Fork It Over The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater-Mantesh by Unknown (rm book recommendations .TXT) 📕

had about seventy thousand foreign residents amid a population of three million. Now it has less than half that number of foreigners in an official population of seventeen million. Even the fiercest central planning cannot make up for such an absence of cultural diversity.

I returned to Xi’s Garden, the site of my post-airplane-ride entrail-eating experience. I went back because so much on the menu sounded delicious, particularly the food Wing had refused to order.

My waitress was a young Chinese woman, Christine, who spoke good English and was infinitely patient when I started grumbling that the menu had changed and everything I wanted was no longer available.

She soon figured out that I hadn’t been to this Xi’s Garden but to a different branch. Instead of labeling me an idiot, which would have been understandable, she redoubled her efforts to see that I had a wonderful meal. Thanks to her I had pigeon that was sweetly lacquered, followed by the most entertaining food show in Shanghai: prawns marinating in rice wine dumped over hot stones, releasing a Vesuvian cloud of steam into the air. Next came fried, cumin-laced chicken with sesame-coated hot peppers and a whole fried fish prepared in such a labor-intensive manner it could have been the centerpiece of a banquet.

The fish had been cut into chunks, deep-fried, then put back on the bone. In the Western Hemisphere, diners consider themselves blessed if chefs will go to the trouble to return mashed potatoes to the skin.

Christine hovered over me, fascinated by the presence of a Westerner, as few Chinese are these days. (When my wife telephoned and asked if I was being followed by Communist secret police, I told her that not only wasn’t I being followed, I wasn’t being noticed.) Christine seemed the perfect person to quiz about the nightlife of Shanghai, which is apparently limited to a phenomenon known as KTV bars. I saw dozens of them along Nanjing Road, the neon-lit promenade where concubines once window-shopped while sitting on the shoulders of coolies. I noticed them on street corners near my hotel. Everywhere I went I saw brightly lit KTV bars, and I had no idea what they were.

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A L A N R I C H M A N

I hadn’t come to Shanghai to wallow in decadence, but thus far I was disappointed with my social life. After all, Shanghai’s lighthearted, East-meets-West lifestyle had long ago earned it the nickname Whore of the Orient. I asked Christine who went to these bars and she replied,

“Bad girls. Bad men. If the man drink beer, maybe one bottle for very much money. Then the girl is dancing with the man and they sleep together. The man pay money for the girl.” To maintain my respectability, I scowled in displeasure.

KTV, which sounds like a network affiliate, stands for Karaoke TV.

The notorious and legendary singsong girls of yesteryear who catered to certain manly needs have been replaced by young women practicing the art of karaoke, a notable downgrade in my opinion. I asked Wing to take me to one of these emporiums, and the next day he did.

We were greeted effusively at the door and led upstairs to a large carpeted private room furnished with couches, coffee tables, and a television monitor large enough to do justice to an American rec room. In came a string of girls, led by an overseer the girls called “Mommy,” with trepidation in their voices. We were told to pick a girl, the way we would select a lobster from a tank. What occurred afterward was more ludicrous than libidinous.

My girl was an Asian Alicia Silverstone, which meant she was very pretty and going to fat. She went by the name of Yo-Yo, and I soon learned her father was dead and her mother had lost all their money playing mah-jongg. Our evening began auspiciously when she picked the seeds out of a watermelon slice and handed it to me. I thought, “Now there’s a woman who knows what a man likes.” Then she started singing karaoke duets with Wing. I suppose I should have been jealous, but I was concentrating on the watermelon, which was particularly sweet.

When she wasn’t singing with Wing, she was singing solo. She must have sung the theme song from Titanic, “My Heart Will Go On,” four times in two hours. When she wasn’t singing it, a different girl was. I soon realized that one advantage of being on the Titanic was never having to hear that song. I later asked a Shanghai resident who seemed to know about such things to estimate the magnitude of the KTV phe-F O R K I T O V E R

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nomenon, and he guessed six thousand bars employing one million girls.

I learned a lesson that night. It’s no fun spending an evening with a woman whose idea of pleasure is to listen to herself sing.

“I have a turtle foot in my soup,” said one of my dinner guests, a Westerner who had recently moved to Shanghai but was still unaccustomed to the dining quirks. “A foot in your soup,” he added, unnecessarily, “is not right.”

We were at Merrylin, one of the megapalaces that dominate dining in Shanghai. At Merrylin, hostesses who look like Rockettes lead guests from the marbled entrance past Italianate statuary to private rooms decorated with oil paintings of Occidental women strumming ancient instruments.

This dinner had a dual purpose, to eat the famous hairy crabs (only the feet are hairy) of Shanghai and to meet Hui Ren Qiu, a lifelong resident of the city. She is an elegant woman, a former instructor of English who attended the finest schools of Shanghai, McTyeire High and St.

John’s University, and was forced to leave her home and reside in the countryside during the infamous Cultural Revolution of 1966. Hundreds of thousands of young Shanghainese endured similar humiliation. “I was ordered to seek reeducation from the peasants,” she said, calmly and softly but still