Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen stopped by a Chinese restaurant and unwittingly dined on four portions of psychedelic mushrooms in China before meeting her Chinese counterpart Vice Premier He Lifeng, where footage captured Yellen making a rather unseemly approach to Lifeng by repeatedly bowing in rapid succession without reciprocation while enthusiastically shaking his hand.
“Magic mushrooms may have been to blame for Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s mortifying bow before a Chinese official last week.
Yellen, 76, gobbled four portions of jian shou qing, a type of wild mushroom, when she dropped in at a casual Beijing restaurant soon after she arrived there on July 6th, Chinese state media reported in an effusive story that took care to praise the secretary’s chopstick skills.
But the funky fungi are known in their native province of Yunnan for their unpredictable psychedelic effects.
‘You thought you were walking straight but you just fell sideways’, one gourmand told the Xinhua state news agency in a report about the ‘shroom’s potent powers — published only after Yellen departed.
‘I have a friend who mistakenly ate them and hallucinated for three days’, Dr. Peter Mortimer, a professor at Kunming Institute of Botany, told CNN.
Yellen’s stop at an outlet of the Yi Zuo Yi Wang restaurant chain — the name means ‘In and Out’ in English — sparked a flurry of posts on the Chinese social media network Weibo and a deluge of reservations, staffers said.
‘It was an extremely magical day’, the restaurant said of the secretary’s visit”. -Mary Kay Linge, New York Post
The finance minister committed other diplomatic faux pas during her visit by tripping over Lifeng's name several times, calling him "Vice Premier Hu" as she opened the first official American meeting with the economic chief, and also having her picture taken eating a meal with a few young, Chinese female economists, sparking controversy over the Chinese internet.
Outside of Yellen’s demonstrable ineptitude, these series of incidents only serve to illustrate the complexity and delicacy of the relationship between the Chinese and U.S. governments and the problems that stem from the United States’ flawed perception of China and its political system.