Beijing Cherry (Chapter 1) - Sex Stories

Beijing Cherry (Chapter 1)

The young waitress approaches our table with all the enthusiasm of a slug on tranquilizers. She stops beside me, not bothering to say a word or make eye contact, and slams the bowl of noodles down so hard that a wave of hot soup splashes onto the table-top. “Hey!” I bark, loud enough to get her attention over the war-like clatter of cheap metallic bowls and raging voices all around us. She turns back, tired eyes blinking through a haze of cigarette smoke. “What?” “I said no coriander.” I give the bowl a poke to highlight my point. It slides a few inches across the table. Her sour face creases, as if to ask: Where the hell do you think you are? It’s the same question I’ve been asking myself for the past month. And the answer: I’m right back where I started. No wonder I’m going crazy. “You can take it out yourself,” the waitress suggests after a few seconds, shrugging as she retraces her steps to fetch another (probably wrong) order from the kitchen. “We can swap if you want,” mumbles Dan, the girl opposite me. “They didn’t put as much in mine.” I stare into my friend’s bowl. Her soup is swimming with green specks, more so than mine. I tell her it’s okay, although I’m seething inside. Nothing here works the way it should. “I hate this place,” I hiss under my breath. “Come on, Fei,” she pleads, pasting a smile on for my benefit. “It’s not so bad, is it?” Sun Dan, my oldest friend, is a reflection of the former me. She’s content to take whatever this place has to throw at her ...

... – thick clouds of smoke; a kid pissing right beside her sandaled foot; the guy at the next table sneezing into the back of her head as he turns round to spare his lunch - all without standing up and shouting: “This is not fucking good enough!” Right now, though, I need Dan to understand; I need her to see that this restaurant, these people, this city – none of them are good enough. “Have you heard of reverse culture shock?” I ask. She sucks the meat from around a tiny bone and spits the remains onto a growing mound beside her bowl. “No.” “Well, you know what culture shock is, right?” “No.” I’m about to dive into an explanation of the two terms when the bare-bellied oaf behind her turns round and lets rip with yet another almighty sneeze. I close my eyes and hold the smoky air in my lungs for as long as I can before coughing, which turns out to be just over three seconds. Unfazed by the germy onslaught, Dan slurps down a long noodle and looks at me with sudden excitement. “Are you doing anything after lunch?” “I was planning to go home and take a nap,” I say. I don’t usually take afternoon naps, since I’m not eighty, but the apocalyptic summer sunshine that’s been turning the grass brown and the locals browner for the past couple of weeks isn’t conducive to much else. “Oh,” she murmurs. I know she wants me to ask. “What did you have in mind?” “I’ve got a job interview in half an hour. I thought maybe, well, maybe you could come with me.” “What kind of job?” Dan flashes me a ...