Duck!

(Lindsay)

On Sunday, Steven Fang, a student who came to DS last year, and his mother took me out for lunch. Not just any lunch, it was Peking Duck, such a delicacy that you want to stretch the repast for as long as possible to enjoy every bit. And it wasn’t just the duck; it was a performance and a class. A chef came in with the duck to carve it into even slices and then taught us the proper way to place the duck slices, along with onion, hoisin sauce, and cucumber onto a very thin pancake, about six inches in diameter, and wrap the whole into a roll to be eaten in two bites. This process is repeated until the duck is gone, and between pancakes you sample other dishes, such as the sweet Osmanthus soup, a crab and doufu ragout and several vegetables. We were in our own dining room in Yi Jia Xian, a high-end restaurant on Baochu Road here in Hangzhou. Our little salon had an anteroom, to which Steven returned from time to time to search the cupboard for whatever was needed, be it more serving spoons, bowls or napkins. The atmosphere was a hard-to-achieve and wonderful combination of elegance and coziness, an ambiance that requires time and subtlety. Subtlety was, it turned out, the order of the day.

After lunch, Steven returned to school for several hours of studying, and I had an appointment with Helen, a teacher, now retired, who came to DS eleven years ago. It is well known in the China Exchange Program that if you come to Hangzhou, you get in touch with Helen to shop at the silk market. After walking past a few boutiques and sizing up the goods, we entered one little shop, and Helen went right to work, checking the material, pinching it and viewing the weave closely with the eye of a connoisseur. She made friendly conversation with the proprietor as we browsed; then there was a long pause. The proprietor made herself busy, while Helen looked more critically at one garment and then another, pulled at the weave of one, put it down and picked up another, at the same time chatting with me to appear as if we were deciding on where to go next, and all at once, as if a bell had gone off, we were into round two. Helen questioned the owner and drew her into an extended discussion about the relative quality of the different pieces. Then, when the owner moved to the rear of the shop, Helen winked at me and whispered, “We should bargain.” The friendly chitchat went on, but it was punctuated now and then by frowns, first from Helen, then from the proprietor. The owner would sweep her hand over the design, indicating the work that went into the weaving; Helen would point out a stray thread. This continued for a long time, until Helen turned to me and asked me what I thought of a price that was about a quarter of the original asking price. I thought that we were done, but she made a face and motioned with her hand to indicate to me that I should seem doubtful. I complied, and the bargaining continued until Helen was satisfied. We closed the deal at a fifth of the asking price. The way Helen shops should qualify as an Olympic event. (Maybe by 2022, the Winter Olympics for which China is bidding.) I was to return this afternoon to pay for and pick up the goods, but Helen intercepted me in the school corridor this morning when I was coming out of a class to tell me that she had explored a number of other shops and had found the same garments for even less. “But won’t they be expecting me?” I asked, bothered somewhat by the vague notion of an implied contract. She waved me off. “No, no, no. This is the way we do business. If you can get it for less, you should.” Truly, Helen is a national treasure.

In the News

The only channel in English that I can get in Hangzhou is CCTV, which offers a cornucopia of items and a fascinating array of in-depth reports. In recent days, the network has covered the emergence of a vaccine-resistant strain of TB in Kenya; the rising problem of insomnia in China, one suggested cure being to read philosophy : ); a French embassy dinner party with a guest list that, according to the commentator, “read like an Oscars after-party”; the fiftieth anniversary of “The Sound of Music”; a sand castle competition/fund raiser in Johannesburg (Joburg), South Africa, and Britain’s adoption of the math textbook series known as “One Lesson, One Exercise” which has proved to be so effective in Shanghai. (Soon to be translated, the books will be published by Harper Collins and available in the coming months.) Longer segments have focused on China’s revitalization of the Silk Road, in both the literal sense of the old land route and the more figurative sense in a sea route, as a new trade initiative, and on the history of Pakistani madrassas before and after 9/11. Of course, the passing of modern Singapore’s founding father, Lee Kuan Yew, is a major story today, but blazing beyond all the other news is the story of the opening of the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), which has attracted partners such as Britain (despite warnings from Washington), Germany, France, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Australia and others. The AIIB provides an alternative to the World Bank, and yet, emphasizing that they do not seek to compete with the World Bank, the Chinese have hired an American lawyer. ? Certainly, all news programs are filtered; CCTV is no exception, but viewing the world through this particular lens is fascinating.