Guest Blog - The Holiday Party

In my former office in St. Louis, the annual holiday party (held a week or two before Christmas) consisted of the following:
- A special lunch catered in
- There was often a glass of wine or two.
- We did a “white elephant” gift exchange through some sort of game.
- At this point the office party was completed and we were free to go home early.
Most used the afternoon off to finish their Christmas shopping. Some of us occasionally would get together at someone’s house for a bit.

That’s about the extent of it.

The annual holiday party in my new office in Shanghai (held a week or two before the Chinese New Year holiday) is very similar, in that it involved food, drinks, gifts, and leaving the office early. After that, it was mostly different.

We left the office at about 5 pm to get on buses (there are about 100 of us) which took us to the hotel hosting the event (actually, I elected to ride my bike instead – leaving later, I arrived first due to the easier ability for a bicyclist to get through Shanghai traffic). The event was held in a typical hotel ballroom (these are indistinguishable in every hotel in every country that I have seen so far).

It began with dinner, which was typical Chinese hotel ballroom fare (as in America, adequate but not terribly great). Food was served throughout the night. In addition, glasses were rarely allowed to stay empty long – mostly juice, but a number of the men (maybe an occasional woman, but not too many) drinking beer.

After a bit, the shows began. I have only a vague idea what was going on in most of this, but there were several introductory “routines” done by our hosts (several of my more gregarious colleagues). Then each of about 12 groups put on a mini-show. Each had a theme wrapped around a famous Chinese movie (from Kung Fu Panda and the Sound of Music to the Chinese versions of Sex and the City and Quantum Leap to purely Chinese fare). Mine was this final category (a TerraCotta warrior comes to life in modern times – think Encino Man). I got to play the modern beau (ku nan in Chinese, although ku is just used because it sounds like “cool” in English) fighting the warrior for the lady. I mercifully lost quickly and exited the stage. Most of these plays/songs/dances (written, directed, and performed by each group) included frequent references and allusions to our work (I think…).

In the middle of all the shows, there was a break in which we had a picture slide show of all the weddings and births during the year (lots of babies, since it was a lucky year – everyone wants to have a Pig baby apparently, but we are shortly entering the year of the Cow – not so lucky). We had a toast, and then some games. These games all involved “guess the song”. First, someone had to sing using only the word Niu (sounds like new, means Cow) and his teammates had to guess. Second was classic charades. Finally, to determine the overall winner, two groups came up front to guess the songs being sung by … me.

Many of you know that I can’t carry a tune. At all. I also am not so good at Chinese. These gaps in my skill set were quite apparent, as I put on headphones, listened to a Chinese song, and had to try to sing/hum/anything else enough for the guessers to figure it out. Not sure, but I think they called this particular game “Laugh at the American.” Hope it was funny for them, cause it was agony for me. For most songs I couldn’t get across enough to be understood at all. Luckily there were a few with fairly clear words at the beginning that were enough. One song had a bunch of HEY!s interspersed; yelling those was enough for one of the contestants (amazingly). The final one was Chinese opera, and just trying to do the weird very nasal singing got it across, and I was finally done.

The evening ended with the last show at about 11:30 and everyone ran for the taxi stand (except, of course, for me, the ku nan riding my bike home.

The “shows” went on way too long and even those that could understand them lost interest fairly quickly. But I very much appreciate the lack of cynicism, the willingness to just do stuff that’s kind of embarrassing. If I had to choose between the two, I’d probably choose the Chinese version. It showed the company was willing to spend a little bit of money to try to give everyone a good time, it was an overt holiday celebration (there’s no political correctness needed regarding Chinese New Year, a fully secular holiday), and everyone was willing to actually have a good time. I may have enjoyed the completely forgettable little office holiday parties in St. Louis more, but I somehow appreciated this one more.

Anyway, Xin Nian Kuai Le (happy new year) to all of you.