I am assured this story is true. A visitor to Co Antrim went to a Chinese restaurant. He was served by a local waitress who wrote his order in Chinese characters. "Do you speak Chinese?" he asked in astonishment. "Och no," she replied. "They just taught me how to write the orders, it's way easy."
Next time he dined in the same restaurant he was served by a Chinese waitress. After she took his order she looked at him quizzically and remarked, "You're no' from these parts, are you?"
Almost every town and village in Ireland has a Chinese restaurant. It is possibly true what John Taylor once said, that "more people speak Chinese to each other in Northern Ireland than speak Irish". The Chinese in Ireland are mostly Cantonese from southern China and Hong Kong who came to work in Chinese restaurants and cafes.
But a new generation is arriving today from all over China. They come to study and will work in Irish establishments, not just Chinese takeaways.
On a recent trip home I took a visiting American to Johnny Fox's pub in Glencullen for the ultimate Irish pub experience, and encountered two Chinese youths loading crates in the yard.
With the Chinese government currently conducting a 10-day census of its population, the focus is once again on the vast pool of energetic and talented people which makes up a fifth of the world's population and has provided a diaspora of 25 million people, scattered through almost every country.
For reporters like myself based in Beijing, and I suspect the leadership itself, the basic facts about China remain elusive. Even the size of the population and the acreage of arable land is hotly disputed.
The publication of Jasper Becker's book, The Chinese, is therefore especially timely.
By travelling to the far corners of China, as Becker has done for many years as correspondent of the South China Morning Post, and talking to people at every level, he has produced a meticulous study and drawn some realistic conclusions about the state of China today and its people.
It is a bleak picture. Becker finds a society "in which everyone seems to be engaged in deceiving one another", from the distortion of news and history to the corruption in business.
China is nevertheless on the brink of becoming an economic superpower. It is the world's largest garment maker and manufacturer of sports shoes. Its cities are booming. In 20 years it could equal the US in world influence.
What is remarkable, Becker points out, is how little has changed for the people in 4,000 years. China's social pyramid has survived almost intact, as has the unique legalist tradition of governance inherited from Qin Shihuangdi, the country's founding emperor. Only in China can one interview a bureaucrat charged with civil service reforms who recalls how officials of the Han dynasty (206 BC-AD 220) dealt with the problems of nepotism.
The catastrophic failure by Mao to engineer the most egalitarian society in history has given way to acceptance of one of the most unequal. The peasantry who constitute a billion people - more than the combined population of the US and the EU - are still subject to authoritarian rule, and the imposition of crushing taxes.
Urban elites live as well as New Yorkers, but half the population cannot read or write and a third exists below the poverty line. His conclusion is that China needs to urbanise quickly, and on a massive scale.
Becker brings to bear the same understated outrage at the cruel burdens imposed on the poor and helpless by the system and its officials, as in Hungry Ghosts, the highly-acclaimed expose of China's secret famine under Mao Zedong.
The book concludes on a hopeful note. The switch from military rule to democracy in Taiwan in the 1980s and 1990s means that for the first time "one of the two parties that have controlled China's destiny as a modern state has irrefutably abandoned the common heritage of dictatorship".
China, too, may haltingly move to reform itself politically, though genuine reform may have to wait until there is a change in status of the ruling party.
The key factor will be education. In the Han dynasty a small part of the population had access to higher education, and went on to form the core of the bureaucracy. Now urban Chinese families can send their sons and daughters abroad to become the core of a new, educated, high-tech society.
Today, there are regular queues outside the Irish embassy and other missions in Beijing of people seeking visas to go abroad, not to work in a Chinese restaurant, but to study at a foreign university. Education, along with the Internet, could yet bring profound change to China.
The Chinese, by Jasper Becker. Published by John Murray. £25 sterling.