a socialist's social life.

Apologies for the lapse in updates, as the Internet police (some four million employees of the Chinese government) put a temporary hold on I've been not unpleasantly occupied lately, working during the day, and spending afternoons very slowly and clumsily digesting company earnings reports and audits, which, lucky for me, look as though they've been put together by someone with as much financial background as I.
My humorless and patriotic communist friend, Tao Tao, got us tickets to the opera, which was uncharacteristically awesome of her, or so I thought. Chinese opera, it turns out, is perhaps the unsexiest thing in the world, and it took every bit of strength and social decorum in me to appear attentive during the three of hours of nasal warbling, while TT howled with pleasure and applauded with passion beside me, along with the rest of the geriatric audience.
I met some college friends - Dave, in from New York, and Ding, a Shanghai native - for a couple of dinners, and a couple more drinks at some fashionable lounges and restaurants. The ex-patriot bars, as it were, are the only bars in Shanghai.
Shanghai, despite what it's size would suggest, isn't a big party town. The clubs and bars - stylish, costly, large - are populated primarily by sophisticated Europeans or American study-abroad collegians. There's also a good population of a certain breed of beautiful and terrifying Shanghainese women, birdlike bundles of jewels and furs and Gucci bags and penciled-in eyebrows and very high high heels shopping for wealthy Western boyfriends, with whom they'll be unable to communicate verbally. (My Brazilian boss' girlfriend is one such specimen - twenty-four to his sixty; a hot-pantsed, English-illiterate vision of Orientalism's merry modern carnation.)
I asked - desperately - what young people in China do for fun, and was told that evenings and weekends are spent with the family. In New York, and in college as well, I felt at home among fellow nomadic yuppies. Many of my peers left home at eighteen, a drive birthed of the boredom and wanderlust that inevitably accompanies a rather good life, objectively speaking, and fled to east, for culture, to the cities, for stimulation, to the country, to find ascetic zen, to South America, for the novelty, each year being as disposable and transient as only an obligation-less, American annum can be. TT hits up the opera when she's feeling up for a night out on the town; otherwise, she plugs away at her accounting firm for the seventh year running, and lives with her family. It's no wonder, really, that she was quick to write me off as an errant American, aimless and uncommitted.
My colleagues, most of whom are Western-educated Chinese girls, are a bit more open-minded. My first club experience in Shanghai was by the side of the very-much engaged Flora (an acronym, devised by her fiance, for Flaunting Love Of Ryu Always), who deftly flirted up some Beijing businessmen for drinks. Michelle married a Moroccan man last year, shortly after she had his (cute as hell) kid; Tian Mu's cynical response for every bogus earnings report she tears to pieces (and she's quite good) is "it's China." Here, I feel less like I ought to be shot. Where TT balks with disapproval at every answer I provide to her interrogations about college, working, New York, boyfriends, girlfriends, sports and vacations, the girls at work are much less, well, inquisitive for one, and critical for another. (My uncle says that criticism is a cultural staple. He states with his characteristic authority that the Chinese abhor hypocrisy, and therefore, tend to be more blunt. I considered my small pool of Chinese acquaintances - himself and my mother prominent among them - and was inclined to agree.)