Birthday gan bei!
(Clockwise from top left: my ‘ming pian’, Susan and ‘Duane’, the birthday crew, me and John: Suzhou, China)
Last night I attended a raucous birthday dinner for the boss at Ying’s work – he is the gentleman in red at the table. Many of Ying’s colleagues were there, as well as myself and a couple of other partners. I chose to splice together several images to give a full impression of the evening’s diversions.
I was browbeaten yesterday for having mentioned some people’s names here and not others – this surprised me, far from my impression that people would want their privacy protected, they wish to have their faces and antics exposed on the internet. One of these is John who is seated next to myself in the bottom left image – he was one of my companions on the flight to China this time – he is the gentleman who granted me passage into the business class flight lounge, for which I will be eternally grateful. You can see from the image of the entire party that it was a mixed group of Chinese, Scottish, Italian and one (supposedly) Suzhounese interloper, also photographed with my friend, Susan. He was far from camera shy and was intent on making his voice heard from an adjoining table.
Aside from his insistence that we include him in conversation and then join him in several toasts, (he would shout “Chinese gan bei!*” repeatedly and would not cease until we had raised our glasses and joined in) perhaps the most arresting characteristic of this individual was recognised by John. He has many similarities with a character from the British sitcom, Red Dwarf (apologies if I’m losing people here) but using this link, I’m sure we can all appreciate the likeness. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Red_Dwarf_characters#Duane_Dibbley I would also like to draw attention to the fact that he has applied the two finger peace sign to all his images, like many Chinese people being photographed. Susan has also adopted it for the sake of continuity.
Aside from all the fun we are clearly having, I was delighted to notice my business card, or ‘ming pian’ had been accepted by the staff from a previous visit and put on the board at the restaurant entrance. It is in the centre of the bottom row of cards. It seems customary to leave a ming pian here once you are considered a regular, though I am clueless as to any other purpose of offering it.
*’gan bei’ is basically the Mandarin equivalent of ‘cheers’, it actually means literally, ‘empty cup’. Why he needed to add the word ‘Chinese’ to a Chinese word never became clear.
