Observations on drinking in China

My wife and I regularly go to China to visit her family. While we're there, I often drink with her dad, and sometimes with her extended family. One thing I've noticed is that drinking there is tightly coordinated[1]: people only drink when toasting, or when they're pulled into someone else's toast. This is pretty different from the American norms I'm used to, where everyone is typically free to titrate their own BAC.

The Chinese way has some obvious downsides. It doesn't accommodate different alcohol tolerances particularly well[2]. You can't control how quickly you ramp up to your happy zone, or fine-tune how long you stay there. These are (significant!) sacrifices to comfort and personal control.

But because everyone has given up some control, it creates an environment where people have to watch out for each other. Someone will notice if you're falling behind, or if you've had too much, and adjust accordingly. You're expected to do the same. There's also an element of forced synchrony: even as a clueless 美国佬 who can't follow the conversation, I'm periodically pulled in, smiled at, and invited to participate in a simple ritual. The structure does a lot of the social work, and the result feels really inclusive. By contrast, at an American cocktail party, connection is a project each individual has to repeatedly opt into.

I think there are a couple patterns worth noticing here:

  1. A multitude of minor connections, even when they're mostly programmed, can lead to a feeling of social cohesion.
  2. Maximizing individual control, in certain systems, pushes the work of creating these minor connections from shared structures onto individuals.

There's definitely some temptation to go grandiose and say: America at large has a tendency toward freedom-maxing; maybe this explains why we're suffering from a loneliness epidemic? This also rhymes with some of the observations from Bowling Alone, which documents a long shift toward more individualized activities. But, proving any of that is way beyond the scope I want to take on in this little post[3].

A more defensible statement is just that, at a personal level, noticing these patterns is useful. If you want to live a highly efficient life where you maximize your own career progress, learning, hobbies, or even just hedonistic pleasure, it's worth realizing that it may come at a social cost. Conversely, if you're feeling a little socially thin, see if there are some freedoms you would be willing to sacrifice, even if the payoff is "just" a bunch of micro-connections that don't clearly ladder up into a bigger personal goal.

Although the emotional weight of this post leans towards connection over control, I really don't think one approach is inherently better than the other. I spent most of my 20s trying very hard to control my time and attention, and it was appropriate for that stage of my life. It was super fun, and it helped me construct a sense of identity. Nowadays, I'm trying to be more tolerant of various inefficiencies, because my priorities are shifting. At the very least, living with my wife has meant making compromises on my time and attention, but it's worth it because fostering connection with her is a top priority for me. I'd also love to connect with you, dear reader! My email is always open at firstname dot lastname @gmail.com.

  1. I'm going to call this "the Chinese way" in this post, but to be clear, I have no idea how universal this actually is across China. Even with my in-laws, I'm not sure I've fully grokked all the rules - my wife barely drinks, and I only speak ~100 words of Chinese, so my understanding is necessarily partial. That said, the behaviors I reference in this post are fairly obvious. ↩︎

  2. At least not by default. There are workarounds where you can e.g. take smaller sips or substitute tea for alcohol, but there's also this whole labyrinthine respect engine running in the background that prevents this from always being super straightforward. ↩︎

  3. To be clear, I also do not think there's a compelling China-vs-America case here. Even though China is comparatively collectivist, there are plenty of lonely people there as well, for a wide range of complicated reasons. ↩︎