How to survive Maotai

Anyone who has been in China for business has probably had to endure Chinese Baijiu, or more specifically Maotai. This is the famous 53% alcohol content Chinese liquor, which according to Wikipedia "offers an exceptionally pure, mild, and mellow soy sauce-like fragrance that lingers after it is consumed, is distilled from fermented sorghum[...]". That makes sense because it does taste like its distilled from a fucking scrotum. And the taste that lingers is like ten thousand puppy corpses fashioned into a dragon that has had life breathed into it just so it can vomit in your mouth. That shit will paralyze your face.

So anyways, my first experience with this poison was a few years ago in some hole outside of Shanghai. I was there with my father for a factory opening and we therefore had to attend a Chinese banquet after the opening ceremony. Now my father, he has been doing business in China for over 20 years, so he knows all about Maotai. Dick that he is, he tells the Chinese boss to do a gambei with me. I had never had Maotai before and me being Scandinavian, I was pretty sure this would be no problem. So I burn one down and it felt like I had just guzzled down airplane fuel. My face must have expressed this feeling, because everyone started laughing. Because everyone found this so fucking hilarious, they all wanted to gambei with me. I ended up shotting 5 or 6 of those and seriously almost passed out at the table.

The next morning (severely hung over), my father shared with me a little trick he always uses. What he does is he initiates a Maotai gambei with the most important Chinese person at the table. After one shot he'll pretend to get an important phone call and disappear for a while. What he does is he brings his baijiu glass with him and hides it in a flower vase. Then, when the next person comes over to do a shot with him, he doesn't have a glass. But he will quickly take his beer glass and down it instead. Downing a lot of beer is much better than a lot of Maotai, to be sure. That's just a normal Friday or Saturday. Now if he just could have told me that the day before...

Final Summation: All is fair in war, you'll need to learn how to avoid those Maotai shots or you'll regret it in the three hour car ride back to Shanghai (like I did)!