Normally, the feng shui master would have been furious at such a cop-out. But not this time. He had been content to bite his tongue and say nothing. Although he had never thought of himself as status-conscious, he was pleased to think that his words were being added to the emergency files for evacuating top people in the event of war in China. It made him feel important and, more significantly, it made him feel he could do some name-dropping and raise his fees.
‘We’re here,’ Bi said. The lift came to a halt, the internal elevator lights went out and the doors
wooshed
open.
‘Lights not working?’ Wong said, noting the darkness of the lift and the gloom of the corridor. ‘Power cut?’ The only light leaked out of the floor, like the emergency strips leading to exit doors on an aircraft.
Bi shook his head. ‘No. We use an automatic dimmer to turn them right down so you get more of an effect when you enter the restaurant.’
They followed the spooky floor-lit corridor around a turning to the left and came upon the main door of the restaurant. As Bi had said, the darkness enhanced the drama of the entrance. The doorway was bathed in multicoloured light and surmounted by a temporary sign: a neon light with the name of the dining club which was meeting tonight:
This
Is Living
. The letters were in luminous yellow-green which gradually changed to shocking pink as they entered. Wong stopped and stared at it for half a minute, wondering about the feng shui implications of a light which changed colour (yet another modern artifact that broke the recognised laws of physics). Bi, impatient, grabbed Wong by the elbow and pulled him through the doorway.
In shape, the restaurant was much as Wong remembered from the previous week—a large, elegant, oval-shaped room on two levels, with a balcony rail making sure no one tripped off the higher level, which had been turned into a sort of stage. But in another way, it looked very different—the lighting engineers had given it an otherworldly atmosphere with low-slung lights, focused beams, and mixed colours. The room was reddish on one side, blue on the other, and had a clear, balanced tone only in the middle.
Wong looked up with delight at the suspended ceiling. Modern ceilings, to him, were one of the marvels of room design. Suspended ceilings, by definition, lowered the height of a room. But clever layering and lighting effects meant that the net result was to make it appear higher than it would otherwise have seemed.
The room was dotted with tables—thirty-one of them—at intervals large enough for people to have discreet conversations: not like in most Chinese restaurants, where diners ate shoulder-to-shoulder with strangers. In the middle of the raised area was the display table—a high-standing platform where chefs would perform their culinary party tricks from time to time.
There were only four people in the restaurant when they entered, but a steady flow of couples joined them. Each person was welcomed effusively by celebrity chef Jean-Baptiste De Labauve, who gushed over them. He clearly had not been able to decide whether to wear a professional chef ’s outfit or something stylish that a haute cuisine restaurant host might wear, since he liked to do both jobs—or at least to take the credit for both. As a result, he was wearing chef ’s whites, but in ivory silk, and without the stovepipe hat. Around his neck he had a natty Hermès scarf knotted to one side. He had no fear of getting the outfit ruined, as most of the actual cooking was to be done by his staff, overseen by his deputy, a Japanese chef named Benny Tomori.
Virtually all the diners were Asians, and about three out of four were male. It was a strongly testosterone-dominated group. The few women present were mostly young, attractive and rather quiet: mistresses, trophy wives or doting personal assistants, which in Shanghai was a widely recognised term for concubines. There were to be only eighteen guests tonight, all of whom—well, all the men anyway—were founding members of the This Is Living dining club. Wong was not an official member. He was well out of his league as all the others were wealthy businessmen or top officials (which often meant the same thing, not that anyone would be stupid enough to say so). Several were sons of tycoons. But during the preparations, De Labauve was delighted to learn that a number of the guests knew Wong and had employed him. And once he heard that the geomancer used to work in the seafood industry in Guangdong—centre of China’s live and exotic food sector—he had invited him to join the founders’ meal as a special guest.
Wong was looking forward to it, and his mood went from good to superlative when De Labauve handed him his payment for doing the feng shui reading of the restaurant—a fat envelope of cash. No records, no signatures. No need to declare anything for tax. He tucked it in his jacket pocket right over his heart and from time to time stroked the pleasant bulge it made.
