The Gourmet and Other Stories of Modern China (1987)

Readers International's 1987 collection gathers five stories by the Suzhou writer Lu Wenfu, born in 1928 on the north bank of the Yangtse, with his own introduction, A Writer's Life. The title story is narrated by Gao Xiaoting, who spends four decades managing and quarrelling with the restaurant-haunting gourmet Zhu Ziye through Liberation, the famine years and after. (Open Library)

Watches

Longines watch: In the hungry years, when Zhu Ziye comes begging pumpkins and is made to push the cart at four in the morning to earn them, he complains that he has never worn a watch. He had a Longines in his first year at university, he says, but wore it only three days because he did not like it on his wrist. Xiaoting nearly laughs: the watch must be in Zhu's stomach by now, and that was the best place for it. The watch is recalled, not worn. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: "I had a Longines watch in my first year at university but I only wore it for three days. I didn't like having it on my wrist." ... I almost burst out laughing. That Longines watch must be in his stomach now. That was the best place for it. (Lu Wenfu, The Gourmet and Other Stories of Modern China, scan cataloged as Readers International, 1987, p. 142, in "The Gourmet", which runs from p. 97 by the contents page, two paragraphs joined with an ellipsis and an OCR line-break hyphen closed up; the narrator is addressed as Xiaoting on p. 141; Internet Archive scan OCR)