CHINA IS THE MOST POPULOUS COUNTRY on earth but it can be a lonely place. The unremarkable man sat hunched over his plate of runny eggs, dipping half-toasted pieces of bread vigilantly into the congealing yolk and then lifting them to his mouth, almost playfully.

     The restaurant was cavernous and full. Middle-aged men crowded around the tables, scooping up steaming noodles. Those who had finished picked disinterestedly at steamed bread and deep-fried dough sticks. Most held lit cigarettes throughout the entirety of their meal. The diners had not bothered to remove their blue jackets or even their blue caps. It was as if breakfast was an unpleasurable necessity. Through the door that led to the foyer of the hotel came loud and continuous hacking sounds. You could tell with little trouble whether someone was clearing his chest of phlegm or his nasal passages of mucus. In the restaurant, the diners limited themselves to loud burping. The unremarkable man eating his eggs was not distracted from his concentration by this activity, these sounds. I noticed him before he noticed us.

     My wife and I were about to leave when he rushed over to our table. He was not large, nor fat, nor old, and moved quickly around the diners that lay between us, even though those in the blue jackets and caps, whom we knew to be Communist Party cadres, sat in such a way that they left little room to pass.

     ‘I am Luigi, he said, ‘I am from Como Lake.’

     Luigi, skin the colour of burnt butter, tight darkish curls, sharp blue eyes, a sad smile, had the presence of a young boy lost. Immediately I imagined him among a large family, at a wooden table stained dark with red wine – where a half-empty bottle of olive oil stood next to a bowl of sliced tomatoes sprinkled with fresh basil, where mounds of steaming pasta cooled slowly. I imagined lots of jollity around this table, and nobody clearing their bodily passages of filth. ‘Poor bastard,’ I said to myself, but to him I said, ‘I’m Wayne, pleased to meet ya.’

     We talked. My wife asked the questions. Luigi told us that he was building a pasta factory in Hohhot. ‘I have been here for a long time, a very long time,’ he said.

     ‘We’re here to buy paintings,’ my wife volunteered.

     ‘I have to go to work,’ he said suddenly, ‘my driver will be waiting. Will you join me for dinner tonight? I have a bottle of Chivas Regal that I have been saving for a special occasion.’

     We took the same route into the foyer soon after. The desk clerk, dressed in multiple layers of padded clothing, said it was minus twenty. ‘Warm,’ she added, pronouncing the word with pursed lips, making it sound like ‘worm’. It was a quirk of the hotel planning that the rooms were all heated by a central boiler to a temperature warm enough to roast potatoes, while the foyer and the restaurant on the ground floor were considered comfortable if you could not see your breath after exhaling.

     We rented bicycles outside the hotel and pedalled vigorously on our quest for art. It was a windless, cloudless day, and should have been as clear as sunlight through clean crystal, but the city was poisoned by industry and coal fires, leaving the sky grey and the air dappled with grime.

     I thought I would cry from the pain as we bicycled…. It was my ears. They felt as if somebody had struck a match and held it beneath my lobes. At first I rubbed them vigorously to coax blood into returning, but this was only a temporary solution and I soon gave up, preferring to wait until the pain turned to numbness.

     We were surrounded by greatcoats, earflaps and scarves. We could have been bicycling with circus bears, there was no way to be sure. Colours and fashion became the only criteria for judging sex and age. Faces and figures had become inconsequential.

     I glanced toward the footpath. A nut-brown man, bare-headed and so deeply lined across the forehead and around the eyes that he appeared to have been sculpted with a hammer and chisel, punched bare-handed downward into a bowl of water lightly covered by ice. He then took a bicycle inner tube and, before passing it through the water to watch for bubbles, inflated it with his own breath. The owner of the punctured tyre stood beside the man, smoking, sinking as far down into his coat as was possible without setting it alight.

     Symbiotic contraptions, half-motorbike and half-box, sped past carrying passengers hidden behind a covering of leather curtains. Heavy gloves like welders’ mitts had been fastened to the handlebars, allowing the driver to insert his hands for maximum warmth. The machines periodically farted blue-black fumes, but they were mild polluters compared with the overfilled diesel buses that skidded dangerously along like elephants on black ice.