Within twenty minutes all the guests had arrived, and gongs were pounded to invite everyone to move from the bar area to their tables.
De Labauve mounted the raised area and beamed at each table in turn. He spoke in Mandarin, made semi-unintelligible by his French accent. ‘Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the founding meal of the most remarkable dining club in Shanghai. Most of you will know that we offer the freshest, most delicious food in China. This is true. But we offer more than that. We are, I believe, offering the only culinary experience in the world in which all the main ingredients will be alive as you start the meal.
‘The fish you will eat are all swimming in the aquarium, which is in the room to my left, through the blue-lit door. The poultry is clucking away in cages in a room to the left of the kitchen. The crabs, lobsters, prawns and crayfish are swimming in tanks on the east side of the aquarium. The vegetables are growing in conservatory trays in the climate-controlled greenhouse on the floor below us. The giant sea turtle tried to escape twice but has been apprehended and is now in safe custody in the care of the sous chef.’
Pause. Cue laughter. The speaker bowed slightly to acknowledge the audience reaction. ‘And now, let the magic begin. The food will inspire you to repeat to yourselves, ladies and gentlemen, I hope, the exclamatory phrase which has given this restaurant its name.’ He switched to English: ‘This Is Living.’
He banged a gong, and the lights dimmed. A Japanese chef appeared from a door on the left, with a massive knife in one hand and a sharpening tool in the other. He rubbed them together, making sparks fly in the darkness. From the other wing, another chef hurried into the room holding a large fish in a net. He dropped the shiny green creature onto the carving table and the two chefs started to dissect it. It wasn’t easy. The beast wriggled and flapped—and was clearly quite strong.
The diners looked on with a mixture of horror and morbid fascination as the heavy knives chopped through its twitching, frantic green skin. Dark blood spurted.
De Labauve was back on the microphone, this time providing a commentary. ‘This dish has been nominated by Mr Tun Feiyu. Thank you Mr Tun. My sous chef Benny Tomori and his assistant aim to get the fish filleted and onto your plate while it is still flapping. This is not an easy job and needs great skill on the part of the chef. You may think that removing the fish’s spine will render it unable to move, but the flesh of the fish can continue to contract and expand even after the backbone has been extracted.’
Right on cue, the two chefs pulled the spine out of the fish and held it up. It looked like something from a children’s cartoon.
‘It will be served with the beating hearts of frogs, which the chefs in the kitchen have prepared for you in the past few minutes,’ De Labauve continued.
While Tomori and his assistant rapidly began slicing the filleted fish into small pieces, two other chefs appeared with a dish of animated objects—the frogs’ hearts—which were swiftly placed on small plates and distributed to diners, who broke into a spontaneous round of applause.
Then diners stared at the twitching morsels of flesh on their plates with either horror, delight, or delighted horror, before the braver ones among them splattered them with soy sauce and wasabi, and popped them into their mouths. Wong was thrilled and ate his portion with his eyes closed in rapture. The thumping, slimy frog’s heart was particularly flavoursome, although a little hard to get a grip on with one’s teeth.
‘Astonishing,’ said Park Hae-jin, a Korean businessman sitting nearby, who chewed slowly with pleasure in his eyes.
‘Eat, eat,’ Chen Shaiming, a Beijing factory owner, said to his nervous-looking wife Fangyin.
‘Ew! Does it hurt it to be cut up like that?’ she asked.
‘No, it likes it. Fish and frogs don’t have feelings. They don’t feel pain.’
After a slow start, all the portions were consumed (although several of the women surreptitiously passed their portions to their male partners to consume).
The second dish was Shanghai hairy crabs, nominated by a Shanghai-Indian import-export businessman named Vishwa Mathew Roy. A rack of the creatures—unusually large, female specimens—was wheeled into the room. The crabs’ pincers were tied shut with pink ribbons, and their legs similarly incapacitated. Yet one of them had somehow come loose. It was scuttling sideways across the top of its fellows, towards the edge of the tray and freedom. One of the chefs caught it and turned it upside down to retie its bonds.
Once the display was tidy again, a junior chef quickly went along with his fingers, flicking the eyestalks of each crab to make sure they flinched, proving that they were all still alive— and thus truly fresh.
