THE GATES OF BEIJING (14)

In which Jim spends a nerve-wracking day as an honored guest at Diaoyutai State Guest House. He starts off giving a bad English lesson and things go rapidly downhill from there.

It was like night and day, going out with Big Ten one week, the Crimson Prince the next. Each had their entourage; each had their hangers-on, each had enforcers in their orbit. Once inside their respective inner circles, the common rules of the road didn’t seem to apply. You entered an alternate reality in which it became devilishly difficult to tell right from wrong, up from down, or good from bad.

Yet for a guest to resist, to question, to take to task, or to criticize was to go against the flow, to put at risk an unquestioning friendship.

The only reason I got invited to such things in the first place was because of Huamei, of course, but she was nowhere to be found.

Still, friends of friends were friends, too, weren’t they?

And to turn down an invitation to deliciously lavish lunch at Diaoyutai State Guest House would be the height of ingratitude, wouldn’t it?

Even the foul-mouthed taxi driver who thought I was joking when I gave him my destination was a believer by the time he dropp…