TAIPEI – A Mainland Chinese tourist helping himself to the free breakfast buffet at the venerable Howard Plaza Hotel in Taipei on Monday grabbed the entire pile of bacon that was generally available to all the buffet customers and not just to him, nonchalantly placing the fistful of the dozen-plus pieces onto his plate and then carrying it away to his table as the other buffet-goers glared in disdain at the clear breach of Taiwanese — and arguably universal — dining etiquette.
A waiter who witnessed the offense said it was another “clear example of the rampant boorishness” he had seen among the hotel’s mainland clientele, who usually arrive in Taipei as part of group tours and are then given free rein over the hotel’s facilities to the exclusion of the other guests, politesse and general feelings of mutual humanity.
The mainland tourist was among a group of about 50 who were unloaded at the hotel over the weekend, where they were expected to stay for the duration of the week-long Chinese New Year holiday.
“You see these rubes in here all the time,” said the waiter, 27-year-old Chen Gu-weh. “Most of them have just fallen off straight off the turnip truck from their ornamental heritage villages in mainland China, where they mostly dine on local rice variants and congealed fibroids, and so have never seen exotic food like real crispy bacon, sauteed mushrooms and American-style pancakes with Canadian maple syrup.
“I have also seen them wrap their sausages into the pancakes and dip them in soy sauce, but I think that maneuver can be forgiven because when I tried it myself, my palate tingled in empathy for their provincial tastes,” he added.
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Swiss tourist Heike Vilbrandt, who was also dining at the buffet and anticipating having at least one slice of bacon and possibly two to go along with her ever-so-gently toasted Eggo waffles and locally sourced saffron asparagus, said the mainlander’s bacon swipe had upset the delicate cultural balance the buffet line was enjoying prior to the theft.
“Yes, there were mainland and Taiwanese guests, but there were also us Swiss, some Koreans and Japanese, a few Africans, other Westerners and some killjoy Russians, but we had been unified by one common goal: to empower an orderly international drive through the buffet line based on mutual understanding and respect.
“And then, here comes Chairman Chow-hound,” she said. “Who was he, anyway? The Standing Committee of One For Porcine Overindulgence?”
Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council issued a statement after the incident saying it had “grievously wounded” the cross-strait relationship. The MAC also said it would consider implementing a complete buffet ban on mainland tourists if they could not stay in their lane and abide breakfast regulations.
The unidentified suspect was not available for comment because he was outside loudly sidewalk-hacking humongous quantities of bacon-infused phlegm, throat-heaving it into whichever pedestrian pathway had the greatest amount of traffic.
He later visited a local KTV with his male cohorts, where they sang uplifting odes to the motherland and also threw in some Elvis tunes, which they then self-reported in their afternoon online WeChat write-up to their local Rural Communist Politburo of Subdistrict 14, which comprises a moderate populace of 27 million people.