It is the morning after a particularly drawn-out hotpot dinner when I make an uncomfortable discovery. My favorite jeans, my beloved, go-anywhere jeans, appear to have shrunk beyond all recognition.
"What on earth has happened to these jeans?" I think.
My immediate instinct is to blame my ayi, or domestic helper. "Ayi shrank my favorite jeans!" I think accusingly. "The water must be too hot! I'll have to leave her a note."
Then I remember that my Chinese washing machine only uses cold water. "It must be toxins getting into the water supply and making my clothes shrink," I think crossly. "How annoying!"
Later, a thorough test of my wardrobe reveals a more painful truth.
"It is not my jeans that have shrunk. It's me that has grown," I think grimly. "I wonder if it was the hotpot."
Hotpot is a kind of game where the essential mission is to defeat the raw cow on the table by turning it into cooked steak as quickly as possible.
Primal fight for food
Everyone pretends to make conversation while secretly trying to get as much meat as they can, a kind of primal, caveman-like fight for food. It gets harder as your mouth turns numb from all the Sichuan chilies. Fortunately, I have had extensive practice at hotpot.
"That cow didn't stand a chance," I think proudly.
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