How to Drink Like a Warlord

Dearest Readers:

Recently, Beijing Boyce, the all-star blogger and friend to Shanxi’s most eligible warlord, published my list of the greatest bars of China’s erstwhile capital city.  You can read all about it right here.  Be sure to notice how kick-ass I look in my Time magazine cover.  In honor of this auspicious occasion, I thought I would provide a few tips so that you, my good readers, could learn to drink in true warlord fashion.  It ain’t easy, so get your yatou (you do have a servant girl, right?) to fetch a bottle and let’s get started!

Remembering a Fallen Warlord–Feng Yuxiang

Loyal Readers,

Being back in Taiyuan is great–how I survived those long months of near captivity in the United States, not to mention my near disastrous campaigns out in the Tibetan highlands, I have no idea. I swear I may never leave my beloved Shanxi. My wives–at least those who were not pimped out to the peasant hordes–are keeping me loopy on fenjiu while my favorite qinqiang opera stars “perform” for me all night long. Damn it feels good to be a warlord.

But my good fortune has a tinge of sadness as I think of a former colleague who no longer shares the good warlord life. I speak of Feng Yuxiang.

As my more thoughtful readers might remember, I had suspected that my boy Yuxiang (no, not the fish sauce) might be in charge of Beiping, but I now know he is in charge of jack shit. You see, that pussy whipped cut-and-runner Jiang Jieshi is determined to keep Feng Yuxiang out of power. What a fall from grace… Feng and I were once within a battle or two of pushing Jiang Jieshi into an early retirement… who knows, maybe he could have gone to the US and learned how to use a fork. Jiang lucked out, and while I am still firmly in control of Shanxi, Feng does not have two Mexican silver dollars to rub together.

Now, Feng Yuxiang and I have had our differences. He has been at times known as the “Christian General” and the “Red General.” That tells you he is something of a moralist, and he loves to get on his high horse and tell people not to whore around, drink, or gamble. Fuck that! What is the point of being a warlord if I cannot get loaded with some whores and double the Shanxi treasury playing mahjong? As for the “Red General”–it is true that Feng spent way too much time in “mother Russia,” and since he was not banging Russian whores, you just have to think he is politically suspect.

But to be without an army, without a territory? Just too sad. Fuck, I am a bit depressed. Time to go do all the things that would make my former ally pray to his Western gods.

YXS