Sam Bieler | Lower drinking age will lead to lowered drinks

If college students woke up tomorrow morning to find the drinking age had been lowered to 18, the resulting weeklong party would be the most impressive in the nation’s history, followed by an equally impressive revolution in responsible drinking. I say this with confidence because this is the trajectory I have followed during my summer in Beijing, where the drinking age is 18. Now that the novelty of easy alcohol wore off, I have quickly fallen into more responsible drinking habits.

In the months before I set out for China, I regaled friends and family with tales of the alcohol filled bacchanalia that would result when I could legally buy and drink alcohol. I imagined nights and weekends of bars and clubs, of stores from which alcohol would flow in an endless river into my apartment and where no parent, teacher or RA would be around to spoil my fun. Well, you know what they say about dreams. I arrived in China to find my fanciful vision absolutely true.

China’s drinking age is 18, but I have never once been asked to provide ID. Not at bars, not at clubs and not at supermarkets stocked with the potent beverage Bai Jiu, known appropriately as China Fury. I have an apartment all to myself, a nearby job that facilitates late wake ups and a Beijing guidebook that lists the best bars from across the city. Not that bars are necessary given that beer can be purchased from street vendors for less than $1. The only limit is financial, and thanks to China’s artificially low exchange rate, that is no limit at all.

Tense with anticipation on my first weekend in Beijing — coincidentally the weekend of both a World Cup match and my birthday — I proceeded to drink until I resembled a poster child for keeping the drinking age at 21. But a funny thing happened the second weekend. After a day touring around Beijing, I went to a bar but drank far less. The third weekend, I ordered one beer: a high end Belgian dark to complement a pizza. By the fourth weekend, drinking had become largely reserved for meals. The river of alcohol I imagined in my apartment consists of a single bottle of red wine that I drink from only sporadically.

Somewhere in my head I hear my parents telling me to lighten up. I can hear my friends shouting across the world, “Dude, what happened? Why are you so lame?” What happened is that drinking has ceased to be an event for me. Alcohol has become just one element of an evening out rather than the purpose of the whole night because it is so easy to acquire. For teens in the United States, drinking is an adventure. It requires covert meetings, fake IDs and a whole lot of deception and planning. With so much effort involved, drinking becomes the event, rather than just a supporting element.

But in China, the actual drink now seems trivial next to figuring out what to do once the drink is in hand, and since my drinks are legal, I have options I don’t have in the United States. Rather than chugging in dorms or frat houses, I bemoan the quality of Chinese guides with a traveler in a bar or learn about scholarships from a friend at work, all with a drink in front of me. No one gives the drinking at these events much thought because we didn’t spend a week scheming as to how we would drink undetected.

Now I watch as society pressures me to drink in moderation, rather than excess. Throwing up or blacking out may be common at college parties, but is nearly unimaginable during an office dinner.

Sam Bieler is a rising College junior from Ridgewood, N.J. He is a member of the Nominations and Elections Committee. His e-mail address is sbieler@sas.upenn.edu.

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