Evening entertainment with Bank President

I forced myself to a reasonably early start to work as judging by the last few days oftentimes (gosh, that is an Americanism) people call me a couple of hours before to go out even though I’ve told them I’m working. Indeed, in the late morning Li Kun asked me to go out at 8pm with a “bank president”. The kids’ lunch was another crappy delivered DFC but I had three 1000 year old eggs instead. I also managed to get Leilei to do some maths hw and Xixi to do some violin practice for the second day in a row so at least I’m hoping they’re keeping on track. I’ve realised why I’m not totally disparaged by the term “oftentimes”. It’s because it encourages the silent “t” in the word. I’m well aware that there are two ways of pronouncing “often” and many people interchange between the two (though if there is a rule for this I’ve not found it yet). Even Christopher Hitchens, in his audiobook “God is not Great”, used both pronunciations. My interpretation of this is that the silent “t” is the educated way to pronounce it (not that that makes it right), and that the pronounced “t” version arose from less-educated people thinking that those silent-”t”ers were wrong. But I also notice it’s more prevalent in British people than Americans, not that that makes it right. The bottom line is that when people use “often” in a sentence I am more likely to pay attention to their pronunciation of it than the rest of the sentence...more fool me. But nobody pronounces “soften” with a sounded “t” do they?

At 9pm I caved in and IM’d “hi” to Li Kun, who got back to me saying he was about to go out. So I needn’t have worried about 8pm. I went to the new music bar he’d invited me to around 9.30ish leaving the kids at home. Typically I was the first of his guests to turn up, so we sat at a big reserved table eating sunflower seeds until even Li Kun couldn’t wait and we cracked open a couple of beers. Slowly but surely people turned up, including the bank president at 10.30.

I had to bite my tongue not to talk about Bitcoin and how it could replace banking as we know it. Actually his English was fairly good and he surely wanted to practise it, so who was I to language-bully him? I managed what I was internally showing off to myself as my first English conversation in weeks, when Xixi rang to remind me I was clearly speaking English every single day, and that she was hungry although Tan was home. So I temporarily excused myself in order to get three sausages for her and returned back 20 minutes later.

It was only 20 minutes but in that time the blokes at the table appeared to have become a lot more drunk than when I left...maybe it had just kicked in. Bank president was explaining that he had attended a wedding between one of his relatives and a western man. Within seconds the conversation turned to penis sizes and I engaged in the conversation as little as I was politely able to. The upshot of it was, according to bank president, that although Chinese penises were smaller, they were hard. I thought it best to raise my glass to him and gan bei at that point, and we all roared with laughter (well them more than me).

Mr Bank President near right, token female middle left

Then he showed me his alarm on his phone that was set to 5.45am, and said no matter what time he went to bed he’d always be up at this time in order to be in the bank. I admired his resolve, and understood when a few beers later he went on his way. Advertising friend IM’d me at 11.30 to go for a drink but I couldn’t really leave LI Kun. Obviously inviting bank president was a really big deal for him and he was so happy I had been there to talk to him. He was now saying “thank you, thank you” in English to me and I realised he was really drunk. But so did Guitar Teacher, so managed to take him home without too much fuss...I’m not sure how he paid the bill or who took care of it.

It was 1am so I pinged Advertising friend just in case and of course within seconds I was sent a wei zhi pinpointing the location of where they were. There were also six pissed blokes there, each of whom I should probably know, but it didn’t really matter as we had a great time chatting and a bit more gan bei’ing till hum o’clock.