Last week I went to a dinner party at a restaurant held by a non-Tsinghua professor. It was nice of him to invite me. I’d been to two similar dinner parties before and this one was so much more pleasant because the grad student sitting next to me translated what everyone was saying. Which was stuff about cigarettes, Beijing is now more expensive than Hong Kong, rumors of ranking battles, buying a house, driving drunk (you are amazed how you park and drive while drunk), for example.
Do I have delicate Western sensibilities? Everyone was served an extremely strong drink called bai jio, which is about 50% alcohol. Not everyone had to drink it, except the three graduate students. Being the youngest, each of them had to go around the table toasting each of the rest of the guests. After each toast they had to do “bottoms up” — drink the whole tablespoon-sized glass. That’s 11 bottoms-ups (or 9 since your fellow sufferers would allow you to cheat)! I couldn’t toss down one glass of the stuff, and I’m a fan of soju (20% alcohol). It is horribly strong. I drank one glass the whole evening and it was too much. The graduate students jockeyed for who would go last — they hated it. Why does this happen? I asked my translator. “We’re entertainment,” she said.
I suggested she replace the bai jio, which is colorless, with water. Amazingly this was a new idea. She did it (furtively) and the deception worked. Still, she was very happy when the dinner ended before she had finished all her toasts. Did you tell the other students? I asked. Not till later, she said. Too important. Next time, she said, she’d bring a water bottle and a can of Coke to allow for drinks with other colors.
The bai jio tradition gives a sad twist to a letter on Chinese human rights just published in The New York Review of Books. The letter is signed by “hundreds of Chinese intellectuals” — many of them professors, no doubt. It contains the following:
We see the powerless in our society—the vulnerable groups, the people who have been suppressed and monitored, who have suffered cruelty and even torture, and who have had no adequate avenues for their protests, no courts to hear their pleas—becoming more militant . . .
Or more devious.