Ah, the sounds of dining out in Beijing: the 'clink' of cup after cup of baijiu; the raised voices; the spitting out of bones, saliva and more; the shouting matches and near fights over who pays the bill. Above it all, however, are the shouts of xiao jie! ('waitress!') that echo throughout the room.
I admit that I have picked up most of those habits, which for the most part, I keep in check when I go abroad. Except, that is, for shouting for the server. In a country where 'serve the people' is supposed to be a national mantra, the service industry has an enormous weight on its shoulders. The burden is made even heavier with the harassment servers regularly receive at the hands of customers. I watch diner after diner snap their fingers to get the attention of the staff, berating them for daring to take so long with their food. Part of this behaviour is, once again, chalked up to that catch-all concept of 'face': that an individual's importance is inversely proportional to how low one is able to make others feel.
This is shocking to those of us familiar with restaurants overseas. Not so in the Beijing restaurant world, however, where, with heads bowed, waitresses stand and take the (often-drunken) scathing diatribes of their customers.
But one woman has stood up. Currently doing the rounds on the internet is a song called Passengers Aren't Gods. It is a homage, in style, to Eminem, performed by someone known as Lilyining. The online word - derived partly from the song itself - is that she is a China Eastern Airlines stewardess.