here in the restaurant—inspecting the bottles, judging the food, making quick decisions—he seemed completely different from the man who had stood in the background during the arguments about his son’s blood transfusion. But it was simply rural logic: Wei Ziqi didn’t know anything about platelets and biopsies, whereas food was his trade, so here at the restaurant he was the expert. And perhaps he wanted the others to see him in control.
The men drank steadily and the grandfather’s face was the first to turn red from the alcohol. He stood up and gave me a formal toast, using my Chinese name: “Ho Wei, we appreciate all of your help with Wei Jia.”
Everybody held up his glass, and we drained them. “Ho Wei has a lot of friends in America who are doctors,” Wei Ziqi said. “They gave us a lot of help, too.”
Somebody asked about the boy’s platelet count, and Wei Ziqi said that it had improved since the transfusion. He described our drive into Beijing, when Wei Jia was bleeding and we had stopped repeatedly on the mountain roads. After the story was finished, the other men continued discussing the boy’s health, and Wei Ziqi turned to me. “You know,” he said quietly, “I was frightened during that drive.”
I told him that I’d been scared, too.
All of the men had turned red and now the toasts came faster. Li Ziwen, the city resident, exchanged shots with the grandfather. “This is the second time we’ve drunk together,” the grandfather said.
Li Ziwen laughed. “The first time was when Wei Jia was born,” he said. “Back then I was in the military, and they gave me two days’ vacation.”
“We drank a lot that day!” the grandfather said.