A bit of background
It’s sometimes claimed that no real cultural differences exist between the East and the West. For one thing, we live in a global village. Societies the world over are in constant flux, cultural differences are merging, and where they are held to exist at all are too hybridized to describe. For another, to speak of the “East” and the “West” is to create a false dichotomy. It’s to exaggerate differences where they don’t necessarily exist, to separate “us” from “them” and thus obscure our common humanity. I agree with this. My own decades-long project of writing about China is precisely to deconstruct these dichotomizing and essentializing habits. Too often, assumed differences between the East and the West or between China and the West are revealed to be nothing more than hackneyed stereotypes. (For the purposes of this essay, I employ the terms “Eastern,” “Asian,” and “East Asian” to refer collectively to China, Japan, and South Korea.)
Yet in certain domains differences are very real and still apply. The example we shall discuss here is the social activity known as the party. At the risk of seeming to dichotomize with a vengeance, let me start off with a bold claim: when it comes to partying, nothing is more terrifying to an East Asian than attending a Western party, and nothing is more miserable to a Westerner than attending an Asian party. This will take a bit of explaining before we get to the specifics of Chinese parties. My purpose in the following rundown on Western party culture is not to edify you on something you are all too familiar with, but to point up key differences from Eastern party culture.
We need first of all to distinguish between two types of Western party, the closed party and the open party, the former more prevalent among grownups, and the latter, young people. Closed parties are by invitation only: the dinner party with friends or neighbors, the Friday evening cocktail party at the office. For dinner parties, it’s the norm to arrive up to half an hour after the stated starting time, and to bring a bottle of wine. With larger dinner parties or potlucks, guests each bring a dish they’ve cooked. You can expect the party to last no more than three hours, and you’ll make a good impression by not being the first to leave.
Open parties are bigger affairs, successful ones anyway, in which just about anyone can attend, not just friends and friends of friends by word of mouth, but anyone off the street. Back in my university days in my off-campus neighborhood on Friday and Saturday nights, knots of young men would sniff out parties, easy enough to spot from the noise and activity in apartment windows, and buzz themselves in, despite having no personal connection to anyone at the party. (This can lead to trouble if they’re thieves scoping out your place for a planned break-in, though most college students don’t own much that is worth stealing.) Open parties have a stated starting time around 8 or 9 PM; again, you don’t want to embarrass anyone by arriving on time. More fashionably, arrive after 10 PM and magically show up by discreetly slipping in through the kitchen back door. If you must make a splash upon entry, do it with aplomb. You can leave anytime you want—at dawn or five minutes after you arrive (when the guys outnumber the gals five to one). No need to apologize if you beat a hasty retreat. If more than a few people are present no one will notice your absence, unless you’re the sole female guest.
The only thing you have to do at a Western party, and are expected to do, is make small talk. The shy tend to stick with their buddies, but it’s more productive to talk people up, gain new friends, and meet potential bedmates. The more crowded and noisier a party is, the easier to hit on people, especially if there’s dancing. A few alcoholic drinks can help. A keg party means a big barrel of chilled beer and a good marketing move by the host to attract people. The party for teetotalers does not exist.
We are acculturated to Western-style partying from an early age. I hosted my first party at fifteen in my basement bedroom. Word got around fast among my junior-high classmates and over thirty people showed up, spilling into the adjoining laundry room. I had prepared a case of cola and orange pop. I needn’t have worried about being too young to buy booze; it came with the guests. My parents were upstairs. At one point my father came down to see how things were going and perhaps meet some of my friends. He was prevented from making it all the way down by several kids passed out at the foot of the stairs in their vomit. During senior high, some house parties, arranged with parents absent, were so crowded it took twenty minutes to work your way from one side of the room to the other. This is another difference: people tend to stand and walk around in Western parties; they sit and stay put in Eastern parties. The biggest parties were outdoors, such as the park by the river where hundreds from our high school congregated every weekend until we got raided by the police.
