First published in Flaunt magazine (14 November 2013) //
Concubines, Detective Work, and a Taste for Ibérico
I meet author Jung Chang in a classy Chinese restaurant atop a Kensington hotel in London on a Friday evening, 7 p.m. sharp. She’s ten minutes late and I’m having a beer with the barman, Vittor. He’s Italian but can speak smooth Mandarin, picked up from three years on cocktail duty. Vittor demonstrates by showing someone the toilet in what rings like true, learned dialect. I tell him I can’t speak a word of it, and he balks.
“What a lad,” he says, for the first time of many. I’ve got an Asian name and an even Asianer face. And Vittor’s the Asianest man at the bar.
Internet Present 