Chinese feast

After our meeting at the factory we’re working with, the president of said factory treated us all to a feast at our restaurant. As Chinese tradition dictates, such feasts are accompanied with many, many toasts. The toast works this way: the person making the toast picks out a specific person to toast, walks over to that person, raises his/her glass and gives the toast. The translator translates. The person receiving the toast answers back. The translator translates back. Then both toaster and toastee down drinks in one swallow. After this, the glasses are immediately refilled by one of the servers.
In our case, the liquor used for toasting purposes was either red wine or bai jiu, a Chinese white wine that is actually more of a distilled liquor. The Chinese love bai jiu, which has a distinctive flavor. It’s about 50 percent alcohol and has a front end taste that is kind of like the essence of an infusion of dirty socks in some sort of floral alcohol and a back end like lighter fluid. It’s an acquired taste, and one that I had sort of acquired after a zillion toasts.
As the meal progressed, the toasting evolved into each toast requiring the downing of both a glass of red wine and a glass of bai jiu. Thank God we ran out of red wine and baiu jiu before I ran out of consciousness. The photo above shows me just before downing a glass of each after a toast from the head of operations at the factory.