Western parties are really quite simple. Thrown together with a mix of familiar and new people, you try to meet as many as possible or be more intimate those you’re already acquainted with. Straightforward and logical to us, the Western party is, however, very trying and intimidating for East Asians. You have to imagine yourself in their shoes. Having little experience in the social art of spontaneously approaching strangers, they don’t quite know what to do with themselves, like they’ve been thrust into a speed-dating event for which they are totally unprepared. For Asian females, it’s both easier and harder: easier because if they’re passably attractive they’ll be approached by interested men; harder because gender-based sexism is more entrenched in East Asian culture, discouraging women from taking the initiative. Asian males have it the worst; unless they’re savvy to the situation, they’re rendered perfectly invisible.
East Asians are confined to childhood longer than their Western counterparts. Up through the end of high school they are strongly discouraged from dating and sex. Though some defy this, it’s especially hard in China, where many high schools are de facto boarding schools run like reform schools; they’re kept in classrooms every night studying before being sent to their dorms at bedtime. If they are day schools, parents likewise lock them up in their bedrooms to study away every evening. It’s as if the entire educational system is geared to prevent sexual activity; even university students used to be expelled for sex. Most factories in China are run the same way. It’s a challenge for young assembly-line workers to find the time off to have a date, let alone any privacy with the opposite sex; older male workers find streetwalkers.
The virginity cult is even more institutionalized in paternalistic China than in Korea and Japan. This exerts great psychological pressure on young people, who by default become deeply invested in the ideology that being “traditional” (chuantong) is good and “openminded” (kaifang) is bad. The term “openminded” connotes not capaciousness of thought but sexual deviance; for girls, it’s equivalent to being labelled a slut. If young Koreans and Japanese appear less brainwashed than the Chinese in this regard, they are not immune. They too miss out on the brutal sex-selection process that American high schoolers collectively undergo and are thus more innocent. American teenagers’ training in dating starts early, makeup regimens yet earlier, while their schizophrenic society threatens them with statutory rape for engaging in underage sex (we don’t mean pedophiles but a seventeen-year-old sleeping with an eighteen-year-old).
By the time the Chinese begin to explore sex, they’re already legally adults and out of their parents’ purview in their university dorms. Those studying abroad have been fed all sorts of rumors about casual sex and drug use at Western parties. This tends to frighten them away just as effectively as fear of engaging with locals face-to-face. Most aren’t attuned to the English words “weed,” “marijuana” or “cannabis” (dama in Chinese); those who are envision a scene out of a crack house. This is why few Chinese show up at Western parties in North America or Europe: they’re scared shitless to attend. There is also little concept in China of the American frat party. To attend a party they’ve been invited to in an off-campus location just a few minutes’ walk down the street is simply too big of a deal. Not to mention that fear of crime in many U.S. neighborhoods is not unfounded.
Add to this the language problem. Nonnative English speakers from Europe and other parts of the world where English is used as a lingua franca are able to navigate English-language contexts with ease. While there are exceptions, the Chinese, Koreans, and the Japanese are notoriously challenged by English. English instruction in East Asian schools is always passive—reading, listening, and grammar. It’s very hard to insert yourself into a cluster of strangers chattering away in fluent English when you’ve had no real-world oral English practice. How can you contribute to a conversation when you have no idea what they are talking about?
The language problem is at bottom a cultural problem. Europeans are good at English since they’ve grown up with Anglo-American culture—U.S. mass-media hegemony if you will—submerged in it since childhood, and their own culture isn’t all that different to begin with. Asians, by contrast, are familiar enough with Hollywood and other Americana, but it’s a superficial familiarity seen from afar and often poorly understood. This cultural gulf is again more extreme in China than in Japan and Korea. Many Chinese may recognize one or two Beatles tunes, but they can’t discern anything about the music that distinguishes it from the blandest pop music. The massive symbolism of the group’s psychedelics-fueled aesthetic revolution that engendered Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and the wider countercultural significance of that historic moment, is lost on the Chinese. It draws a blank and we struggle to explain it, just they struggle to explain to us why Taiwanese pop star Jay Chou reigns king of the musical world. Music appreciation is an acculturation process we take for granted yet begins from a young age.
