Any hutong home with more than one story had to go, which meant my landlord?s home would be demolished Roughly one Saturday afternoon per month, my landlord comes over to ask how I?m doing and drink my tequila. He pours it into a wine glass, then chugs the whole thing in one go.
This is fairly standard drinking protocol in China, the only country in which rates of binge-drinking peak among middle-aged men. What is unusual here is the choice of tequila over the local liquor, baijiu. And the fact that it?s mine.
Lao Liu is my landlord in Beijing, but he seems to have confused renting me an apartment with adopting me. I like this about him. He is proof that dads will be dads no matter where they are in the world. He scolds me when I don?t clean out the fridge often enough. He repeats the same stories over and over again. His son bought him a nice DSLR camera one year, but he doesn?t know how to get the photos off of it, so when he wants to show them to me, he just flicks through them on the camera?s tiny screen. He has many photos of himself holding parrots. I am not sure why. Lao Liu likes to reminisce about the ?90s, showing me Polaroids of him with a full head of hair standing with various government officials who, though I don?t recognize them, he assures me are important. Oh, and he also owns a pet Australian sea turtle. He?s growing very quickly and will need a larger tank soon.
I often struggle to understand Lao Liu?my Chinese is middling, and his Beijing acc...