So any old Chinese female friend invites me out to her birthday party for her 25th birthday. I arrive at Hof, a HK-run trendy dessert and cocktail lounge and get introduced to a Disney consultant,  a logistics manager, and someone who works for Remy Martin.

The 5′2″ Disney consultant from Florida was doing most of the talking and asked me what I thought about doctors in China. I told him my own horror story about getting overcharged 400USD for medicine for a disease that I didn’t have.

Later I ask the Remy Martin girl if she often goes to the hospital.  She already knows I’m joking (a bit of an inside joke from earlier， and it’s also a subtle way to say that she’s crazy 你经常去医院吗？), but before she answers the midget-sized Disney consultant pipes up with his poop Chinese saying “whoa, here’s what I’m talking about cultural differences between westerners and Chinese. ” Apparently, him being in China for 8 months makes him a cultural expert, but me being here 5 years doesn’t count for anything – cuz I’m white and he’s originally Vietnamese and spent 1 long year in Asia.

Even though the birthday girl knows the HK manager and even though we bought tonnes of drinks and dessert, the manager still didn’t allow us to pop open the Champagne the Remy Martin girl brought. So we all drank it on the street (which is perfectly legal in China).

Anyways, I guess I was shocked once by the behaviour of the HK mangager (“you can’t ah do dat in here ah”) and then again by the whole “what do you think of american political influence in Canada ” when I haven’t been in Canada for a very long time.