Saturday, January 5, 2008: Trying not to Crash the Economy	Return to Journal TOC >>
Several of Ro’s Chinoy cousins pick us up to meet Chinese side of the family near the Mall of Asia for shabu shabu (hot pots) which are all the rage here. (You see hot pot restaurants everywhere in Manila.) I’m not a huge shabu shabu fan - I like it, but it’s not one of my favorite things - but this dinner is amazing. As you might suspect, the quality of Chinese food you get when going out to dinner with ethnic Chinese bank executives in a country close to China is pretty high. More than a hundred ingredients rotate around an airport people-mover style track that passes by all the tables at shoulder height. Four cooks work in a prep area in the middle of the track (there’s a separate kitchen area as well) preparing beef lung, fish lips, intestines, and other not-served-in-America ingredients, along with various kinds of dumplings, noodles, etc. Each of us made a soy-based dipping sauce, adding garlic paste, chili, herbs, and other condiments, and the cousins at the table pick some items off the track to add to the two bowls of broth (one mild and one spicy) cooking at the table. Then waiters start arriving with course after course, constantly bringing more to dish into the hot pots - beef, lamb, shrimp, oysters, cheese-filled balls (my favorite), broccoli, various kinds of tofu, and other things I can’t entirely identify. They bring drinks as well, first a green apple jello shake, then iced mango green tea, then iced lemon green tea. After we’ve eaten our fill, they bring out a fruit plate for dessert, with mango, watermelon, and probably the best papaya I’ve ever had. There are too many of us to fit at one table, so it ends up with me at the men’s table, and Ro with the women. I expect that we will both be interrogated separately, like suspects in separate rooms for questioning, and then our answers compared, but as it happens Ro’s the only one who gets a ton of questions. One of her cousins, an international banker, asks me a number of questions about the American presidential race and economy. I answer the questions and give my analysis, hoping that my answers don’t somehow precipitate major economic problems. They’re very helpful about how to eat the food, but other than the economic questions talk mostly in Chinese and Tagalog.
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