Beijing eating

The main thing I did in Beijing was to eat.  Friends and friends of friends invited me to a constant stream of banquets.  A Chinese banquet consists of a large round, 10 person, table where assorted dishes are spinning around on a revolving plate.  Ever so often you stop the revolving and pick something up with your chopsticks: a piece of Sichuan chicken, a duck breast from Beijing, a helping of Shanghainese carrot salad or strange, salted, eggs.  Yes, it’s all very good and very overwhelming.

Yet the purpose of a Chinese banquet is not nutritional but social.  Banquets are there to cement friendships.  The way to get invited to one is to make sure that you first invite people to dine at your expense.  If you are mutual dining partners, you are mutual friends.  Your friendship is based on eating together rather than on personal affinity.  As long as you enjoy the food, you don’t even have to enjoy each other’s personal qualities (and often the conversation around the table can be pretty bland).

Compare this with a dinner I had in Beijing with a professor at U of Chicago, James Hevia.  The round, spinning, table looked similar enough but the social logic was totally different.  Eating with a Westerner is all a matter of making yourself enjoyable, of coming across as pleasant and interesting.  The food is just an excuse for self-presentation.  Your friendship, if it takes off, is not based on mutual obligations, but on personal compatability.  Hevia is a very nice person but he has no plans to visit Taiwan and I don’t have any plans to visit Chicago.