La juerga China

Aquí les paso un artículo que escribí para mi clase online sobre la vida social en la China... ojalá les guste.

The Chinese students of UIBE are not big on going out. They can’t be; they have to manage a very intense course load and be back at the dorms for an 11:30 pm curfew. Although cultural standards regarding dating and nightlife have been relaxed significantly in the past decade, Chinese society still frowns upon heavy drinking and public displays of affection. UIBE students carry the legacy of unisex Mao suits and the labeling of love and sex as bourgeois decadence. My Chinese friends drink mostly when they go out to dinner, and almost always avoid hard liquor. Instead of going to bars or clubs, they mostly go to Party World--a huge karaoke venue close to campus. They rent out a private room there and enjoy the free beer and buffet while they sing along to Chinese pop and rap, and sometimes even Western music. Mostly though, they just go out for dinner, hang out with their very serious boyfriends or girlfriends, or just watch TV with their parents if they live at home.

This is in direct opposition to the mostly American student body of TBC. We all came here to learn--studying Chinese is very hard and time consuming--but to a certain extent we are all still in vacation mode. Our American dollars and Euros go a long way in China; a taxi to the bars costs us less than a dollar each, the most expensive drinks about $7, the entrance to the hippest club about $3. We tend to frequent the same places--the bar strip at Sanlitun, an American sports bar called Goose and Duck--but recently we have been trying to explore new places. Regardless of where we go, the bar scene has a mostly foreign clientele and features Western drinks and music.

As Chinese society opens up and a middle class develops, the student population is straying away from tradition and starting to develop a social life more in tune with ours. Still though, the competitiveness in such a difficult labor market is on the rise, so students are pressured to study very hard and thus cannot go out as much as we do. They are also hindered by their parent’s more traditional outlook on life, which translates into very high expectations because the vast majority do not have any brothers or sisters. In such a collective society, their parent’s face is directly correlated to their academic performance and behavior.

Last night, we all went out to bars to celebrate the end of midterms. Some of our Chinese friends went out with us; it was the first time they had ever been to a bar.