Chinese Birthdays

I grew up in a culture where the birthday person never had to pay for anything. From dinner on friends to “Let me buy you a birthday drink!” whoever’s birthday it was could count on being spoiled for the night. The opposite is true here.

The first time I experienced Chinese birthday culture was actually at a Japanese friend’s yearly celebration of birth. We took her out to pizza. It was a surprise. We were successful. It was a good night. Then it came time to pay. I waited for someone to calculate how much it would be for each of us, including chipping in a bit for our dear friend. Everyone waited around awkwardly, particularly the birthday girl. She was aware of the culture (though she told me, in Japan, dinner is usually on the friends), but we’d put her in the position of potentially having to pay for a boatload of people. Best surprise ever. “Surprise! Joke’s on you cuz we all get a free meal.”

My Birthday Subway Surprise

Recently, it was my birthday. I had an amazing day planned out: lunch with my expat friends, ice-skating afterwards, and a free concert in the evening with my boyfriend Alex and my good friends Lisa and Echo. My girlfriends and I met up first at the Beitucheng subway station, and waited for Alex to arrive straight from work. “Can I use your camera tonight?” Lisa asked me. “Um…okay, sure,” I replied. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust her with my nearly 5-year old camera. It’s just that normally people ask to use your camera to take one picture, not to hold onto it. “You can use the camera on your phone,” she added. So I gave her my camera without much thought.

The things you see in China.....

After chatting, laughing, and waiting for nearly 40 minutes downstairs, we decided to move upstairs. We waited by the escalators, and I decided to open their birthday gifts to me to pass the time. “Where is he?” I asked them. “Should I give him a call?” I called Alex, but there was no answer. So we continued chatting and laughing. And waiting. All of a sudden, coming up the escalator, I saw someone dressed in a full head-to-toe Winnie-the-Pooh costume, giant head and all. Winnie-the-Pooh was carrying a bouquet of about a hundred or more roses. Pretty much the biggest bouquet of roses I’ve ever seen. My heart stopped and my first thought was, “Is it…? No, it can’t be.” I waited for it to walk over to us, but it didn’t. Winnie-the-Pooh sauntered around the subway station (which was pretty empty, save for a few people and us), which, to be honest, threw me off a bit. A couple followed it, wanting to pose for pictures with the giant honey bear. “Quick!” I said to Lisa, “Take some pictures!” In true Chinese fashion, we whipped out our cameras and camera phones and zoomed in on Winnie-the-Pooh.

Meet the Family

Me and my boyfriend after watching "World of Colors" at Disneyland's California Adventures

I’ve always imagined that when I introduced my boyfriend to my family, it would be after a few months of dating, after which he would be a constant presence at family dinners, birthdays, and other events. Ideally, he would get to know my family slowly until they grew to love him as much as I do.

Unfortunately, in a cross-cultural relationship, where the guy is Chinese (and we’re dating in Beijing) and faces a slim to none chance of getting an American tourist visa, “ideal” is not always “reality.” In my case, it took a year and eight months before my boyfriend finally made it to California to meet my family and friends. It was a whole month of experiences, and a lot to wrap up in just one post. I’ll try to post here and there on various stories throughout the trip. In general, it went well. It probably helped that my mom speaks Mandarin and my sister is learning (and therefore had a live-in native speaker as her tutor for a month). My grandparents are amazing and funny and I love that they were able to communicate with my boyfriend. Somehow, he was able to understand my grandma’s made-up dialect consisting of Cantonese, Taishanese, and broken Mandarin. It was great…..in even the shortest of sentences, she was able to incorporate all three dialects =P

My "pu tong" boyfriend

So I realized my blog was posted under Jocelyn Eikenburg’s blogroll “Chinese Men + Western Women Personal Stories” and figured a post on my cross-cultural relationship was long overdue. In other words, I felt like I needed to justify my spot on that blogroll.

My boyfriend has said more than once that he thinks he’s just pu tong, or that there’s nothing special about him. I think he wonders why someone so beautiful, intelligent, and kind would choose him (his words, not mine). We disagree on his pu-tongness for several reasons. The first is that I think we have different meanings of the word. I think that in his eyes, his education, though the same level as mine, was perhaps not of as good quality as mine was. He also doesn’t think he is particularly good-looking (trust me, that is definitely untrue, but his modesty is one of the things I love about him). I think part of it is Chinese modesty, not boasting about your qualities to others, or putting yourself down but not really meaning it. Like when your hostess serves you an incredible meal and then spends half the meal criticizing her own cooking.

For me, his looks are far from pu tong  and were actually the first thing I noticed about him at the hotel we both worked at. I had seen him in the staff canteen and wondered who this handsome guy was. Needless to say, when I found out he worked at the western restaurant, I pulled strings in HR so that I ended up spending one month training there instead of the two weeks I was supposed to train. Call it what you want, but I was merely “creating opportunity.”

In China, a LOT, and I mean A LOT of emphasis is put on testing. From elementary school, students are pressured to get good exam results for middle school. From middle school, parents expect stellar results for high school. And high school is the worst, with students studying nonstop for a year in order to pass their gao kao, the college entrance exam. As a result, I think that many Chinese people measure intelligence by which school you were able to test into. Maybe I don’t completely agree because I’ve always been a horrible test-taker. I mean, grades in college were based on three tests per quarter. How unfair is that?! But I digress. While my boyfriend did not go to Beijing University or Tsinghua University, what he has, and what’s more important to me than a name, is that he teaches me so many things. In fact, I’m often shamed by the fact that he knows more about my country’s history than I do. And there are times when he’ll say something about China’s history and I look at him with a slightly confused expression, and he asks “Didn’t you guys learn about Chinese history in school?” I’d almost rather he think I didn’t study it than know that I barely remember anything I learned. But I guess that wouldn’t do much good for US-China relations. He keeps up with current news, and we often have discussions about things going on in the world. More times than I’d like to count, I’ve called him with a particularly interesting news story that just broke and exclaimed, “Did you hear about….?” and he says “Yeah I did,” which totally undermines my coolness factor in being the first to know. I guess that’s called ‘arrogance’ on my part.