Vast numbers of Asians desire to study, work, and live abroad if they can, as the numbers enrolled in U.S. universities reveal. As can be said of Westerners trying to become “native” in non-Western cultures, Easterners who learn to swim comfortably in Anglo-American culture are a special case. They tend to be highly ambitious and linguistically talented. They seek out romantic/sexual partnering with English speakers to help this along. They’re rebels of a sort, consciously hostile toward the perceived backward aspects of their native culture. Because their sexist upbringing gives them something to rebel against, Asian females tend to be more adept at mastering unfamiliar cultural territory than their male compatriots. You’ll see them at parties. But let’s return to the Asian context.
Interlude: Japanese party culture
Before I lived in China I lived in Japan, where I was introduced to the Asian party. Japanese party culture has much in common with the Chinese. This will enable us to sort out the unique aspects of Chinese parties later. What can be stated at the outset is that unless the host is a Westerner, the “open” party favored in the West, in which guests not personally acquainted with the host are welcome, and the more the better, is not the custom in Japan, China or elsewhere in East Asia.
Japanese parties, or enkai, all follow the same script, though larger parties tend to be more formal and smaller affairs more relaxed. They are held in restaurants and almost never in people’s homes. Enkai are normally workplace events, but even informal get-togethers among friends are held in restaurants. This has a practical purpose. Most Japanese don’t live in American-style houses with spacious living rooms but in small apartments not set up to entertain more than a couple people. Home visits are confined to relatives or close friends. Japanese in the countryside who have larger homes could stage parties if they wanted to but don’t out of habit. Moreover, many unmarried Japanese live with parents who may not want their privacy invaded. Those who have moved out and work in the city while still single make do with apartments not much bigger than a dorm room. There’s just not much space anywhere save restaurants, which have dedicated rooms for party purposes.
The following by an anonymous Japanese (or non-Japanese well-versed in Japanese culture) expresses it as well as any, and the same applies to China:
In Japan, two people can be close friends for decades and never once step foot inside each other’s homes.
This is not a sign of distance or coldness, but rather a reflection of urban geography, social expectations, and deep-seated cultural boundaries. The reasons for this phenomenon generally fall into three categories:
Physical space: Urban Japanese housing is famously compact. A typical apartment in cities like Tokyo or Osaka simply does not have the square footage to comfortably host a gathering. Kitchens often lack full-sized ovens or extensive counter space, and dining areas are small. When living spaces are designed for sheer efficiency rather than entertaining, bringing a group of people over becomes a severe logistical hurdle.
The Japanese social structure places a heavy emphasis on the concepts of uchi (inside) and soto (outside). The home is the ultimate uchi. It serves as a highly private sanctuary where individuals can completely let down their guard and escape the intense social pressures and formal etiquette required in public. Inviting a guest crosses that boundary, dragging the outside world into a private retreat.
The burden of Japanese hospitality, known as omotenashi, sets an incredibly high bar for hosts. If a guest is invited over, the host often feels an immense, culturally ingrained pressure to ensure the home is immaculate, the food is elaborate, and the guest is constantly catered to. For many, this turns what should be a relaxing evening into an exhausting performance.
Because entertaining at home is so physically and socially demanding, socializing simply shifts outward. Japan has built a phenomenal ecosystem of “third places” to compensate. Izakayas (casual gastropubs), karaoke rooms, cafes, and affordable neighborhood restaurants act as the nation’s collective living rooms. These public venues are designed specifically for groups to linger. They allow friends to bond, share meals, and relax for hours in a lively atmosphere—without anyone having to wash a sink full of dishes or worry if their apartment is perfectly staged for company. (MosaicPalate)
Medium-to-large restaurants are outfitted with private rooms of varying sizes, from intimate three tatami-mat rooms for a handful of guests sharing shabu shabu (Japanese hotpot) to big rooms with long tables for accommodating groups of ten, twenty or more; banquet halls can accommodate all of a firm’s employees. The largest parties take place at the annual bonenkai event in December, attended by the whole company. Workplaces regularly organize parties to maintain employee morale, and the high school where I was teaching was no exception. I attended many a Japanese workplace party during my employment there.
