DENPASAR, BALI – It was the snot heard ’round the world.
When 38-year-old Zhao Qingshang stepped up for his turn at the Hilton Garden Inn Bali dinner buffet on Monday, the Shenzhen native had a number of choices to make. First was whether to take the normal-size dinner plate available to everyone as his serving vessel, or to empty the family-style salad bowl and use that for his feedbag.
After all, he had never seen such sumptuous delights in his life! And all for the taking! The only thing he had to do was to start shoveling – first the mie goreng, then the pisang goreng, then the nasi goreng, then the dragon fruit, the bubur ayam, the sambal eggs, the watermelon, the sweet coconut balls, the squid on a stick, the ice lemon tea … Zhao Qingshang would stay here all day!
To Mr. Zhao, traveling for the first time abroad, the choices seemed infinite. His tour-group operator – Happy Family Travel – had certainly not stretched the truth when it promised he would be stepping off his plane from home and straight into paradise. “Why,” he thought, “I am a king here in Bali. Or on Bali. I am not sure which, but one thing I am certain of: I will never return to mainland China again! To hell with them! To hell with everybody!”
But as Zhao had learned from attending classes on Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, foreigners would be watching him during his holiday, especially for breaches of supposed Western etiquette like nose-picking, phlegm-hacking, butting in line, shouting into the telephone instead of talking in a calm, quiet casual voice like the Japanese do everywhere but mainland Chinese somehow can’t do to save their lives, and most important: projectile sneezing into the face of the person standing in front of you so as to ensure swift passage of every communicable disease known to humankind.
And with that thought and a sneeze rising in the depths of his nostrils, Zhao Qingshang – right there in the buffet line – violently goobered one not into his fingers, not into the open air, not into the mango punch bowl and most assuredly not into the carefully arranged buffet that was intended not just for the mainland Chinese guests but for everyone…
No, Zhao Qingshang, accountant by training and patriot by circumstance, had cooly and swiftly withdrawn a paper tissue from his front pants pocket. With his fellow buffet-goers ducking for cover in the expectation of being pelted by the airborne blancmange, Zhao instead stepped away from the buffet line, politely though forcefully sneezed into the Kleenex, and then went back to the business of overfilling his plate as if nothing had happened at all.
And in this instance, at least, Zhao Qingshang could be safe in the knowledge that yet another mainland Chinese tourist wouldn’t be landing in the pages of breakinginasia.com because he had failed to adhere to the standardized and widely accepted international code of tourist –and human – comportment.