my teeming brain: Upstart Ducks

Yes trust them not: for there is an Upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and beeing an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey. -Robert Greene (1592)

Greene, a minor Elizabethan playwright, was Shakespeare's contemporary, and holder of MAs from both Oxford and Cambridge. He wrote those lines as a bitter man, jealous of his younger rivals (most notably Shakespeare, but also including Marlowe and Nashe) on his deathbed.^* The reference contains an allusion to Henry VI, Part 3 ("a Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde"), one of the lines Greene likely suspected the Bard of having lifted from elsewhere. ["Johannes fac totum" = Jack-of-all-trades.]

This reference to Shakespeare as an "upstart crow" came to mind tonight during dinner at 北京大董烤鸭店, an upscale restaurant in Beijing specializing in roast duck, but serving a variety of other dishes including shark fin soup, bird's nest soup, and seafood. (I made the mistake of asking the concierge at our hotel to make the reservation for us. Hearing the concierge's native Mandarin, the hostess taking the reservation must have assumed that we were also native Chinese, and booked a table for us on the restaurant's second floor, where locals eat and where the staff speak no English. This is quite a departure from the first floor, where I normally dine, which boasts an exclusively foreign clientele and wait staff who are trained accordingly.)

Though the food itself is engaging, it's hard to keep one's eyes from drifting in such a fancy restaurant; the urge to look around at the other patrons and see what they're eating is so overwhelming. So there I was, not minding my own business as usual—after the beef satay, scallops, and two-flavor shrimp, but before the actual roast duck had come out—when I noticed the table beside ours.

The family seated adjacent to us ordered one duck for seven (7) people (for those unfamiliar with roast duck proportions, our party of three (3) consumed the same quantity of waterfowl along with eight other courses). Okay, so one of their party was a child, but still, one duck amongst seven six people? That's barely three duck-filled crepes per person! 北京大董烤鸭店 serves the finest Beijing duck I've eaten (and I had quite alot of duck during my year in Beijing); you don't go there to nibble on niggardly rationed portions: the food invites you to gorge yourself in epicurean delight!

So what did those seven people share before going home hungry? They had a total of six dishes, four of which were soups, and not of the expensive shark fin or bird's nest variety. The fifth course was, of course, the duck, and the last was a plate of fresh fruit—a complementary dessert served with the purchase of each bird.

What did I make of this unusual selection of appetizers? Taking their odd meal into account with the fact that their child kept hitting things and running around with his underpants showing deplorably (my mother would be completely aghast at the thought of allowing me to run around like that in public), my first inclination was, "Ah, the nouveau riche of China, probably made their money off the exploding Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges, and haven't yet figured out how to order." Then I realized that: a) Chinese people know how to order good Chinese food [Hello! What was I thinking; it's practically genetic!]; and b) to be "nouveau riche," one must be "riche," which this family was not.

It quickly dawned on me: these people (whom we'll call the Wu's) are probably just social aspirants. The hypersonic explosion of the Chinese economy, which is moving faster than Olympic hurdler Liu Xiang pumped full of caffeine-laden wulong tea, is creating a burgeoning middle class here. My guess is that the Wu's are just keepin' up with the Zhou's: their neighbors or friends came to this restaurant last week, and now the Wu's are here to "save face," and show that they've got every bit as much disposable income as the Zhou's. Having a dinner at 大董 not only allows the Wu's the privilege of being seen at a posh eatery, but also gives them bragging rites—it doesn't matter that they only had a few soups and four bites of duck each. The point is they ate here at all.

I'm curious what the phenomena of social aspiration, keeping up with the Joneses, and conspicuous consumption are going to look like in the People's Republic. Will they follow in the footsteps of the Americans, who invented and subsequently perfected these dark arts, or will they choose their own way, an Eastern variation infused with oriental mysticism and Confucian philosophies? Only time will tell.

Conspicuous consumption: coming soon to a Communist republic near you.