Boozing with Old Fat and the Boys

As I have done for so many years, I am out on the town, drinking with the boys. 

We sit around a circular table in a private room of a crowded Beijing restaurant for our ritual bacchanal. We have gathered to consume shots of strong alcohol and insult one another and laugh.

These are boisterous blue-collar men who call out to the restaurant staff like a tableful of Stanley Kowalskies. Instead of “Stella!!!,” they bellow “fuwu ren!” waitress! “Another beer. And make this one cold!” 

For me, the their roughhewn companionship has been a rite of social passage. When I first arrived here decades ago, I was a gawky American outsider. Many had never met a foreigner, let alone a Western journalist. I was an alien, worthy of their suspicion. Looking back, maybe they were just curious.

But I know this for a fact: They were always ready to drink.

Their poison of choice was bai jou, a 56-proof grain alcohol that sneaks up on you, no matter how much food you consume. Words become slurred, laughter more raucous. In the beginning, they would level me in their eyes and raise their tiny shot glass in a sort of challenge, an interrogation, a social initiation.

Gambei, they said. Bottoms up. 

One by one, they would go around the table, each raising a shot glass to challenge me in a high-noon showdown. I was their guest. How could I resist? I swallowed hard and took the plunge. The alcohol stung my throat. It made my stomach churn.

Drink, foreigner, drink. How much of our alcohol can you hold? 

Tell us your secrets.

One was a Uighur, a Muslim from the far-west province of Xinjiang, another from the central region of Sichuan, where the food is spicy, he insisted, and the women are the prettiest in China.

There was Lao Yang, or Old Yang, with his oversized head and booming operatic voice. And Big Glasses, who lost an eye when a car driven by a drinking buddy, a man nicknamed Lao Ban, or big boss, crashed. The two friends never lost a beat. The incident was never again mentioned.

Perhaps most intriguing was a police officer they called Lao Fei, or Old Fat (shown above). This is how I first described him in my journal:

“He sits like a profane Buddha — large head, belly protruding, his small eyes and fatty eye bags giving him a perpetual squint, reducing his visual portal to the world to tiny slits. He may be the laziest police officer on the planet, requiring Armageddon to rouse him from his comfortable chair and cup of tea. A Barney Fife in 42-inch waist pants, he works as a driver for high-ranking officers or handles night patrols when no one is awake and he can himself doze off. He forever carries a lit cigarette in his free hand.”

I liked Old Fat. He was like a Chinese stand-up comedian. On a 12-hour drive from Beijing to Shanghai. Lao Fei was behind the wheel of the van and I rode shotgun while his cronies slept in the back seats.

I searched my English-Chinese dictionary for the most malicious words to describe Lao Fei’s hulking body, pointing to his chest and reciting the phrase for “large breasts” in Chinese. He made fun of my hairy back and called me River Horse, Chinese for hippopotamus, for the way I opened my mouth wide when I yawned.

On summer nights in Beijing we’d all meet at a restaurant near the gate of a public park, sweating from the heat and the spicy food, the empty bottles of beer and bai jou littering the space. We’d watch the pretty girls pass and slowly drink ourselves stupid. Life was sweet.

For awhile, a high-level Beijing police officer nicknamed The Rock was dominant in our social circle. Lao Fei worked as his full-time driver. The Rock was big, 6-foot-six, and once played professional basketball. Then in his 40s, he could still dunk the ball.

The Rock knew that Old Fat was probably the most yellow-bellied driver in the entire Beijing police force. One day, a call came in that a man with a bomb was threatening to blow up a heavily-guarded area where most of the Chinese government high officials lived.

The Rock rushed to the scene, with Old Fat behind the wheel. When they arrived, The Rock got out of the car and walked up to the would-be bomber. He talked with him softly, put his hand on the man’s shoulder and got him to put the bomb down.

When The Rock called for his driver, it took Old Fat forever to arrive: He’d driven far away just in case the device exploded. The Rock was livid, especially when Old Fat asked for part of the bonus money The Rock earned for his act of bravery.

One night, moving between drinking spots, I sat in the front seat of The Rock’s personal car. As we passed Tiananmen Square, the nerve center of China’s communist regime, his radio crackled with the report of a nearby suicide. He barked commands and drove on. He was out with friends; underlings could take charge. 

It was like a private filming of Chinese Cops. I was so very far from home, asleep with the enemy.

As a western journalist in Beijing, I once rushed to cover a protest outside the Japanese embassy, an uprising over some territorial spat between the two nations. I had yet to receive my press credentials so I was stopped with the rest of the crowd outside the police lines.

I needed to get inside the perimeter. That’s when our eyes met.

The Rock had arrived to supervise the crowd. He and I had just partied the night before. We both probably had hangovers; I know I did. While he couldn’t speak English, he must have sensed my dilemma.

He lifted the orange security rope to let me pass, shooing away his minions. We drank again that night, but the incident was never mentioned.

In our circle beer and bai jou guzzlers, we took care of our own.

Now I no longer work in China and return once a year to visit family. But me and the boys always get together whenever I’m in town

The other night, the early-December weather was cold and we all wore heavy winter coats, dreaming of long-ago summer nights when we drank in shirtsleeves.

It wasn’t quite like old times again. People have dropped from the scene. The Rock lives in Houston now.

But Lao Yang was there. So was Big Glasses. And, of course, Old Fat.

By now, he’d contracted diabetes and isn’t so fat anymore. His wife accompanies him to make sure he doesn’t over-indulge. Each time she left the room, he implored his boys to quickly refill his glass of bai jou.

But this much hadn’t changed: Old Fat still has those xiao yan jing, tiny eyes. And his sense of humor. He still asks me to bring him a case of Marlboro cigarettes each time I return to China.

Laughing, he told us how when he engages the facial recognition feature on his smartphone, the process won’t work because the phone can’t read his little slits. And when he sat for a recent portrait with his wife, the photographer told him that he had to open his eyes wider.

“They’re open as far as they’ll go,” he said.

Nowadays, the boys no longer come at me like bullies. The old challenges of “Gambei,” bottoms up, are replaced by mere sips of bai jou. Anyway, I switched to beer from the deadly white sauce years ago so I could stay at the party longer.

When the drinking was over, the bottles emptied, we donned our heavy coats and stepped out into the wintry night. I faced each of these men who hail from a culture far from my own and gave them long farewell hugs. 

Like Chinese brothers. Drinking brothers.

“Until next year,” I said as I stared into Old Fat’s eyes, what I could see of them, anyway,