Twenty-three, a kindergarten graduation ceremony

The room

Doors opened at two, and for the first hour the place belonged to whoever turned up early: karaoke, arcade machines, pool, and a fridge of soft drinks. Tina arrived first, having misread the start time, and was told to enjoy having the microphone to herself. Tony went to the wrong building. One guest could only find the button for the sixth floor and had to be talked up the stairs by Catty.

The dress code was decided that morning. Stella dug out the white SZTM T-shirt from a few years back and asked whether the old members still remembered it. Jason’s answer was to wear one and bring a spare. Last year, Christy was the only person who wore it, and only after cycling home to change.

Stella collected the cake herself. It was a six-pound one from Sam’s Club, which does not deliver cakes that size, and it came with two candles shaped as 2 and 3.

Who came home

The party was built as a bridge between three groups: the people who run the club now, the newer members and guests, and the members who had drifted away without ever really leaving. The third group showed up.

Eleven came, with sun cakes from Taiwan. Gary came, which surprised the group chat enough to earn an “OMG”. Max Liu flew in from New Zealand, roughly twenty thousand kilometres and fifteen hours, and brought chocolate. Tangson came and took most of the photographs. The second Emma came too. Tracy brought her family. Jacob brought his daughter, whose haircut turned out to match Eleven’s. There were enough children in the room that Anna singled them out afterwards for being so well behaved: future Toastmasters, she said.

Strong could not make it from Huizhou, but sent red packets at the exact moment the party ended. Rebecca and Camellia were both called away by family the same weekend, and Cecilia could not come.

Ten guest places had been set aside. One guest came, Jack, and he threw himself into every segment.

The programme

Jason opened with a game, the same one as every year: a “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” style quiz on general knowledge, with a ten-yuan red packet for the winner. Ten yuan is not much. A red packet is a red packet.

Stella’s opening was five slides, one for each birthday from the eighteenth to the twenty-second, and one closing line: We didn’t join a club. We built one.

Then the video: five and a half minutes, two thousand photographs from the club archive, from the earliest group shot in 2014 to the faces of the people in the room. It is on the invitation page if you want to watch it again. The 23rd Anniversary Quiz followed, 35 questions on club history. The room’s collective answer, submitted under the name “SZTM 23 birthday 现场”, scored 31 out of 35. Tony had already posted a perfect 35 from home the week before.

Min hosted “You and SZTM”, a storytelling round for old, middle-aged and young members. She only found out at one o’clock that she was still hosting it, and did it by calling on people at random. The question she prepared on the way over was who in the room had the longest tenure. The officers’ group did the arithmetic: with Strong absent, it was Tao.

Eleven spoke in this round, about what he has been up to and why he had not been able to come. Christy said afterwards that it had been a long time since she heard English spoken on that stage that felt like a spring breeze. He said he had left because he ran out of new stories, and that lately he had started to have some again. The officers had planned a surprise for him and Christy chose flowers. He got the biggest bouquet in the room.

The round ended with Tao answering the opposite question: why are you still here? His answer was that he still has room to improve, in speaking and in leadership.

Mini ran the interactive game and did what has become her signature: a dance. Everyone followed along to a short video from Xiaohongshu.

Everyone gets a prize

Anna hosted the cake and the prizes. Twenty-five awards, one per person, each with a title and a short story drawn from six years of the group chat. Tracy’s was for accumulated losses of 100.8 billion yuan, the total of the times she said she had “missed a hundred million” by skipping a meeting. Jason’s was for being the club’s chief greeter who still asks, after every meeting, who that new person was. Stella’s was for five years of calling debates “a fight” and always feeling she had not fought well enough. Max Liu’s was for the longest journey home. The slide said ten thousand kilometres; Anna pointed out afterwards that it is twenty.

The full list, with the stories behind each award, is in the document at the top of this page. It was shared in the group that night as a web page, could not be opened in WeChat, and was rescued by Tangson as a PDF.

The gifts were Christy’s choice: a live air plant, a Tillandsia from Mexico, set in a dark wooden frame with a label card, made to hang on a wall or stand on a desk. By the next morning the group chat had turned into a nursery. Anna’s was already on her desk, Danny’s filled the exact spot he had been meaning to put a plant, Max could not take a plant through customs and gave it to a niece, and Stella proposed checking in a month to see whose was growing best.

Afterwards

Christy, who knows the neighbourhood, had booked a barbecue place on Bagua Road, the food street next door. Tony brought sparkling wine. Jason ate three oysters and suspected the restaurant had over-ordered. The bill came to just over a thousand yuan. Officers paid fifty, members twenty, and Christy had it settled by a quarter to ten.

Eleven wrote in the group that evening that he was happy to have seen so many old friends. Stella’s reply: promise me you’ll come back often.

The cake and the snacks came to 525.5 yuan, which is not bad for a birthday.