It started off with an innocuous “Did you like the food?” The questioner was a young man, a waiter in a restaurant specializing in Sichuan food in a small south China city. But very soon, the conversation turned into a full-fledged barrage of questions.

The fish was delicious? Good. How expensive is fish in India? It wasn’t as if the youth was interested in knowing more about India as a tourist destination. He knew enough already. He knew — as he put it — that a poor man in China could be a rich man in India. What he wanted to know was how much would it cost to own a house in India. He wanted to buy one so that he could sell it later when the price appreciated.

India is a big country. Where did he want to buy a house? This time, he was pretty definite. “Where are the most beautiful girls”? he asked. He knew that Indian girls kept winning the Miss Universe contest. East India, I told him. But he wanted the name of the city. It transpired that there was a Chinese name for Calcutta. “Not the capital city?” he asked, disappointed. Why yes, he could hit gold there too.

Was English the only official language or was there another he needed to learn? Should he carry water when he came to India? He’d heard that clean water was difficult to get there. Did Indians know about Chinese food? Did they! His best bet would be to open a Sichuan restaurant. Ok then, a Sichuan restaurant in Calcutta, he declared. Sorry, that city had enough already, he had better try ‘Xin Deli’ (New Delhi).

Old beliefs

How much money would he need to set up a restaurant in the capital city? Even as I groped for an answer, he shot off the next one: were there many Chinese in India? Yes, Calcutta, the city of beautiful women, even had a Chinatown.

At the end of this most unusual exchange, the waiter offered a free dish next time, provided I filled up a questionnaire about the restaurant, which he would help me answer. What dish would I want free next time: beef, fish, pork or chicken? With reports of chickens and pigs being injected with chemicals to fatten them, fish being poisoned in polluted rivers, and beef out of bounds, thanks to cultural hang-ups, it was a tough choice. Come early to get a seat, was the waiter’s parting shot.

The encounter proved, once again, that China never ceases to surprise. Would such an exchange ever take place in India? Would a waiter in a popular restaurant, definitely not five star or even three star, talk with such confidence to a foreigner? Would he know so much about the foreigner’s country? This waiter couldn’t have studied beyond middle school, the nine years of schooling that is compulsory in China. His salary couldn’t have been more than 800 yuan.

It wasn’t just the confidence of knowing that he could afford a good life in the foreigner’s poor country that emboldened this youth. The man had no hesitation in using his own compatriots accompanying the foreigner as translators. It didn’t cramp his style that they were customers whom he was serving and who had, just minutes earlier, urged him loudly to hurry up with the bill, or, that these were English-speaking young Chinese women and therefore obviously “upper class”. The class (and sex) difference, the factors that immediately separate people in India, didn’t matter at all.

The youth was cocky, expressing displeasure when the Chinese women told him they could answer the questionnaire (in Chinese) on their own, cracking jokes with them as they eventually turned to him for help. This young man was probably born after Mao died. As the Chinese acknowledge today, under Mao, everyone was poor but equal. His successor, Deng Xiaoping, believed that “we should allow a portion of the population to get rich first”. But Mao’s legacy seems to have survived despite the odds.