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Scrapped year-end office extravaganza reminds us of many benefits of simplicity
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AS the recent central government mandate for civil servants and government functionaries to economize continues to awe our servants into abstinence, some restaurateurs are missing out on one of their most lucrative business opportunities: catering for the time-honored year-end office party.
There are murmurs of complaint from many of those who have taken this tradition so for granted that they no longer seem to be capable of reflecting on the adverse health, social, and environmental consequences of this ritual. The ritual of wasteful extravaganza, practiced on a national scale, has nothing to do with the mundane biological need for life-sustaining nutrition.
It has degenerated, like most Chinese banquets, into a pagan celebration of abundance and excess, with free flow of liquor and drink, and food Ñ food meant to impress, surprise, and utterly satiate.
Only then would foreigners realize why some of the grandest buildings in China are dedicated to this ritual.
During a recent conference in Japan, after a fully packed four-hour conference, I sat down to a frugal, cold bento (lunch box), of such moderate portion that it took me several seconds to become resigned to the mouthful of darkish soba, meant to be the main food.
Food for thought
Even the feast to which we had been treated Ñ at a Chinese restaurant at that Ñ failed to live up to Chinese standards, for when I left the table, there was not a morsel left. I did not stagger, but felt in full control over my faculties.
Actually, I felt more alert and incisive than when I had entered the room. The experience afforded me more than enough food for thought.
When Zhou Zuoren (1885-1967), one of China’s most brilliant writers, landed in Japan in 1906, he observed that Chinese students studying in Japan were often appalled at the Japanese food Ñ simple, light, cold, and much less greasy than at home.
Zhou found that most families would only have a hot breakfast, while lunch was contained in a partitioned bento. The better-off family might have some fish, while the ordinary would make do with a few preserved plums to go with the rice.
The leftovers from the morning would often serve as dinner, and when it was too cold in winter, the cold rice would be simply washed down by hot tea.
Instead of complaining, like fellow Chinese students, Zhou found himself reliving and witnessing ancient Chinese customs lost in China; He felt an affinity for the basic and simple way of life of early Chinese people, and felt deeply grateful for that recognition.
He became critical of those Chinese students who insisted on having table and chairs (rather than tatamis), bedstead, and hot food.
Less is more
“These people were often the butt of our ridicule, for we felt that why go abroad at all if you could not tolerate the hardship. If you are in Japan only to learn a bit of technology, it would in the final analysis mean little, being just skin deep, for you fail to gain true insight into Japanese character and mindset,” Zhou wrote.
More than 100 years after Zhou made this observation, I had the chance to listen to a Fudan University professor who, while giving us a lecture in journalism, digressed about the “humiliating” treatment he suffered at the hands of the British foreign devils while he was there on an exchange program.
“Do you know what they gave us to eat? Potatoes!”
By comparison, the British scholars on that same program in Fudan had been treated royally, with daily banquets.
Many of us still do not know why this generosity could not be reciprocated, but a professor should know the many benefits of moderation.
Nearly all Chinese experts on conservation of vital energy council moderation.
Longevity, according to Sun Simiao (581-682 AD), one of the greatest physicians in traditional Chinese medicine, should start with “three lesses”: less speech, less food, and less sleep.
This column, named after the old saying that “one man’s meat is another man’s poison,” stresses the importance taking another perspective.
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