     We turned into an alley of crumbling brick houses, and were hindered by a horse pulling a cart brimming with barrels of frozen excrement. There was no smell. We arrived back late, loaded with art, half-frozen … ready to eat.

 

Luigi was waiting for us as we entered the restaurant. He stood smiling broadly as we reached the table, first shaking my hand, and then taking my wife’s, lifting it daintily, kissing it lightly. I thought I might try that sometime, but I knew that an Australian could never carry it off.

     The restaurant was again filled by blue men – tables of them, smoking and eating, alternating mouthfuls of food with hits of nicotine. The ceilings, graciously high, held the cigarette smoke well above us, leaving the air at table height reasonably fresh.

     ‘Don’t mind if I smoke?’ Luigi asked, before pulling a packet of Marlboro from his top pocket.

     I nodded. ‘No problem,’ I said.

     ‘What do you say?’ Luigi asked, not understanding.

     ‘Please feel free to smoke.’

     ‘Thank you,’ he answered graciously.

     I didn’t want him to smoke, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell him. I could hardly breathe in Hohhot. The restaurant specialised in Mongolian hotpot, a meal of mutton and vegetables that you cooked yourself on a copper stove. The stove, fitted with a chimney, rose up out of a bowl of water filled with stock. It was fueled by kerosene and, when overfilled, threw flames like a welder’s blowtorch up the chimney. Extra kerosene was added when the fire burned low. Plates of vegetables, mutton and dipping sauces were placed on the table, around the pot. Spurts of flame shot skyward from the left and right of us.

     Luigi opened the bottle of whisky and ceremoniously presented it, his left hand supporting the base so we could study the liquor’s colour and read the label. Behaving like an overacting waiter, he threw a napkin over one arm and poured the Chivas carefully into small glasses, making sure we each received equal measures.

     ‘Salute!’ he said.

     ‘Salute!’ we repeated, sipping it slowly, determined to make it last.

     We finished the first glass before we started to add the vegetables and mutton to the stock, which was now simmering. I noticed that Luigi added his ingredients methodically: three pieces of meat, three of vegetables.

     ‘I am a technical man. I put the pasta factory together.’

     ‘You do it alone?’

     ‘Yes.’

     ‘You must be very lonely.’

     ‘Yes,’ Luigi admitted, ‘I miss my wife and my two children, but they are already teenagers, the children I mean, they do not miss me, only the money I am not there to give them. They love their mother,’ he added. ‘They are boys, all boys love their mother, if they do not, who would take care of them?’

     My wife and I said little, preferring to listen to his troubles. It was as if he had torn out his heart and set it on the table.

     ‘How long have you been here?’ my wife asked.

     ‘Eight months. Ah, if only I could taste fettuccine again. I know a restaurant that makes it with lobster poached in butter. Then I would be happy.’

     ‘And if you could see your wife?’

     ‘Yes, of course, then I would also be happy.’

     We added more meat and vegetables and, on Luigi’s advice, dipped our chopsticks into the broth to burn off any bacteria that may have been lurking in the raw meat.

      ‘Chinese are very difficult to get to know.’

     I nodded in agreement.

     ‘Besides, I do not speak the language. I am always alone. It is not good to be alone. Tonight I am not alone.’

     Luigi repeated the measures of whisky more than once and I noticed, suddenly and with the alarm of somebody not wanting the party to finish, that the bottle was three-quarters empty.

     ‘I will go home for Christmas,’ he said, ‘but the airlines will probably be on strike. Nothing works in Italy!’ His voice became louder and more desperate. ‘You die in the hospitals, you are cheated by lawyers, the politicians are thieves. They are worse than the mafia. The garbage is never picked up,’ Luigi added finally, as if that were the most important of all. ‘If I was born just a few miles to the north, I would be Swiss. Bellisimo!’