This job done, thick, steaming-hot soup was poured into a massive tureen under the crabs. A glass dome was placed over the entire structure and then the flames were turned up high. The soup quickly started boiling, steaming the crabs to death. After just sixty seconds, the flames were turned off and the transparent lid removed. The crabs were picked up with tongs and placed on the diners’ plates. Waiters laid gloves on the tables.
De Labauve strode to centre stage again to provide commentary: ‘Most of you probably know how to eat hairy crab. But for those who don’t, this is what to do. Stick your fingers under the edge of the shell like so—and rip the top half off the crab like this,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry. It’s almost definitely dead by now—and if it isn’t, it soon will be.’
Inside, the crab was a steaming and delicious white. And since they were female crabs, there was succulent yellow roe to eat, too. Wonderful.
Food, Wong decided, should always be served or cooked alive if at all possible. Certainly if it was going to be presented to men. (The women appeared to be less enchanted with the process.) Males should eat just-slaughtered food several times a year if possible, he decided—preferably this should include some food that was alive when it went into the mouth. The consumption of meat, after all, was not just a way of getting nourishment into the body. It was symbolic of the struggle to live. Just as early man had to battle sabre-toothed tigers to keep his family alive, so modern men needed to be involved in some sort of physical activity to make his meals really satisfying. Buying slices of them dead in plastic wrappings, Western-style, from the supermarket—what kind of True Man would do a thing like that? No, food should be grappled with, and the winner should eat the loser.
In a situation like this, the food was alive and could, in theory, win the battle. The lobster could snap at the fingers of the human trying to eat it, jump off the table and run to the elevator. The turtles, De Labauve had said, had already tried to make a break for freedom. But of course, no one wanted the animals to escape, so the odds were weighted in the humans’ favour. And the deep, primal satisfaction of killing an animal as or just before one eats it—what a shame that the vast majority of people would never know that feeling. It seemed fitting that business people in China, who were proving to be masters of innovative entrepreneurialism, had successfully arranged a way to let people experience death as part of living. Killing was part of eating, and it was wrong for them to be separated.
After the crab, a drink was distributed as a palate cleanser. It turned out to be a broth of tiny live fish that wriggled and squirmed as you swallowed them.
The third dish was baby octopi, nominated by the Korean businessman, Park Hae-jin. These tiny bright red beasts, barely a mouthful each in size, were provided with a spray container of red chilli sauce and herbs. You blasted one of the creatures with the red stuff, which drove them wild—and then popped it straight into your mouth. In several cases the creatures made valiant attempts to escape, and in one case an octopus managed to leap off a diner’s fork onto the plate and then scurry onto the tablecloth. A waiter grabbed it with tongs and then held it still while the diner sliced it in half before eating it in two separate, wriggling mouthfuls.
Wong, joyfully crunching his live baby octopus, reflected on how fortunate he was that Joyce was not present. His pestilent assistant, he knew, was stupidly fond of animals and would find this whole show objectionable, hard though it might be to believe. (He would never have chosen her as a colleague: she had been foisted on him a year earlier because she was the daughter of one of East Trade Industries’ clients.) How could anyone see any harm in this wholesome display of consumption of fresh, healthy food? Indeed, to object to something like this going ahead was cruelty—cruelty to human beings, who needed fresh food to live. As he chewed, a tentacle fell out of his mouth and lay twitching on the white tablecloth. Wong picked it up with his fingers and slipped it between his thin lips. Delicious.
He had hardly finished before De Labauve was back on stage. ‘Now we have a treat for you. A classic dish with a new interpretation. I’m proud to introduce to you Drunken Prawns Flambéed in XO cognac, nominated by our very own feng shui master CF Wong—who, incidentally, assures me that this restaurant has the best feng shui of any eating place in the whole of Shanghai.’
Wong smiled and bowed his head to acknowledge the reference, although he wished De Labauve had not repeated the praise he had given to the room—praise which he had given to at least six different restaurants in Shanghai in the past year. Remarkable how that phrase alone could guarantee a generous tip on top of his agreed fee.