Quote:
Originally Posted by YoungEcon
LOL, I heard it's hard to turn it down if you're at a business lunch/dinner too (something about offending people and making them lose face). Kinda scares me since I'm seriously thinking about moving to China in 3 - 6 months haha.
Foreigners tend to get a pass in this area if the Chinese people you are out with have even a basis understanding of western culture. Of course if you're drinking with a bunch of gangsters or old people, drink up.
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I remember eating BBQ with some friends late at night and as we finished one of my friends and I were invited by a group of Chinese guys to have drinks at their table. He declined and I stayed. As I am drinking, I notice that they are asking some rather invasive questions and they are acting pretty aggressive when I respond. It goes from curiosity to interrogation pretty quickly.
It's around 3 AM when I finally decide that I have to go. I haven't been this drunk in a long time and the environment is getting really uncomfortable. I get up to leave and say goodbye. Just as I turn to leave, one of them grabs me by my left wrist and says...
"Passport."
"What? I don't have it.", I say in busted Chinese.
"You need it." As he does this, he fumbles through his coat pocket and shows me his badge.
NOTE: As foreign experts, we absolutely must have either our passport or foreign expert certificates with us at all times. They're like our green cards. We must show them upon request by any police officer. You can hit with a "fine" if you do not have it.
At this point, it hits me that I have been drinking heavily with 8 Chinese police officers. This sobers me up as I recognize that I'm in for a shakedown. I am fumbling through my mind, trying to figure out how to get out of this without handing him any cash. Seeing that I had just recently cashed out of a poker game in the area, I had quite a lot of it on me.
He holds out his hand and waves it towards himself, a way of showing that he wants some money out of me. He reaches towards my left coat pocket, the one with most of my cash in it (I split my cash among multiple pockets). I shift away from his right hand put my hand in my right hip pockets, which contains mostly ones and fives. I end up tossing a 1 RMB bill to the cop. He catches it and looks at it for a second. During that second, I make a break for it and run like hell.
Given the amount I drank, I was amazed I could run at all. I hopped into a cab. The next thing I know, I wake up in my bed with the front of my body drenched from the waist down. I go through my pockets and see that I have all of my cash with me, though much of it is drenched in whatever I fell in that night.
Last edited by SuperUberBob; 11-11-2012 at 02:37 AM.