The routine never varied. Everything is choreographed and nothing left to chance. Guests arrive punctually at the starting time. As per custom in homes and restaurants everywhere in Japan, shoes are removed and you sit cross-legged at a low table (tables may have a recessed space for extending the legs). Seating is assigned, with your name on a card at your place. This relieves guests of the burden of having to decide where to sit. Men are arranged toward one end of the table, women at the other. This is not always the case but the reason for this common practice will soon become clear.
Everyone is served the same set menu. Depending on your workplace’s budget, the food may be fancy, with multiple courses served by kimono-clad waitresses. Small glasses are filled to the brim with Kirin beer (the favored brew), with just enough space at the top to accommodate the head—an important detail I’ll return to below when discussing Chinese parties. The toasting rounds begin after a speech or two by the bosses. Later, as people loosen up, some get up to go around the table for one-on-one toasting. In the year-end bonenkai, male tipsiness is not only encouraged but expected, even demanded; it provides the opportunity to make up with any colleagues holding grudges in emotional tete-a-tetes, where apologies gush out and everything is (supposedly) forgiven.
Drunkenness is de rigueur not just at the bonenkai but at lesser events throughout the year. Once the dishes have been cleared, it’s karaoke time. The microphone is passed around and everyone given a chance to make a fool of themself. I hated karaoke but was not allowed to opt out. They’d thrust the song catalogue at me when it was my turn, which always contained a few English hits, such as Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” or the Beatles’ “Let It Be” (the latter a surprisingly difficult song to sing). That was decades ago; the selection is probably more sophisticated today. Everyone’s performance, no matter how bad, is greeted by a roar of approval. As with the pressure on male guests to drink until they puke, it serves as a social leveler, disabusing the stuck-up of their snobbery and pride.
The females in attendance are not pressured to drink, though they may imbibe a little. As the men become more raucous and the karaoke fizzles out, the fairer sex find the right moment to get up on cue and excuse themselves. Any who remain are acknowledging a fondness for male company—and dirty jokes. By this point, some of the men are so drunk they’re incoherent or unconscious. The rest may either agree to call it a night or carry on in more vulgar vein. Pawing any remaining women is taboo, above all when everyone is from the same office. If it occasionally happens, and I’m sure it does, I never witnessed it. I’m not the type to get piss drunk. As a foreigner, thankfully, I was excused when the women were.
Chinese party culture
In many Chinese parties, especially those to which foreigners are invited, the drinking that characterizes Japanese parties is replaced by games. Let’s revisit a staff party I attended at my first university teaching job at Capital Normal University in Beijing in 1994. The school had just built a spiffy entertainment hall for such purposes. In attendance besides us ten “Foreign Experts” are an equal number of Chinese teachers, the President and Vice President of the Foreign Language College, a few selected student representatives, and staff from the school’s Foreign Affairs Office, which organized the party. We are arranged around round banquet tables replete with snacks. The foreign teachers have their own table; sitting with us is our supervisor, Professor Feng. Though room-temperature beer is on offer, drunkenness is not encouraged and most sip Coke or Sprite. The teaching profession must set a good moral example.
As at Japanese parties, everything is worked out in advance, to prevent the guests from not knowing what to do with themselves. Before we can break the ice with small talk, Mrs. Zhang of the Foreign Affairs Office is already announcing the first activity: a song contest. The foreign teachers are each to sing a song in English from memory. When I protest that I really can’t sing, she suggests reciting some lines from Shakespeare. I’m completely unprepared for this. I toy with pulling a Karen Finley, the notorious American performance artist whose recommended antidote to stifling social gatherings was to stand up and walk out, but not before turning around and announcing loudly to everyone present, “I’m going to get the hell out of here!”
