火锅局 Huǒguō jú — The Hotpot Gathering

Hotpot, and the fight at the end of the meal

Sichuan hotpot is a shared pot of boiling broth in the middle of the table, into which everybody cooks their own food from a spread of raw ingredients, and it is as much a social form as a dish. Chongqing and Chengdu each claim it, the red broth is loaded with 花椒, 辣椒, beef tallow and 豆瓣酱 from lesson 67, and a 鸳鸯锅 with a divider lets the cautious and the committed sit at the same table. You assemble your own 蘸料 from a bar of sesame oil, garlic, coriander, spring onion, MSG and chilli flakes — in Chengdu the base is oil, in Beijing it is sesame paste, and people are partisan about it. The part that needs explaining to a visitor is what happens when the bill arrives, because it looks like an argument and is not. At a Chinese meal there is normally one host, the person who proposed it, and that person pays for everybody. This is not generosity to be relieved; it is a role, and it comes with 面子 attached. The expected behaviour from guests is to protest — 推让 — once or twice, sincerely enough to be polite and not so hard as to succeed. Then you let them pay, thank them, and reciprocate on another occasion. 下次我请 is the correct closing line and it creates the obligation that makes the next meal happen. What a foreigner should not do is what feels natural: insist, or produce a phone and start calculating shares. Splitting a bill at a group dinner in China, particularly one with anybody senior present, reads as either a refusal of the relationship or a suggestion that the host cannot afford it, and 林悦's 反而不给他面子 is exactly right. AA制 exists and is entirely normal among students, younger colleagues and close friends of equal standing, especially in big cities — but it is agreed in advance, not decided at the till. Two smaller conventions. Seating is not random: the host usually sits facing the door and the most senior guest furthest from it, so wait to be placed rather than choosing. And toasting has a physical grammar — 敬酒 with your glass rim lower than that of somebody senior to you, both hands if you want to be warm about it, and 随意 if you cannot drink another. Saying 我不喝酒 plainly is fine and increasingly common; inventing a medical reason is unnecessary. And the thing to actually enjoy: a hotpot lasts three hours, nobody leaves early, and the conversation is the point. It is the same institution as lesson 62's crab and the Spanish course's sobremesa, and it is the best language practice available to you, because the food takes so long that there is nothing to do but talk.