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Bai Jiu is powerful stuff—90 percent alcohol, or so it seemed—and it was best to just throw it down in a single gulp and get the whole thing over with. Except that the waitress filled the glasses right back up and disappeared into the kitchen. Back she came with the first course: batter-fried snake skin. We were encouraged to drink a toast to
the snake skin. And another toast to the empty platter. A toast to the next course, which was stir-fried snake meat and vegetables. A toast to that empty platter. A toast to the courses to come, none of which I can remember, except to say that every part of the reptile was served in one way or another, and it was necessary to toast every last bit of it,
down to the eyeballs.
"Snake," I thought, rather blearily, "the dinner of alcoholics."
Michael and I paid our bill and bounced from wall to wall down the long hallway to our room. There, sitting on my bed, was the outsize duffel the airline had lost—several thousand rounds of ammunition that could, I imagined, earn me a lot of disagreeable jail time. This realization was not a comfort. I lay on the bed, worrying drunkenly about all
that ammo, until the snake informed me that it wanted out, and right now.
That was my last dinner in China. Now, back home in Montana, I was watching the Chinese deal with the jellied mess on their plates, and as they began to eat, an unworthy thought came to mind, an evil feeling of culinary schadenfreude: Lutefisk is the revenge of the reptile.
Alas, it was soon clear that they liked it. Or two of the three visitors did. Brian didn't go back for seconds, and he told me later the fish wasn't "to my taste." He was polite about it, as good travelers are in foreign countries, and we laughed about the lutefisk, me perhaps more than Brian. I was pretty sure he didn't have a gun.
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