Professor Feng is as reluctant to go solo as myself. He comes to the rescue by jotting down in pinyin (alphabetized Chinese) the lyrics to an old Cultural Revolution ditty that we’re permitted to sing together: “The East is red, the sun is rising / China welcomes Mao Zedong / To the people he brings happiness / To the people he is the Great Leader.” We huddle to rehearse the song once and go up to the mike. As he sings, I mumble along in turn, to everyone’s amusement. We don’t win but it gets us off the hook. The next activity is a race. I’m paired with an American teacher. Each pair’s inner legs are tied together and we’re to run the length of the room and back on three legs. A little foresight—coordinating our first steps—helps us cross the finish line first, while the others pile up in the silliness of it all. In comradely spirit, everyone receives the same prize. Next is involuntary disco dancing to the music of Bananarama, before the evening closes with a lesson in traditional Chinese dancing. Our hosts beam with satisfaction at bringing the whole thing off without a hitch and we’re delivered at long last to our bus waiting outside.
The rush of activities steamrollers over all attempts at private conversation. Not a detail is left to chance nor anyone to their own devices. Our spontaneous interaction is to be thwarted at all costs, as it might be interpreted as a sign of fidgeting or worse, muted hostility at their organizational failure. The totalitarian control exerted over us is best explained as an unconscious holdover from the quarter century of self-criticism sessions workplaces had to undergo from the outset of the People’s Republic to the end of the Cultural Revolution. Workers spent the evening hours after work in Alcoholics Anonymous-style confessional meetings but without the cordiality. The purpose was more than just the cultivation of a revolutionary mindset. It was to prevent people from having any time to themselves and thereby nip such bourgeois habits as private thoughts in the bud.
Had I been invited instead to a workplace party in a non-educational profession, the partaking of alcohol would have been guilt-free. In China it is just as copiously employed to grind down egos and enforce camaraderie as in Japan and Korea. Soon after arriving in Beijing, I visited a noodle shop close to campus for lunch one day. Loud groups of beet-red drunk working-class men sat outside on plastic stools with empty bottles of Yanjing beer and 100ml flasks of 56 percent ABV Erguotou sorghum spirits balanced on rickety tables. That’s why many offices in Chinese workplaces have cots for napping after lunch, so that colleagues can be rested up for more drinking at dinner. Women are excused from this, as they are from the chain-smoking ritual accompanying the drinking that requires handing out cigarettes to everyone in turn. If women are taxed with housework on top of their day job, at least they have a longer life expectancy. It does help, however, that drinks are never served on an empty stomach but only after the food arrives.
In the pre-revolutionary past, copious alcohol featured in Chinese parties but was supplemented by tobacco smoked in water pipes, caffeine in the form of tea, and opium. As with parties today, most were held in private rooms in restaurants but also in courtesans’ houses, the women sitting at big round tables, between or behind the men, pouring them drinks or lighting opium for them. In the more exclusive houses, cultured courtesans facilitated things with witty conversation and word games such as completing the lines of famous poems, or the cruder “finger-guessing game” (the Chinese equivalent of rock, paper, scissors). All imbibed either huangjiu, a fermented rice wine, or shaojiu, the old word for baijiu, or strong grain spirits.
We find lively pictures of Chinese parties in famous novels such as the anonymous Courtesans and Opium (1848), which depicted courtesan houses in Yangzhou in the early decades of the nineteenth century, and Han Bangqing’s The Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai (1892), on the Shanghai courtesan houses in the century’s latter decades. Where Han’s great novel captured his characters’ psychological battles and intrigues with uncanny realism, Courtesans and Opium is clearly of another era. Characterization is less invested in dialogue than in the elaborate, and to modern readers, impenetrable dress codes. The novel’s lavish parties reveal an earlier incarnation of this timeworn institution:
Before long the table was brought out and set for dinner. Wu Zhen, who was still on the bed smoking opium, was invited by Cloud to join them. The others added their voices to hers, and eventually he put down his pipe and got to his feet.
