Beijing 2018 | The Classmates

My wife was late for yet another get-together.

We hurried through the narrow back alleys of her parents’ old-Beijing neighborhood, already having kept her school classmates waiting for way too long.

When we approached the car, idling along a main street, Chen was standing outside, taking the last drag off a cigarette. He’s a compact man with piercing coal-black eyes.

“If this was a date,” he told my wife, “it would be our last.”

“Why do you think I stayed single for so long?” she said.

We drove off toward lunch. Every time she comes to Beijing, my wife sees these old friends with whom she shared her formative years. Along with Chen, the cop, there’s Yan, who for years worked on some secret government project she still cannot even talk about.

And Feng, who worked for Coca-Cola. With his large eyes and gentle demeanor, he used to be the best-looking boy at school, but Yan says he’s dropped his game as he’s gotten older. Now he’s average, at best.

There’s always lot to talk about, stories to trade and news to catch up on with these people who stayed. My wife is the only one who left.

But first, Chen had to get something straight. As he drove to the restaurant to meet Feng, me in the front, the women in the back, he wanted to know: Why was my wife so late?

There were so many reasons, I said, where should I start? She has to eat breakfast and then put on her makeup, a process interrupted by miscellaneous tasks. Then she takes her vitamins. Then she tries on the first of her possible outfits. There are more tasks, a few more changes of clothes, a trip to the bathroom.

He sighed. He’s married, with a grown son, but maybe his wife is less high-maintenance, or more decisive.

“Wo deng deng,” I said.

I wait.

“Wo ye shou ku le.”

And I suffer.

At the restaurant, we had reserved a private room on the second floor. Fung has traveled extensively in China and has become something of a foodie. He was the one who chose the restaurant, named after a famous mountain in Sichuan province.

The eatery has popularized one of China’s signature dishes, kung pao chicken, a delicacy developed 200 years ago and once served here to all kinds of high-ranking government officials, starting from the 1950s.

The present chef has a reputation for choosing all his own ingredients and being a bit of a perfectionist when he goes to the market each morning. When we tried to order his famous dish, the waitress apologized, saying he was out of town.

Fung leaned over to me. “That means he doesn’t want to make it today,” he whispered.

If we wanted kung pao chicken, we’d have to settle for a dish prepared by the chef’s understudy. It arrived among a lavish display of more than a dozen dishes — including smoked duck, mustard-flavored jumbo prawns, Chinese pizza, lamb tripe with cilantro, string beans with minced pork, dried bamboo shoots with cured pork, mapo tofu and various cold appetizer dishes.

The group had insisted I order but I knew this was just a polite pretense, which I waved off with a mixed metaphor.

“The student doesn’t teach the master,” I said. “A blind man never leads the expedition.”

In the end, we ordered so much food the waitress had to read back to us the long laundry list of dishes.

Later, Feng whirled the Lazy Susan so that the still-steaming kung pao chicken dish was in front of us. He took a pair of public chopsticks and pushed aside the ingredients to show the oil below. This, he said, was the secret to success: The oil pools below; the tart sauce sticks to the chicken, peanuts and vegetables.

Over a three-hour lunch, talk turned to gossip about classmates. One became an actor, another a high-ranking government official who only a month ago had committed suicide by jumping off a building.

Life in China can be difficult; not everyone fared well.

“He’s dead?” Feng asked of another classmate. “I had no idea.”

The old school had also changed, the original building torn down.

“There used to be a big playing field,” Chen said.

My wife added: “Now, the place is like a prison, surrounded by a big fence.”

The entire group is smart and successful, but their class was apparently trouble as a whole. They were left behind on many school outings due to disciplinary issues. During one exercise when students visited the jobs of common factory workers, apparently to learn humility, most went to a much-desired cookie factory, while my wife and her class had to settle for a flour warehouse.

Feng then told a story about the spirit of the one who left.

Once, the class took a trip by bicycle to the Summer Palace, a vast expanse of gardens and palaces dating back to 1750. My wife allowed a friend to ride on the back of her bike, against traffic rules.

A policeman stopped her, worrying the group. Feng, one of the class captains, stepped forward, explaining that he was the group’s teacher and that my wife would be disciplined back at school.

Okay, the cop said, I’ll let her go, as long as she apologizes.

The group all looked at my wife in expectation.

She looked at the cop and said. “Okay, I apologize. So, what?”

At the table, they all laughed.

No wonder she was the one who left.

They talked about other things. Like the female teacher with the terrible overbite, about an ugly girl who apparently liked Feng, who blushed and then insisted he didn’t remember her.

Feng wanted to know why my wife’s family rated such a prime apartment. Chen reminded him that my wife’s father was a military man and they debated the proper name for his rank and specialty.

I tried to ask questions, but faced the same stone wall with my wife, who believes that I revel at probing sensitive areas.

Her solution: she refuses to translate.

It’s tactic I have decried as Chinese censorship. When I first met her father, there was much I wanted to know about life during the Cultural Revolution.

Nope. My wife wouldn’t budge.

“You need to ask better quality questions,” she insisted.

The same thing happened at lunch. “Do you really believe in Communism?” and “Which classmate would you all have dated if you could go back to school and do it all over again?” I wanted to know.

My wife batted both questions aside like an errant mosquito.

Amazing, a few softballs got through the Red Curtain.

“What’s the biggest change in China since you were young?” I asked.

Yan said there’s more free-speech. And that you can be full now. You can eat well and be full. She told about the street urchin who once threw a rock inside her family’s apartment, a ruse that allowed him to steal the dumplings on the table.

But apparently, Yan still remembers those days.

As the lunch wrapped up, everyone was full. A few dishes remained. As the host of the event, my wife offered to serve Yan another helping of a stew made of duck blood and intestines.

“Yes,” Yan said, “but choose only the most expensive ingredients.”

And so, the one who left did just that.