There is a lie I tell myself every time I travel: My experience is unique, I want to believe, and the poorly written notes I keep in my leather-bound journal are somehow different from what every other observer has seen when passing through this part of the world. That my trip to Dandong is unlike Ryan’s or Dezza’s. That I get a new set of inane questions, not the dumb questions every foreigner seems to get. That I’m shivering in the snow with a slightly altered frequency than everyone else in Dalian.

And yet I’m never really surprised when I find someone writing about the exact same thing I’m about to post. In this case, I was ready to publicize my latest epiphany on Chinese bus-riding, a harrowing ordeal for anyone involved, when I checked the Granite Studio and found a well-timed post on Public Manners in China. J’s post cites Atlantic editor James Fallows, via ESWN. This topic has gone round plenty.

Theories abound as to why people in China don’t seem to acknowledge the existence of other human beings, at least in public. I asked a friend recently: “Do the Chinese actually care about each other?” I didn’t get a clear answer.

Fallows lists the same three culprits I would have: Living under the strain of the world’s largest population probably fosters a certain necessary indifference to others’ humanity. Scraping by, underpaid and underfed, in a country gaining wealth and prestige probably doesn’t help anyone’s psyche. And let’s not forget the Cultural Revolution, which I’ve been guilty of underestimating before. Thirty years is not so long as to forget every thread of society being ripped asunder.

And like Fallows and J. and everyone else who can catalog all these issues, I’m no closer to dealing with them when I try to get on a bus without resorting to something better suited to a karate dojo or a wrestling mat. I’ve had people trip me, yank me out of the way, wedge me out of a seat (yesterday). In Shenyang an older woman braced herself against a railing and slammed me backward into another while we tried to get onto a train platform. Then we had to get onto the train itself.

Fallows believes this is all going to make him a worse human being.

What I do know is that if you exist in this culture, you are shaped by it. I’ve only been exposed to it for a few months, and I’m already responding. After a previous stint in Japan, I realized that I had started bowing while talking on the phone, like the locals, and beginning the typical utterance with sumimasen ga, or “Excuse me, but.” And now….You think you can shove past me in the line at the airport or at the bank? Think again, buster. Since junior high school football I’ve never used my elbows intentionally, as weapons, as I use them now.

I’m hoping he’s wrong, but the fact that three of us all have our own analogies for the techniques required–basketball, football, jiu-jitsu–and now used without hesitation, just to board public transit, makes me worry that he just may be right.

Anyway, here’s my novel experience to add to the fray, written yesterday when I couldn’t get online:

I was standing in line for a bus, trying to maintain some feeling in my fingers, when it hit me: I’m standing in a line, a real line, in China.

No one queues here. No one lines up. No one waits their turn. The usual way of getting on a bus involves shoving, wedging, elbowing, sometimes head-butting your way through a dozen or so people who don’t really care that you’re alive and would rather you weren’t so they’d have an easier time getting seats. People fan out around the door, coming from all angles to squeeze through that one-meter opening. I once stood shoulder to shoulder with a man about my age and roughly the same size (pretty average American build). Neither of us was getting seats, but as we stood there, he tucked his shoulder down, slightly, edging just ahead of me. I saw him doing this and started to counter it, to secure my own place in the scrum, until I realized that neither of us was possibly going to get a seat. The bus was already crowded, and we were at the back of the crowd. We’d get on, because bus drivers here show little concern about over-packing their coaches, but no way in hell would we sit anywhere.

So, today, freezing in the snow, I found myself momentarily back in the West, saying, “Hurry up, already. Why the hell doesn’t this line move?” And then, “Wait, this is a line. Y’know, I’ll take this.”

This entry was posted on Monday, December 18th, 2006 at 12:09 am and is filed under the Dalian life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.