Again they took their seats in order of seniority. As the youngest brother and also the host, Wei Bi sat at one end with Lute beside him. Cloud and Fragrance sat on the opposite side. Lu Shu’s place, fourth in order of seniority, was very close to Fragrance’s. Once they were seated, the three courtesans took turns offering wine, fruit, games of guess-fingers, dishes of food, and popular songs. So intent on their merrymaking were the others that they never noticed the loving glances that passed between Fragrance and Lu Shu, or the play of hands and feet under the table, signs of an increasingly passionate relationship. Lu Shu undid a fine white-jade pendant in the shape of a carriage wheel that he wore at his waist—the wheel, which was free and could turn on its axle, was of exquisite workmanship—and surreptitiously passed it to Fragrance, who tucked it away. Then they played guess-fingers, and she lost again and begged for a lighter penalty. He sentenced her to perform a “Lovers’ Rendezvous” for the guests. She put up a counter and rose to do so, summoning a musician to accompany her on the flute. She picked up a crimson crepe-silk handkerchief embroidered with pictures in gold couching of dark blue butterflies sporting among the flowers and began to sing in a melodious voice, “Mistress, O mistress, how lovely she is.” When she came to the line “Oh, who will discharge my senseless debt of love?” with her left hand thrust inside her lapel she bent forward and scratched furiously at her head with an ear-pick hairpin, all the while looking out of the corner of her eye at Lu Shu. The sheer wantonness of her pose was more than words could capture. (Anonymous, Courtesans and Opium [Fengyue Meng], Trans. Patrick Hanan, 1848. New York: Columbia UP, 2009)
The age-old attention paid to toasting and seating etiquette survives today in workplace restaurant parties. As usual they are held in private rooms but you might observe one at a neighboring table if the private rooms are all booked up. To underscore seniority, underlings are arranged around the boss, or bosses, in a specified order. The toasting starts when the food is served, with beer served in small glasses as in Japan. Chinese beer has a low alcohol content (three to four percent) with a weak head that dissipates as soon as it’s poured. This makes it easy to fill your neighbor’s glass precisely up to the brim, preventing cheating with excess foam and ensuring everyone quaffs the same amount when toasting. And you may only drink during toasts. Weak beer also leaves room in the liver for the ubiquitous baijiu, a distilled hard liquor made of sorghum or other grains available in every restaurant in multiple grades of quality. You display your generosity by treating the table to the most expensive baijiu on offer, such as the Maotai or Wuliangye brands. Any females present may opt out with Coke or Sprite, which along with the beer is at served room temperature, as it’s believed chilled beverages are bad for the digestion.
The presence of a foreigner alters the dynamics. They may try to drink you under the table but won’t be quite so insistent if you refuse—unless the stakes are high, such as an important business deal, when drunkenness can forge a brotherly bond of trustworthiness. Otherwise, feign incomprehension or claim a medical condition. What you can always expect is repeated declarations of mutual “friendship,” on top of much boasting on the part of the hosts. This is not to puff up their egos so much as to hint at their powers of guanxi, that is, the future exchanging of favors, should you become a heartfelt part of their circle. Unless it’s your own work unit, all the bragging is only for show and you’ll likely never hear from them again. But you might receive the occasional odd request for help to start the ball rolling. One Chinese acquaintance, personally acquainted with my ex-wife so it was hard refuse, once enlisted me in an awkward scheme to work out a special visa arrangement for his company with the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. He assumed that as a citizen I must have had clout and could pull strings (not even close). In another case, an attractive Chinese female wined and dined me before getting me to impersonate a Frenchman to represent her jewelry business’s new branch opening in the city of Tangshan, where I had to give a public speech outside the shop before an audience of municipal authorities and the local media—details sprung on me at the last moment.
