'Erin go bleagh' turns out no different in Beijing

• Source: Global Times
• [22:06 March 21 2010]
• Comments

By BARRY CUNNINGHAM

During my self-styled immersion course in Chinese culture, I have meticulously avoided the expat community of Sanlitun.

My year-long hibernation from Western culture ended on Saint Patrick's Day with a grudging admission that I, like James Joyce, John F. Kennedy and Shaquille O'Neal, have an Irish name and ought to live up to it.

So I headed down to Paddy O'Shea's pub with a friend from work.

I hoped the luck of the Irish in Beijing would spare me what the annual celebration has become in New York City, the greatest beer guzzling contest in the history of urination.

Besides, I have never been to Ireland and was curious to see what a "real" Irish pub looked like, even one transplanted to Dongzhimenwai. My Chinese colleague was curious, too.

Quite a few Irish Beijingers were already sloshed when we arrived, and the mob had already spilled out onto the sidewalk, making it difficult to elbow our way through the crush of bodies at the bar. Picture a rush hour subway ride with everybody pressed against you nursing on a beer bottle.

If I was expecting to hear Irish fiddlers and someone singing "there's whiskey in the jar," all I actually heard was a muffled roar of talkative 20-somethings in green T-shirts and silly high hats. One of them was babbling in my ear that he came to Beijing "to make people's dreams come true." When I asked for his business card, he said he didn't have one and staggered back into the scrum at the bar.

Except for the Dublin accents and expressions like "Bless your heart and soul," I discovered that there really isn't that much difference between Paddy's and the Irish pubs in New York City.

There the typical Guinness drinker is a 55-year-old Irish football fan with a daughter named Mary who teaches school and a son named Danny who is either a cop or a fireman.

The Beijing pub walls were festooned with the same soccer club banners and imitation team jerseys draped from the ceiling.

There were the same sports bar plasma TV screens, too, although I doubt the New York watering holes would be showing a Pakistani cricket match on one screen and an Indonesian badminton tournament on another.

Trying to balance a plastic pint of Guinness while sandwiched between howling Irish lads and lasses, my Chinese friend said she now knew what "the end of the world" would look like.