Bargaining with a Tiger

Fude Restaurant was a Western restaurant located midway along Avenue Joffre, specializing in Chinese-style Western food. That was inevitable; only adaptation allowed for growth. There were only a little over ten thousand foreigners in the French Concession, and even counting those passing through from elsewhere, there were no more than another five thousand. Proud foreigners could not stomach localized Western food, much less deign to eat it. The foreigners who could make a living in Shanghai were basically never poor. In this superficially prosperous greatest metropolis of the Far East, they too lived in prosperity.

"Over the years, restaurants on the streets have opened and closed, closed and opened. There's Western cuisine, Nanyang cuisine, and Eastern cuisine—too many to count. I still remember my first time eating Western food was at Deda Western Restaurant. It was the second year of the Republic then, and I was still a young man, just like you. Whenever I ate meat, I wolfed it down and made quite a fool of myself. Now it's the twenty-seventh year of the Republic. In the blink of an eye, twenty-five years have passed."

Lin Hongyuan wore a dark green long gown. His close-cropped hair was gray at the roots, and he was skinny as a rake. A white napkin was tied around his neck, a knife in his left hand and a fork in his right. A hoodlum pretending to be a gentleman—like sticking scallions up a pig's snout to make it look like an elephant.

By comparison, Wang Yan speared the steak on his plate with his fork and bit off a huge crescent-shaped chunk. He wiped the grease from the corner of his mouth with a white napkin, then guzzled the fine red wine the old man had brought as if it were water to