I arrived at the Jiayuguan Hotel an hour before checkin, so I decided to have a drink at the bar and read my book in the lobby.
I wasn’t their usual clientele so, as has happened before, they had to crack open a new bottle just for the foreigner. (It was Johnny Walker Black.)
Some kids were running around, playing in the lobby. I got stared at a lot, per usual. Eventually, one girl came over and said, “Hello!” Her (Western) name was Katie. She was seven and her friend was eight. We started talking, a mix of my rudimentary Mandarin and their elementary school English. They kept running away and then running back to ask my name, again. Ask my age, again. Tell me their names, again. Tell me their ages, again. I asked them why they were at the hotel and it turns out that there was a wedding reception in the mezzanine above and all the kids were bored.
Apparently, some of the adults were bored, too. One by one, each of the girls’ dads came down, then another friend of there, then an older man (who may have been a grandfather or something.) We all started talking. The younger men asked me about Obama and Hillary. I got to use tons of vocabulary I had just learned like “vote” and “Republican” and “Democrat.” (This was interrupted by a lot of “This is your school bag” pointing to my backpack and more “What is your name?” It was also interrupted by the older man offering me cigarettes and coffee.)
After, like, the fifth time the girls had asked me how old I was, I told them my birthday was next week. Their fathers’ encouraged them to sing “Happy Birthday” to me, which was very sweet.
Eventually, the older man declared, “drink-uh!” This is usually where my introversion kicks in, but in the spirit of making new mistakes, I went along with it. All the men led me upstairs to the mezzanine, where the wedding reception was clearly winding down.
Then it got awkward.
I held back as the older man approached another older man (the bride’s father, perhaps?) sitting at a table. There was lots of gesturing toward me and then the seated older man got up and shooed me and the older man away!
I did not come to Jiayuguan to crash a Chinese wedding, so I was ready to get the hell out of there, but the older man insisted “drink-uh, drink-uh” and led me to another table were I was offered a shot of biajiu. I drank it and thanked them all profusely. The bride’s father came to shoo us off again and I thanked the older man, the children’s father, the children and scurried off to the reception desk to check in to my room.
(The next day, I ran into the older man on the street near the hotel. He wanted to have a drink, but I lied and said I had to work. We shook hands and that was that.)