The presence of a foreigner alters the dynamics. They may try to drink you under the table but won’t be quite so insistent if you refuse—unless the stakes are high, such as an important business deal, when drunkenness can forge a brotherly bond of trustworthiness. Otherwise, feign incomprehension (harder to do if their English is acceptable) or claim a medical condition. What you can always expect is repeated declarations of mutual “friendship,” on top of much boasting on the part of the hosts. This is not to puff up their egos so much as to hint at their powers of guanxi, that is, the future exchanging of favors, should you become a heartfelt part of their circle. Unless it’s your own work unit, all the bragging is only for show and you’ll likely never hear from them again. But you might get the occasional odd request for help to start the ball rolling. One Chinese acquaintance, personally acquainted with my wife so it was hard refuse, enlisted me in awkward scheme to work out a special visa deal with the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. He assumed that as a citizen I must have had clout there and could pull strings (not even close). In another case, an attractive Chinese female wined and dined me before getting me to impersonate a Frenchman to represent her jewelry business’s new branch opening in the city of Tangshan, where I had to give a public speech outside the shop before an audience of municipal authorities and the local media—details that were sprung on me at the last moment.
As in Japan, Chinese parties are routinely held in restaurants and rarely in people’s homes. Something as simple as one couple inviting another over for dinner is an anomaly. The Chinese regard their home as an intensely private, inviolable space, incompatible with company. For some, it could be their house is a mess and they can’t be bothered to make it presentable for just a few hours. But those who keep their homes neat and tidy don’t invite people over either. Why have people over when it’s easier and more logical to meet in a restaurant? Outside the sharply delineated space of the restaurant and the bar, public space is hostile, while private space is out of bounds. What’s lacking in Chinese culture is the concept of the home as a social sanctuary, and a pleasant one at that, not just for family but for friends, and friends of friends.
As a foreigner you are a novelty, and you stand a greater chance of being invited to a family’s home than locals do. My old supervisor Professor Feng is a well-connected guy, having long served as senior faculty and occasional head of his university’s Foreign Language College. He has attended more than enough restaurant parties over his career, as it’s how wheels are greased in China, in the educational field as well. After four decades of living in Beijing, however, he can count the number of times he’s been invited to a family’s home for dinner on one, maybe two hands. To his credit, he has had me over for dinner.
The subculture
Now, foreigners who have lived in China may take issue with my thesis by claiming they have, perhaps frequently, attended Western-style parties at people’s homes. But many of these house parties in fact were probably hosted by foreigners, blissfully unaware that it’s not the tradition. Chinese guests are drawn to these parties by the enticing whiff of danger. When the Chinese themselves host house parties, they are either living with a foreigner, or they have spent time abroad and experienced the exotic Western phenomenon firsthand. In the 1990s, few Mainlanders had the opportunity to live abroad, apart from illegal immigrants and graduate students. Both groups rarely mixed with locals and thus had scant experience of the Western party. Some of those invited who dared to attend even found to their surprise that they enjoyed the experience. The number of Chinese studying abroad has skyrocketed in the decades since. Obviously, many upon returning to China try to recreate the memorable experiences they had and further influence those around them. However, the Western party is still for the Chinese a special experience even today. Let’s consider this more closely.
The first house party proper that I attended in China was in 1995. It was hosted by a charismatic woman, Shasha. Not long after we met, she and her American boyfriend Ed left the Friendship Hotel where I was also living and moved into a smartly refurbished old flat in a hutong lane in the Shichahai neighborhood, and I was invited to their housewarming party on Christmas Day. She was a master hostess and there was no shortage of guests. It helped that she was a person of wide interests, among them Tibetan burial practices, in which corpses are consumed by vultures, and the budding Chinese trans community, including those undergoing sex-reassignment surgery (the famous dancer Jin Xing was among the first to receive such an operation in China in that same year). She seemed to be acquainted with just about every beautiful female journalist and reporter in the city and made sure to invite enough males to pair up with them; it seemed more of a tribal mating ritual than a Western-style party. Alcohol flowed freely as did dancing to blues and jazz from Ed’s comprehensive cassette collection.
