China considers me a “foreign expert.” I’m not exactly sure what that means, but I have a little red important-looking booklet that says I am, with my picture inside and five characters that, said together quickly, sort of sound like my first name. Actually, it sounds something like, “Ke-li-si-do-fu.” Yes, that’s soy bean curd in my name. This is why I want a real Chinese name.

Anyway, whatever the reason for my supposed expertise, the city of Dalian honored me and a few thousand other foreign experts with a lavish dinner and at least an hour of the same speech repeated by as many local officials as could memorize it.

They also gave medals (made with real metal of some kind) to 23 said experts. I kept score from my seat in the back row: Japan got the most, with nine honorees; Canada was second with three. If I made this a national pride thing I might feel bad that the USA only earned one. Then again, South Korea, Germany, the Netherlands, and Israel did no better. Australia, Russia and Singapore got two each. Only one woman won.

Plenty of people who could have gone skipped out. Supposedly, there are around 10,000 foreign experts in Dalian. I’d guess (and I’m horrible at crowd counts) there were at best 2,000 last night. Only two of the five foreign teachers at my school came.

Two things brought me to this event: It was a chance to hear the mayor of Dalian speak, which I’m not embarrassed to be interested in, since this is the guy everyone credits with making this city look nothing like Shenyang. Actually, it’s quite a nice place.

The speeches, where they differed enough to be counted as plural, are barely worth recalling. A few interesting highlights came in the mayor’s remarks. He took the opportunity to tout the city’s economy:

• Dalian’s GDP is up 15-16% this year, he said. Considering Beijing’s efforts to reign in local growth, that seems astronomical. Even in a good year, and China has had about 20 of them in a row, that is almost unbelievable. (If there’s an economist out there reading this blog, please help me understand this better)

• Troublesome issues: Rising oil prices, a shortage of electricity in Liaoning Province, and a rising RMB exchange value.
• He also hyped the city’s environmental efforts: “Dalian’s sky is bluer, the water is cleaner and the air is clearer.” I won’t disagree, but who in China are you going to compare to?

At the end of it he told us: “You are all heroes in the construction of Dalian,” praising our collective “professionalism, devotion and dedication.”

Considering I spend more time updating this blog than teaching some weeks, I hardly feel professional, devoted or dedicated to “the construction of Dalian.”

The second, and perhaps more immediate reason for coming, was a free meal in the best hotel in town, the Shangrila. These people know how to put on a banquet. I forgot to copy down descriptions of all seven courses, which we’ll blame on the wine that kept refilling itself. I remember several meats, abalone, a vegetable soup I didn’t really touch, and sea cucumbers (slugs, really).

I usually have a “try everything” policy with food, especially free food, but I hesitated a bit with the black and tentacled slugs. They have a texture somewhat like weeks-old Jell-O that’s been sitting in the back of the fridge, getting hard and rubbery, losing all its taste. I bit off half of one, dry heaved a bit, spit the unchewed mollusk out into my hand as discretely as possible and dropped it under the table, since I didn’t have a napkin handy. Then I drank more wine.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 20th, 2006 at 11:48 pm and is filed under the Dalian life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.