It was disturbing, how the raw salmon tasted. It had that oily consistency reminiscent of a piece of fat, and as smooth, but a lingering sour tang hung on my tongue. The green tea didn’t help much, and the wasabi did nothing to mask the taste. I sought refuge in a globular piece of tofu, surrounded by a sticky, rubbery outer skin.
It didn’t help that it tasted like the inside of a fish gullet.
Our guest is a picture of the Chinese businessman who works hard for what he has, and has learned the hard way how circumventing the system has its own rewards. It’s not as if he’s committed crimes, but he has found enough loopholes in his line of work to live well-off. I wonder at his own personal brand of pragmatism. Politics, for someone in his position, has become an afterthought and he says as much. To disconfirm our suspicions, he says that it’s not because he’s made it in life, but because he learned early on that fighting against the system brought its own setbacks in life.
And that’s the game that should be played, he said. Life. Not dabbling in an incongruous mix of human emotion and human ideals. Life, according to him, is what we make of it.
Such a cliche, but I find myself seeing his point.
Ironically enough, sitting next to me at the Japanese restaurant was someone I’d count a loser in life, despite his high position. I privately scorned the fact that he had gained his qualifications from copying another person’s thesis and then submitting it as his own. What’s worse is that he liked giving the impression that his qualifications were hard won. Which, from personal experience, is a hearty joke.
At the same time, I saw the pithy irony of my own scorn for him; I was putting myself in the position to judge him. For all intents and purposes, he was my ultimate paymaster, our client, and he was in a position infinitely higher than I could ever hope to attain; he was well-liked by his own bosses, and he was a consumate bootlicker.
All of which, of course, made me uncomfortable because today, I suddenly found in him a person to fear — he seemed capable of doing anything to get his way. It came to me suddenly over lunch; I had been played by him before, and I had played him before (merely by standing by what I reported, actually, nothing malicious) but it was only today that I was able to see past his effable veneer.
