As promised, here are some links to high quality movies from the 2008 annual party. I titled this post as “Cultural Study 1″ because these movies demonstrate some interesting and fun cultural differences. So, just imagine that you’re in China and you’re going to your first company party. You’ve got an opinion and an expectation about what a company party is like. How close is what you see in this video to what you were expecting?

Here is the full movie of the 2008 Annual Party. It’s a large download (about 120 meg). It’s worth watching the first performance though. If you’re curious about my performance jump to the 9th minute. Or, just watch the next video.

Here is the video of Sally and I performing “Lin Mei Mei”, a popular Chinese opera tune which is taken from a famous book in China.

So, realize that these are all your coworkers singing, dancing, and acting in front of one another. For all the openness of the US, would you imagine that your coworkers would ever do this? It took some courage for me to do it, but once I finally realized that this was the culture and folks just enjoy having a good time regardless of ability (’cause my singing is quite bad), it was easy to commit to. Still, my expat colleagues were quite impressed by my “courage”.