The mice are taking over

It’s quite apparent when going anywhere in Beijing that the Chinese New Year, also known as the Lunar New Year or the Spring Festival, is coming up soon. The basic decoration strategy seems to be to leave up the Christmas decorations and add Chinese symbols into the mix. So Santa and the reindeer and the sparkly trees are still hanging around, and the good luck characters and mice have been added. The upcoming year is generally called the Year of the Rat, but as it happens, Mandarin doesn’t really distinguish between rats and mice (laoshu or haozi for both), and mice are cuter, so from the looks of things, it will be the Year of the Mouse.

Last night we had our company New Year’s party. I’ve looked back through last year’s blog posts, and it seems I didn’t really say much about that party. Well, we were a much smaller company then, and it was a pretty minimal affair. We took an afternoon off and walked to a nearby party facility, where we had a meal and some karaoke.

This year’s party was bigger in all respects. I think the planning committee had some difficulties, because the event was rescheduled twice from other days due to the unavailability of any decent facilities. So we ended up on a Sunday late afternoon at The Sixth Club. It’s one of thousands of party venues around town. And remember that in a city this big, saying “thousands” is not an exaggeration. It’s a whole industry that hardly exists in American cities.

TG, SJ, and I ended up being the last ones to arrive, and everyone else was already eating and drinking when we walked in. We found some seats and hit the buffet. It was decent if not outstanding, with the roast duck being the standout. No surprise, this being Beijing and all.
Each table was labeled with a famous mouse character.
I’ve been trying to get over a nasty cold for a couple weeks now, so I only had a few sips of beer, but some of my coworkers were having a great time with their beverages. No embarrassing breaches of etiquette I’m happy to report.
People were encouraged to participate in the festivities, and somehow TG and I got talked into take part. RR was supposed to join us, but he was stuck back at the office all evening and didn’t make it. There were several karaoke performances, one of which was preceded by some sort of skit that I didn’t understand at all, but got lots of laughs.
And we had a dance routine, complete with costumes.
There were a number of games, including this one that I never caught the rules to. The men sat in the chairs with baby bibs, and the women bonked them on the heads from time to time. I think it was part “Simon Says” with some strange domestic overtones. There was a second part where the women gave the men baby bottles full of beer and the winner was the one to suck it down fastest.
There was also a round of Musical Chairs and a Three-People-Four-Legs race that nearly resulted in serious injuries.
I am seriously out of order here, but what the heck. TG and I took the stage for a painful take on “Hotel California” with lyrics I rewrote to fit our company, full of in-jokes and Olympic references. I called it “Hotel 2008” (“Hotel Er-Ling-Ling-Ba”). It got off to kind of a slow start, but once someone stuck a mic in JW’s face and got him to sing, it improved a lot.

There were some very nice prize drawings, including a Wii and a digital camera and a bunch of portable game systems and iPods. I didn’t win anything.

At least not in the drawings. TG and I got an award for The Best Courage for our performance. Which translates as being really bad but sticking it out to the end, I suppose. There were also two other trophies, one for the dancers and one for the IT department for the skit and song. And everyone got a big stuffed mouse to take home.
Now, I suppose all of this might sound kind of silly. It’s definitely different from any office parties I’ve been to over the last ten years in the US. I hope I’m not inadvertently echoing some kind of stereotype, but what it comes down to is the fact that my colleagues here are not as cynical and jaded as most Americans. Most of us hate to participate in silly games, hate to risk looking foolish, and would rather stay home than play Musical Chairs. But as far as I could tell, everyone had a great time. Perhaps the lure of prizes and the free-flowing beer helped, but for each game, there were people eager to play. Our modern “sophistication” seems to come with a price: we can’t relax and act like kids for a few hours with our coworkers.

Chinese time machine #1

Over the last week, I’ve been mainly writing about the Spring Festival activities, since they are so colorful and photogenic. So now I thought I’d take a moment to back up in time and fill in some bits I never got around to covering when they happened.

On the Friday before the holiday week, the whole office had lunch at a nearby restaurant – the same one that was the setting for the banquet a couple weeks ago. Attentive readers can guess where this is going to end up. We had a double room with two big round tables, and much of the menu was the same as before, though we didn’t have any of the Monk Jumps the Wall Soup. I was sitting next to a Chinese colleague, so I took the opportunity to ask her a number of times, “What’s that dish?” Several times, she had to ask the server what it was. She had been eating things just like I was, without knowing for sure what was in them. One dish that was good featured spicy duck. The meat was cooked to the point of being basically jerky, and it was served with some vegetables in a thin sauce with quite a kick.