Shasha held a smaller affair a few weeks later with five or six couples and a few stray singles, and a dinner around their big dining table. She suddenly came down with something and had to excuse herself and disappear into her bedroom, yet she demanded that everyone carry on without her. I danced with an attractive woman, and we embraced like vines and groped each other until we had to break off at the point of losing control.
This woman’s husband was stationed in another city for work, and she invited me to her apartment. I mention this only as it provides more insight into home visits in China. Mostly when I was invited to a person’s home, it was not for a meal but a tryst with a woman. In the 1990s, there was no other option, apart from park bushes in summertime. Even these trysts were relatively rare, due to fear of the nosy neighbor. Another lady, who worked for a government arts publication once invited me to her tiny studio apartment for a simple meal cooked on an electric burner. Her building was company run and the flat assigned by her work unit. She came down to meet me as I registered at the entrance, and the guard reminded her that I was to be out by 10 PM. It takes a certain independence and nerve to look askance at Big Brother; I was impressed she invited me over at all. On another occasion in those years, a former student invited me to her apartment for the night. Her parents were diplomats stationed abroad at the time and she had the place to herself. I asked her if she was concerned about prying eyes. “I don’t care,” she said.
As I recount in the next chapter, the relaxing of surveillance by the police and neighborhood committees that began in the 2000s has since the later 2010s has been tightening up again under the Xi regime, which encourages grassroots suspicion of foreigners. In 2024 on a visit to Beijing, I was staying with a Chinese female friend. Her neighbor, an elderly woman, caught sight of me one day leaving the apartment and called the police, possibly in the hope of claiming a reward for turning in foreign spies. It wasn’t a big deal; the cops phoned my friend to say I was allowed to stay overnight as long as I registered at the local station. But even when people duly register their guests with the police, the ultimate consequence is a creeping fear among the public about private gatherings in their homes, reinforcing the collective assumption that the only appropriate place for partying is the restaurant.
This fear dovetails with another fear: announcing get-togethers to multiple contacts on the universal Chinese social-media app, WeChat. It’s safe to make group invitations under legitimate circumstances (holiday celebrations, birthday parties, and the like) and when there’s no hint of red-flag activities (group sex, religious evangelizing, grassroots political organizing). But people are conscious of the fact that any gatherings potentially attract authorities’ interest and nothing is completely private. During the 2010s, I used to hold monthly music “soirees” at my Beijing apartment, attended over the years by scores of Chinese and foreign friends and friends of friends, all contacted by an email list. I even once held a benign, erotic-themed music party. This was at a time when no one felt any compunction about participating in parties of any type. I’d hesitate to arrange any such gatherings now. Or I might not hesitate, just to assert my right to hold a party. It is indeed astonishing that anyone, Chinese or foreign, should have to think twice about whether to host a party or not.
People go crazy unless they can socialize, and social media are designed to bring people together even under the dystopian shadow of surveillance. One new trend is to advertise parties on the Meetup or similar apps to which anyone can attend for a fee. As well as covering any expenses incurred by the host, the fee keeps attendance down to the devoted, and the parties always have a clear purpose, such as blind-dating, book readings, language exchange, and cooking events. It remains to be seen how far this trend will develop before the government finds new excuses to clamp down.
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Other posts in this series:
Insights into China, Part 1: A walk down the street
Insights into China, Part 2: A meal in a restaurant
Insights into China, Part 4: A stay in a hotel
Insights into China, Part 5: A glimpse inside a school
Insights into China, Part 6: A visit to the library
Insights into China, Part 7: An immersion in a museum
Insights into China, Part 8: An afternoon in a café
Insights into China, Part 9: A journey to the hinterland
Insights into China, Part 10: A vision in a concert hall
Insights into China, Part 11: A timeslip to the glorious Qing
Insights into China, Part 12: An idyll in paradise
BUY THE BOOK. FORTHCOMING THIS FALL:
At the Police Café: China in Twelve Scenes
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