It's a fact of life for employees in Taiwan, and depending on the company you work for and/or your personality type, it's something either to be dreaded or anticipated with relish.
It's the Weiya.
Literally translated, weiya means "tail tooth", but it's better translated as "year-end party." It corresponds roughly to the office Christmas party in the West.
A weiya is generally a banquet that all employees are urged to attend. In many ways, a Weiya can resemble a Chinese wedding banquet, in which everyone is seated at round tables for ten, given a multiple-course meal of MSG-laden seafood variations, and the top dogs make the rounds from table to table toasting the guests. While the bride and groom and their close rellies do the toasting at a wedding banquet, at a weiya, it's the top executives who do the toasting, thanking the employees for their toil over the year.
The potential bad part of a weiya is that there are often endless speeches by various executives and other speakers. On top of that, there may be karaoke. Both of these make it difficult to chat with the people at your table, especially because the organizers have a tendency to crank the speakers up to 11. The food may be bad (for Westerners at least) - sea cucumbers, greasy pigs feet, bony fish, oily soup with barely any salt: standard fare at a cheap Chinese banquet. But the most dreaded aspect of all is the fact that you, yes you, may be compelled to take part in some skit and make a fool of yourself.
The good part of it that traditionally there's a prize drawing. I suspect that part of the reason they have the drawings is make people less likely to sneak out early. I won NT$1200 in Shin Kong Mitsukoshi gift certificates at the GIO weiya last week. It made it worth the three hours I had to be there (but admittedly, the people at my table were great).
The company I do most of my work for, Hafo, does excellent weiyas. For the last three years, the boss has selected superb buffet dinners, and there are no speeches, skits or karaoke. There's a lot of chatting and feasting, and this is exactly what I like. This time it was at a quality Japanese buffet restaurant.
A new colleague, Mike, asked me the other day if I was planning to attend. He was concerned it might be like the more typical weiya. I assured him it was not.