We had small portions of wine with the meal, along with fruit juice. It was a much better wine than the sweet stuff at the banquet. I know it was a Chinese red, possibly Great Wall. About halfway through the meal, AB started up the karaoke machine, and things went downhill from there… just kidding! We were treated to a variety of Chinese pop renditions of varying skill levels. At one point I said to my neighbor, “This sounds familiar. Is it Sammi Cheng?” It was. Thanks to RW and the Seattle Public Library, it was a song from an album I have a copy of. Pressure mounted on the American crew to participate, and eventually we settled on a group effort for “Yellow Submarine” – about as simple a tune as you can get. Somehow (I’m not entirely sure how it happened) I found myself singing another Beatles tune, “Let It Be”. I must not have been too hideous – when I finished there seemed to be as many people in the room as there were before. At some point, the Sammi Cheng dance mixes came on, and just about everybody ended up dancing around the room. Maybe there’s a Karaoke Corollary to the Silly Hat Theory I postulated in my previous post.

Then we went back to the office and worked for a bit more before CL gave the OK to cut out early.

To continue my series of Beijing Restaurant Adventures… KW, JW, TG and I went to a place called Pili Pili, which is (according to their flyers) “Beijing’s one and only African-themed restaurant.” It’s out in the general area of Chaoyang Park, on a street full of other restaurants and bars, quite a little pocket of night life that actually appears on maps as Super Bar Street in English. I was expecting it to be expensive but was pleasantly surprised. We sat in an alcove decorated with African handicrafts. The menu consisted of what I would characterize as North African cuisine, not the more Ethiopian style of food I’ve had before.
On stage was a band playing a mixture of reggae and pop music done with a slight highlife flavor.
When the band was taking a break, the entertainment continued with a man doing magic, juggling, and unicycle tricks.
All in all, lots of fun, and one to go on the revisitation list.
And lest you all think I go out for dinner every night, here’s a meal I fixed myself.
I’ve only seen carts like this around a few times. I’ve been told there are regulations restricting them to nighttime hours so they don’t get in the way of traffic. But for the holidays, they’re around quite a bit, selling fruit.
As I’ve mentioned before, almost everybody here drinks bottled water, so there’s a huge market in it, but it is not delivered the same way we get ours in the US.
In an earlier post, I promised a picture of the grandeur that is Ziming Mansion.
Standing from the spot where I took that last photo, I turned 90 degrees and snapped this one. This is a pretty typical old-style neighborhood of a kind you see all over the city. Many of them are being leveled to put in complexes like Seasons Park or shopping centers or office buildings, though the municipal government is making efforts to preserve some due to their historical significance. This one probably isn’t charming enough to merit that kind of consideration. As with in cities in the US, there are voices of concern about what will happen to the people who live here as development prices their homes out of their economic reach, and I’ve heard statements about “affordable housing” being built in addition to actual mansions.

And now to go way back in time...

Back in October of last year, when I first arrived here, the big news was the China-Africa Summit. I wrote about it a little bit, and had intended to get pictures of the billboards all around town on the subject, but never did. Lucky for me (and you) there are a few of them that haven’t been taken down yet. These pictures were taken last week.
When I first saw the one in the lower right of my arrangement, I was confused. Certainly it was a long time ago that I took any Anthropology classes, but I was virtually certain that the man with the pierced nose and the feather in his hat is actually a Pacific Islander (New Guinea, Borneo, or Indonesia was my guess) and not African at all. My suspicion was confirmed with a news story a few days later, bringing the same fact to everyone’s attention. Luckily for the Chinese, the African delegates were not offended, and just put it down to enthusiasm and cultural ignorance. By all public accounts, the African leaders were quite pleased with their reception and the talks were judged a great success.
And just for the heck of it, here’s a random shot from the Forbidden City that didn’t make it into my original post. This is one of many elaborately decorated doors to one of many elaborately decorated temples. Or maybe it was a residence building. Or maybe even the servants’ quarters for all I know.

We Are the World

Edited slightly upon further reflection.

I have been accused by certain readers of this blog of being obsessed with food. I don’t think of myself that way, but honestly my meals have been the most interesting part of my life on a day to day basis. Aside from meals, I get up in the morning, I go to work, I take part in conference calls, I have lunch, I work some more, I come home, have dinner, and go to bed. Not that different from what I did in Seattle, or from what people do in thousands of cites all over the world every day. But I realize that I am not writing a food column (note to self: possible career move in this direction), so I promise I will someday soon write a blog entry that has nothing about food in it. But not this one.

