She put a bib on me but I wasn't drooling yet. I was then told to bite down on a small plastic arm attached to a big machine that spun around my head examining the contents of my cranium. Thankfully, something was found - my teeth.

Yep, here I was at a Beijing dental surgery being x-rayed by a machine that was far more intelligent than I am, wearing an oversized bib to prevent my insides from melting. If only my mother could have seen me. "That's my boy," she would have said. "Now stand still as the nice gizmo takes snaps of your crooked smile."

After the teeth density scans, I returned to the dentist chair and had a conversation with a woman whose choppers were whiter than her bleached coat.

It was a distracting and a somewhat humbling little chat. Focusing on her blindingly radiant fangs made me even more conscious of the state of mine. I never had braces when I was a child even though my parents warned me how much I'd appreciate it later in life. In my mind, however, having railway tracks laid in my mouth was akin to handing over a bunker full of ammunition to the bullies at school.

"So can you take me through the options for cosmetic dentistry?" I asked. "Well, first of all, we'll take a look at your teeth and see how healthy they are before we proceed," the dentist said.

She soon discovered that one of my front teeth was, in fact, fake. "This one's not real," she said tapping it with something we'll call The Scraper. "What happened?"

"Oh, it was a sporting accident when I was a teenager," I replied.

This was a big fat lie. The real reason I no longer had my original front tooth was because a drunken goon who I refused to give a cigarette to, smashed my face in.

I was 16 then and in my hometown having either a false tooth, grizzly bear scar or liquor cabinet keys lent street cred you couldn't buy. "That's so cool," one of my friends told me at the time. "A fist fight falsey. Man, you're going to get all the chicks." Unfortunately it did not make me any more appealing to the opposite sex. All I can thank the guy-who-rearranged-my-face for is a fistful of dental bills.

After a clean, polish and a few words of soothing encouragement from my dentist - "what healthy, crooked teeth you have" - we started going over the options for oral renovation. Each one costs the equivalent of a lifetime's supply of Colgate.

Exiting the surgery with the dire sound of drilling still ringing in my ears like a Celine Dion song, my dreams of shiny, straight whities began to shatter.

The gods were indeed laughing at my little bout of narcissism. I hailed a cab, gave directions and with one flash of the driver's smile I felt immensely better - even if I had another encounter with the guy who knocked my block off, I was never going to have teeth that looked like my cabbie.

(China Daily 08/28/2007 page20)