Party Games

Last week the International Student Club at our school hosted a New Year's party for all of the students. This was a big success from last year, so I was looking forward to it. It started a bit late, though, so I didn't stay for the whole thing.

What I did catch was pretty fun. At the beginning there was a long table covered in food and more food being prepared. There were some girls making wontons by hand, a Thai girl making spicy Thai soup, and another girl from China making a broth for the wontons.

While we were waiting for the soups to finish, the hostess (and president of the club) called on two teachers to help with a game of "name that Chinese character." Japanese kanji are based off of Chinese characters - so there are often similarities and some kanji are exactly the same as the original Chinese script. Japanese, however, developed a pair of syllable systems that allowed them to show tense and aspect and all those good things. With the two writing systems combined, one really only needs about 2,000 kanji to be literate in Japanese. Chinese is based solely on characters and requires more like 10,000 for proficiency (or so I'm told). Some characters have changed significantly since the original character system was introduced to Japan from China, so there are a great many basic characters that Japanese people don't know. Perfect for a trivia game!

We were all invited to participate.

The part I found especially amusing was that before every character was shown, the entire room would yell (in Japanese, of course) "Kanji Game, Go!" or something to that effect. The "Go" would be punctuated by a fist in the air and the kanji would be revealed. This took no explanation. Everyone knew exactly what to do. You don't generally see that kind of a) enthusiasm and b)coordination in university trivia games in the U.S. I tried to take pictures every time they did this, but my shutter was slow and I usually caught people looking less than enthusiastic. Please assume that they were very enthusiastic a half second before the shot you see now.

The food was delicious. I got to try both soups before I ducked out and they were wonderful. The Thai soup was my favorite, but it was a bit too spicy for most of the people present. I had a double helping and was wishing Russell was there to have some too.