Before coming to China, I had read about Banquets. It’s a part of doing business here. People who do business together will mark occasions, such as the signing of a contract, with a fancy dinner, usually involving excessive amounts of alcohol. I’ve been in Beijing since October, and tonight turned out to be my first Banquet. I didn’t even know about it until we were getting ready to head home from the office this afternoon. Someone came over and said, “They’re having dinner tonight, and you’re invited.” It was at a restaurant just down the street from our office, one of the fancy places we never go for lunch. They often have cadres of limousines out front and VIPs coming and going. I think the lobby of the building is still in the midst of remodeling, but it had some elaborate displays for the upcoming Chinese New Year, which is generally referred to as Spring Festival around here. We went upstairs to a private room with a very large round table that would seat about sixteen, though there were only twelve attending, so the wait staff discreetly took away the four extra settings and chairs. We knew to be afraid when we saw three different size stem glasses at each setting, including one tiny little glass. I’ve heard horror stories about the traditional Chinese drink, maotai. From my research I also knew that it would be considered rude to not accept hospitality.

Luckily for us, our host was springing for something really special. Instead of maotai, we had baijiu, which translates as basically “white liquor” and is pronounced like “bye, Joe.” I found a link to the exact beverage we had. This is top-of-the-line stuff that has a price tag in the four digit range per bottle when converted to US dollars. I’ve yet to taste maotai, but I’ve heard all sorts of nasty things about it. They said that this baijiu is 68% alcohol (136 proof for comparison to American drinks) – good thing the glasses are really small. The servers brought each of us a little pitcher with an inch or two of clear liquid, and poured one shot into the little stem glass. At the beginning, our host stood, and we all joined him, and he offered a toast to our partnership, and friendship between nations and whatever, and we all downed our glasses. Then the servers came around and replenished our glasses from our pitchers. Meanwhile, they were bringing out a wide array of dishes on the big lazy susan in the center of the table. Over the course of the evening I counted twenty dishes, and I may have missed a couple. Some things I could identify, many I couldn’t. There were a couple of simple vegetable dishes, like elaborately prepared celery with a nice dressing on it. There was a cold dish of the black mushrooms they like so much here. In the largest of our stem glasses, they poured a thick yellow liquid which we Americans called “Corn Julius” – a semi-sweet beverage made from corn that was slightly warm. Very odd tasting, but it was good to take a sip of that after getting a bit of a dish that was really spicy.

One dish was brought around in individual clay pots to each of us. They took away the plates we had been using and set the pots in front of us. The lids of the pots had little Buddhas on them. Then a different woman came into the room, dressed differently than the servers. She explained the story of the dish, which is called something like Monk Jumps over the Wall Soup. It was something about how the soup smelled so good cooking outside a monastery that a monk jumped over the wall to find out what it was. It was a thick broth with many different kinds of what seemed to be sea creatures in it. I have no idea what those chunks were.

There were several different preparations of fish, and one dish that had little tiny octopus in it. Keeping in mind that there would likely be many more toasts, I tried to get some solid food in my stomach, but it was kind of difficult with the selections on offer. And the toasts did come. CL reciprocated and offered an other friendship toast, then someone else stepped up. Then the “challenge toasts” started. Our host came around to each of the Americans individually and said how glad he was to meet us, and if we ever need anything, etc. “Ganbai!” (“Bottoms up!”) And then other members of the Chinese partner came around to do individual toasts. I lost track after five or six, and I know that both CL and JW had more, given their higher positions. As far as I could tell, we polished off two bottles of the WuLiangYe 68%.

In addition to the baijiu and the corn drink, there was also a Chinese sweet red wine, kind of like a port, that the servers kept pouring into our medium-sized glasses. After all those toasts and all that food and all that wine, the evening progressed to the other popular Chinese entertainment: karaoke. Our host had a very strong voice and a very good sense of pitch, and started out the evening with a good rendition of a Chinese song. After a few of the other Chinese present sang, including our PG, the calls for us to sing grew louder. The machine had a huge selection of pop songs in English, and JW started us out with “House of the Rising Sun”, doing a passable job. While I wasn’t paying attention, one of the Chinese guys pulled up “Edelweisse” and dragged me up to duet with him. The screen was only showing the lyrics in Chinese, so it’s lucky I could dredge an approximation out of my brain and fumble through it. At one point, to avoid further solo spots, CL, JW, TG and I did a horrendous four-man take on “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling”. I completely cracked up laughing towards the end when I managed to look away from the stream of lyrics to notice that the images behind the letters were something like a tour of a Buddhist monastery. Then four of the Chinese guys did a group song, the title of which apparently means “Friends” – the accompanying video featured a rugby team. The American crew retaliated (nearly killing the evening) with “American Pie” which has way too many verses to be practical for karaoke. Later, after a few more toasts that polished off the last of the baijiu, they started bringing out Heineken to add to our misery. At long last, someone had the bright idea to sing “We Are the World”, which I can now state from personal experience is a monumentally terrible karaoke choice. Everyone joined in on the choruses and everyone mumbled through the rest of it. This is how international business deals are sealed.

I have a conference call early in the morning. I really need to sleep now.