So the Chinese have a different calendar so their new year starts at a different time each year compared to the western calendar. This year the New Year began on February 3. It is now officially the year of the rabbit. Not sure what that means, but it’s very important.
So being a new year, JCI needed to get all 3000 employees together and celebrate the passing of 2010 (the year of the tiger by the way). The best way to do this is to go to an auditorium on Sunday morning and have a pep rally. I couldn’t talk my wife into going with me (I know, hard to believe) so I had to hit it solo. The event started with me getting whisked into a back room when I arrived at the stadium. The attendant didn’t know me so I’m not sure how she knew I was a VIP and needed to be sequestered. I have some suspicions of racial profiling as I think she was treating me differently based on the color of my skin.
After my 15 minutes in the VIP room with the other 4 white people at the event and the Chinese leadership, I got escorted to my seat in the auditorium. I don’t know when I’m going to stop being surprised by the Chinese parties, but it hasn’t happened yet. First the sound system was cranked up to about 110 decibels. I plugged my ears for the first 5 minutes waiting for someone to realize that making the video voice over sound like a jet engine and making everyone’s ear drum’s bleed was not in anyone’s best interest. That moment never came. I unplugged my ears and just let them bleed.
So as you can imagine there was singing and dancing and lip syncing. There was a great musical collage that included a rendition of MJ’s ‘beat it’ including the little wrist waving and hip thrusting that should be a part of every New Year’s work party. There was also the salsa dancing, break dancing, and robot dancing. As a side note, it turns out that almost all Chinese folks are bad dancers. (Pot calling the kettle black of course, but I’m still allowed to make observations) Everyone on stage looks like they are following a set of rules and trying to make sure they are in line with everyone else (which they are not). This leads to a very mechanical looking dance with ‘hand on hip, now extend forward, kick hip to side, now turn, next . . .’
So it goes for 2 hours and my senses are completely overloaded and my nerves are frazzled. There were some good and bad performances but the whole thing had a real rah rah pep rally feel to it which made for a great ending with the choir singing the company song (I didn’t know we had a company song) and the confetti cannons firing away. The best part for me was on the way out. I realized that I am always evaluating Chinese culture and these odd little events from an American perspective (which leads me to the conclusion that everything in China is very odd). The German who was sitting next to me at the event was evaluating it from a German perspective. He was perfectly ok with the odd performances and the deafening noise levels. He just couldn’t understand all the rah rah. ‘If we ever tried to have an event like this in Germany, the whole world would think WWIII was going to start next week’. Yeah, I guess the Germans aren’t allowed to beat their chests and run around on stage with German flags talking about how great they are. I guess we all have our cultural baggage.
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