16 Jul Chinese Ambassador – 3

The night Peggy and I showed up for dinner with the Chinese ambassador we arrived five minutes early, parked next to the ten-foot high wall with the eight strands of electric wire on top, and waited in the car. As was the case when I came to the Moon Party, there weren’t any Batswana standing watch outside, there wasn’t even a guard box for a Motswana to stand in. At 6:30 I walked up to the gate and rang the doorbell.

And didn’t get an answer.

Three more rings and three more not getting answers. Peggy was beginning to suspect she’d remembered the date wrong when the gate began to groan. A slender man was shoving it open, and it looked very heavy. For a place with the entire Chinese diplomatic community locked inside, there didn’t seem to be anybody else around.

No touch football. No pickup game of hoops. No mixed volleyball or families picnicking on tablecloths like you’d see on warm evenings when Americans were involved. No drinking wine and eating cheese, or kicking soccer balls, if they’d been Europeans. Or tossing bocce balls if they’d been Europeans. And old. And men. Instead, everybody was tucked away inside buildings. Eating. Studying. Cleaning up. Not having anything to do with the people on the other side of the wall.

The Slender Man ushered us into the very formal room beneath the five-story, glass-block-cylinder with the pagoda-shaped roof. The back wall of the room was pieced together out of bricks in a complex, textured, three-dimensional pattern I thought was very attractive. Lighted niches in another wall displayed Chinese crafts set off in little shrines – Ming Dynasty porcelains, an ivory ball with a smaller ball inside and a smaller ball inside that, down through layer after layer of balls, each one freely rotating in the ball it was nested inside of.

The ambassador came in and sat next to me for a few minutes, rather than next to Peggy. Peggy being the beautiful, foxy woman she is, I took that as a courtesy.

You’re supposed to bring a little gift when somebody from China invites you to dinner and a book seemed about right. Personal and appropriate, one author to another, and not important enough to run afoul of any anti-corruption laws. So I gave him a copy of one of the books I’d written, inscribed with the sentiment: TO REMIND YOU OF A COUNTRY WITH SEASONS. He’d liked the seasons when he’d served in Washington and I was hoping he’d respond in kind with a copy of the book he’d written. The one about how Congress really works.

We adjourned to a medium-sized room with a small table set with a white cloth, stylish folded napkins, and dishes embossed with the Great Seal of the Peoples’ Republic. The room was elegant, in an architectural sort of way, but bare and undecorated.

The table was set for four, Peggy and me on one side, the ambassador and the Slender Man on the other. The Slender Man turned out to be some kind of functionary at the embassy and neither Peggy nor I caught his name. Or what his job title was. He might have been there because the ambassador was lonely, what with his wife and son being held hostage back in China.

Or, because the ambassador thought it would be courteous to have two couples at the table, instead of a pair of us and just one of him. But I think the real reason was that no Chinese official, including ambassadors, is ever allowed to be alone with foreigners.

Next to our plates were the little menu cards you find at high-end dinners, but these were much cooler. They were embossed with the Great Seal of Red China and I wanted one. If we’d been paying for the meal, I would have slipped mine into the pocket of my jacket but I was new at this protocol business and didn’t know what that might lead to. Besides, there was a fifth guy in the room.

Oddjob. The biggest, toughest-looking, most physically fit butler I ever met. I felt like we’d wandered onto the set of “Goldfinger.”

Oddjob set an elegant platter of shrimp and what could have been squares of dried fish on the table. There were dumplings and fish cakes with sauce for dipping, liver and onions euphemistically touted on the menu as “steak,” soup, steamed noodles that tasted like they’d been prepared with maple syrup, watermelon, and red wine. Each place was set with knives, forks, spoons and chopsticks. Peggy and I went multicultural and used the chopsticks. The ambassador and the Slender Man ate with forks.

Oddjob wheeled over a stainless steel cart loaded with drinks. On top were cans of Chinese sodas with pictures of panda bears. Below was liquor. Peggy and I had a bad feeling about what liquor might lead to and chose Chinese nut drinks. Coconut milk for me, almond for her.

Oddjob wheeled the cart back into the shadows, but his eyes never left me. I guess he figured I was the one he needed to worry about, that the ambassador and the Slender Man could handle Peggy if she made a sudden move with her chopsticks. Besides, I was the one eyeing the menu cards. The things looked too embossed to have been run off on a computer, more like they’d been engraved. Which meant that whatever was on our plates was standard fare. If I made off with a menu card, the embassy might come up short and leave the next guest with no way of knowing that he was eating steak. And, then, there were table manners to consider.

Oddjob looked like he’d be even more severe about a breach of etiquette than our mothers would have been, and Peggy and I sat up straight and kept our left hands in our laps, and ladled the soup toward the far sides of our bowls, and made Oddjob proud. We’d been raised right.

Across the table, the ambassador and the Slender Man hunched forward, picked up their bowls and spun the noodles into their mouths, forks whirring like little motors. I liked that. Not only did it fulfill a long-suppressed childhood ambition, but it showed pleasure. Genuine gustatory delight in the meal. Watching them enjoying their food made me feel prissy and a little ungrateful. Then the ambassador started telling us about the time his cook had prepared a mophane worm. The way that worked out may have been the reason for the new cook he’d bragged about at the Moon Party.

Mophane worms are the caterpillar stage of big, fuzzy moths that lay their eggs on mophane trees. The moths look like furry bats, and the caterpillars look delicious, at least if you’re a Motswana. If you’re a Motswana, you buy bags of dried mophane worms and crunch on them like popcorn at the movies. If Botswana ever decides to declare an Official National Bug, it will be the Mophane, but not even other Africans will put a mophane worm in their mouths.

But the ambassador was Chinese and a Chinaman will eat anything. At least his former cook thought he would, which is why he’d prepared a mophane worm for supper. The ambassador may have thought so too, because he lifted it to his mouth, and down the hatch it went.

And got stuck.

And lodged there for a minute or two until he coughed it back up. “I kept thinking,” he told us, “this thing has eyes.”

A warm bit of cross-cultural fellow-feeling swept over me when I heard the thing about eyes. And since I’d given him one of my books and I’d washed down the coconut soda drink with a few shots of red wine, and was feeling well-disposed toward him in the matter of the mophane worm, I ramped up my nerve and asked if I could see a copy of the book he’d written. The one about how Congress really works in America.

“You can’t read that,” he smiled. “It’s in Chinese,” leaving me to think that the reason he wouldn’t give me a copy was because I can’t read Chinese. But I was pretty sure that, even if I could have read Chinese, even if I’d taught Chinese as a Second Language, I still couldn’t have read that book. How Congress Really Works is a closely-held secret between our government and his government. Nothing for us mere citizens to bother our heads about.