     Our table was on the edge of the restaurant. Behind us was a private dining room. The group eating in that space seemed to be a large family, or perhaps a bunch of old friends. They had left ajar the hand-painted privacy screen that folded together like a flamenco dancer’s fan. They were euphoric.

     Every few minutes someone would stand and call out ganbei, raising his glass. Toasts and more toasts. The first sign that something was wrong was a girlish squeal, but it was a party with high spirits, and we didn’t immediately turn to investigate. Luigi, who was sitting at the best angle to see into the room, suddenly gave a small grunt. I turned at the same time as my wife.

     A girl of sixteen or seventeen in grey slacks and a light-pink knitted sweater, the colour that looks good on English girls, was standing with her back to us, frantically waving her arm up and down. The men had encircled her and were flapping towel napkins and jackets as if to cool a fever. Curiously the women and children had not moved, remaining in their places, watching as if it were a performance.

     The girl came towards us. Her oval face was unnaturally red, her eyes wide, tears ran across her cheeks, her small nose dribbled. She was screaming now. Flames were jumping from her arm and igniting the breast of her synthetic sweater. It had begun to melt, leaving the pungent smell of plastic in the air. Inexplicably, the men continued to wave the napkins and jackets, stirring the air, fuelling the fire.

     I was a child when my mother caught fire, but I remember clearly my father taking a blanket from the bed, wrapping her in it and throwing her to the ground. He saved her life. She had been lighting a kerosene stove and it had exploded, the fire catching her hair, her eyebrows, her face. She still carries the scars.

     I stood up, moved through the ring of men who were still fanning the fire into a greater inferno, took her hand and embraced her. The fire was out in seconds. The men shunted me outside and closed the doors.

     I sat back down at our table, shaking a little, my own jacket blackened by the flames. The Chinese had said nothing, not thank you, not get out … nothing. They unfolded the screen. There were no more shouts of ganbei, only a soft whimpering from the girl whom I knew had been burnt badly by the flames and the melted fabric.

     Luigi poured a drink, the last of the bottle. We said salute again.

     ‘They lost face,’ my wife said, breaking our silence.

     ‘Strange people,’ Luigi replied.

     ‘They couldn’t take it that a foreigner solved their problem,’ my wife continued. ‘It was a criticism of them personally…. You shamed them. Their solution is to cramp up, build walls if you will. In this case, close the screen. It’s all about face.’

     Luigi nodded but I wasn’t sure he understood. Personally, I didn’t care about their face, they didn’t have the patent on it. I had lived with the same problem all my life. With me it had everything to do with how a man was supposed to behave, to be. I came from a coalmining family, where toughness was admired, fighting ability revered, never backing down expected. Not an easy banner to carry when bravery didn’t come naturally. I knew what face was, I knew it was chronic and could be debilitating, but I also knew that when the reasons were important enough … if your daughter or your niece or your best friend’s child is on fire, you should be able to put it aside.

     ‘Fuck ’em,’ I said.

     My wife stood in front of me, stopping me from going back in. I wasn’t sure what I would have done when I got there, but whatever it was they would have lost still more face. I didn’t want thanks, I just didn’t expect rudeness.

     ‘Just like those southerners, stupid people. Italy would be great without them. Then I would not always be sorry I was not born Swiss.’

     ‘What?’ I asked, still upset and unable to concentrate.

     ‘Southern Italians. Without them Italy wouldn’t be so poor, and I wouldn’t have to work in China. I wouldn’t have to be so lonely.’

     ‘I’m sorry you have to stay here,’ I said, my anger now changing into melancholy and sentimentality.

     ‘Yes, I am not happy living here,’ he answered, wrapping an arm affectionately around my shoulder, ‘but what really bothers me is that at times, I feel like a traitor. I am an Italian building a pasta factory for the Chinese. What do you think of that?’

     Suddenly his face that had been relaxed by the whisky tightened, the muscles in his fine jaw danced. ‘But the world would never buy Chinese pasta, never,’ he assured himself.

     ‘No,’ I agreed uncertainly, that would never happen.