China's Drinking Culture

One of my many misconceptions about daily life for the typical Chinese that I mentioned in my first blog entry concerned drinking and partying. Though I had forced down some Chinese liquor on one or two occasions before going to Taiwan for a study abroad program, I still thought of the "Chinese personality" as rather sober and strait-laced. Boy, was I wrong. It's foolish to think in absolutes about any culture, especially one as rich and varied as China's, and I quickly discovered the party animal side of Chinese culture. For many Chinese, it's customary to make frequent toasts at meals, play drinking games, have drinking competitions, and drink prodigiously while engaging in activities like karaoke. If you're a foreigner, they may take it easier on you, or they may be eager to take you down. And you may get your liver handed to you.

Although there are a lot of drinking stories I could tell, one of the first that comes to mind is from a trip to Jiangxi Province with a couple of my wife's friends from Shanghai. Having seen them drink just about every experienced drinker they've encountered into a stupor, I now know not to provoke them. But in my first experiences with them, I was like a mischievous child poking a cute, furry wolverine with a stick. Needless to say, I got clawed, chewed up, and spit back out.

On that particular occasion, the drinking began on a red-eye train trip from Shanghai to Nanchang. Our friends brought a bottle of Chinese liquor (白酒, or "baijiu") with them, but once the drinking began after most of the passengers had gone to sleep, that bottle lasted all of a few minutes. We then relocated to the area at the end of the car, as far away from any sleeping passengers as possible, and proceeded to play drinking games while sitting on the floor. As a tenderfoot playing against sly and savvy veterans, I managed to lose just about every round and had to endure constant imbibing just to get the small satisfaction of occasionally making them take a swig. And naturally, as I got drunker, I got worse and worse at these games. It was the most vicious of vicious circles. Over the course of the night's festivities, we drank every last can or bottle of alcohol available on the entire train...and it was a BIG train with a LOT of people. I remember taking a long stumble through I don't know how many cars and past I don't know how many startled passengers (I was the lone white guy on a train full of hundreds of locals, and I was appearing out of nowhere) to the front of the train, where there was rumored to be more beer, and being elated to find that they did indeed have a few more cans. In the end, I collapsed on my bunk and passed out while my still bright-eyed companions outdrank some random passenger who had foolishly decided to join us - and who, we found out later, missed his stop while sprawled out unconscious.

The wolverines with their hapless victim

And that was only the beginning. After three or four hours of sleep for me, and even less for my friends, we got up ridiculously early to exit the train and begin our sightseeing, and the drinking continued at lunch with another bottle of baijiu. For my friends, there was nothing demoralizing or even unusual about this. For me, however, it was starting to become intimidatingly clear how much pain the next few days held in store for me.

So the moral of this post is that depending on the company you keep while in China, be prepared for your liver to take a serious beating. If my liver could talk, it would go off on me like Christian Bale on a wayward dolly grip for the abuse I've dealt out to it during my stays in China. On the other hand, I've gotten a lot of fun and some good stories in return. Just be careful, folks, because you may end up biting off more than you can chew. And watch out for those Shanghai women! They may be sophisticated and well-dressed (the photos above don't do these two justice), but they can probably drink you under the table too.

Don't say I didn't warn you.

Burgeoning Shanghai

Ask anyone who's been to China more than once in the last twenty years about their impressions of China, and invariably one of the first things they'll talk about is the unbelievable pace of growth and change. Although China does face significant problems that it must deal with over the next few decades, its "economic miracle" is undeniable to anyone who has witnessed it firsthand. One of the places where this growth is most conspicuous is Shanghai. My wife and I have visited Shanghai five times in the last seven years, and every time we go back the changes are enormous - so enormous that they can be overwhelming, even to a Shanghai native like her. In just the last two decades, Shanghai has become a forest of gleaming high-rise buildings and shining neon lights, with a lively, even febrile nightlife, hordes of shoppers buying the latest fashions and electronics, and unimaginable sums of money changing hands on a daily basis. Here are some photos that testify to the rapid pace of life and expansion in the largest city in China (click on the photos below for larger image files):

An area in downtown Shanghai
(photo by Aapo Haapanen)



Neon lights on Shanghai's
famous Nanjing Road
(photo by Thierry)



Pudong, the area east of the Huangpu
River that used to be farmland
(photo by Emile B)



Pudong at night
(photo by Hario Seto Supranggono)

The Ever-Surprising, Always-Stimulating Nature of Travel in China

Update – September 22, 2011: This post has now been reposted with images intact at this permalink on our new website.

The process began as I desperately clutched the seat in front of me, wondering whether I would even survive the ride into Taipei from the airport. No doubt the driver, my Chinese professor's brother, found my fear quaint and amusing as he weaved nonchalantly through the crush of contending cars. Driving with a heedless brusqueness that would have evoked a string of one-finger salutes and perhaps a few acts of violence in most American cities, he aroused the ire of no one on that highway in Taiwan. Most of the other drivers were too busy doing exactly the same thing to even notice him. So it was with these stomach-churning observations that my process of disillusionment began, not one hour after I had first set foot in Asia.

Strange mannequins in a Shanghai shop - Why are some of them naked?

As a white American who was double-majoring in philosophy and Mandarin, my first acquaintance with China and Chinese culture was primarily academic. I had an idealized impression of Chinese culture formed by the many hours I had spent analyzing the Analects of Confucius, stumbling through t'ai chi, meditating to Buddhist chants, struggling with the abstractions of Chinese poetry, listening intently to the feverish plinkety-plink of classical Chinese music while drinking green tea and inhaling incense smoke, and scratching out Chinese calligraphy that must have seemed to my Chinese friends like the scratchings of a second-grader - in other words, through an ivory-tower exploration of China's vast cultural panorama. Although I had had a number of close Chinese friends for years, they were primarily well-educated, somewhat Westernized Chinese who were not at all representative of the typical citizen of China or Taiwan. So I guess it's no surprise that some part of me always expected to find in the daily lives of the Chinese people a more elevated, culturally sophisticated lifestyle than I had observed in American society. In that sense, I've had some disappointing experiences in China: I've seen pollution, ignorance and backwardness, a dog-eat-dog business mentality, shallow popular culture, and, of course, harrowing city traffic (not to say, of course, that these same flaws and many more can't be found in the United States). Fortunately, looking back on the last thirteen years of my travels there, I can say those experiences have been far outweighed by the many more pleasant surprises that China has given me, in addition to treasured friendships, soul-cleansing mountain hikes, touching encounters with earnest rural villagers, late-night strolls through the urban canyons of Shanghai, euphoric drunken karaoke binges, wide-eyed walks along ancient city walls, and meditative moments in temples and teahouses, all of which have made every day of my time there fresh and stimulating. China is a land rich with paradoxes and brimming with vitality.

Relaxing in a boat on West Lake in Hangzhou

These are the things that I'll be sharing with you in this blog, and these are the things that I hope our company will allow some of you to experience for yourselves. When you travel anywhere, life is more vivid, more intense, somehow more REAL than it is during the mundane routine of daily life. Nowhere has that been as true for me as it is in China. No matter what kind of life you've lived, traveling to China will be one of the best things you've ever done - especially with the extensive knowledge, practical experience, and thoughtful service that my Shanghainese wife and her Cantonese partner, along with our many connections in China, can provide. Our tours are a good place to start your own cultural journey.

Welcome, then, to the home of China International Travel CA, Inc. I hope you enjoy browsing our website and watching it grow. Please feel free to contact us with any questions you have.

A foreign devil making a fool of himself and all his fellow foreign devils in a karaoke room