Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [38]
The next day, I found myself idly waiting in what a sign informed was the Communist Youth League Waiting Room inside the Tai’an train station. I was bone weary. My legs still smarted from the climb up Tai Shan. And I’d been awoken so often the night before by telephone calls from courteous young women kindly offering to provide me with a messagee that I finally felt compelled to take the phone off the hook. Somehow, I had managed to successfully convey my desire for a train ticket to Qingdao, a coastal city on the Yellow Sea, and after responding to the clerk’s inquiries with the big dopey grin I used to answer all questions put to me in Chinese, I found a seat on a bench in the waiting room, quietly pleased that at least the Chinese were thoughtful enough to display numbers in the Western manner. I matched the numbers on my ticket with the numbers on the board, found the correct waiting area, and settled in together with hundreds of other travelers. Then the announcement came. It was time to board. And then there was pandemonium. Why? I thought, watching the melee as 500 people scrambled to squeeze through a single turnstile. Are there door prizes for the first fifty people to squeeze through? Free DVD players? Coupons offering 20 percent off the pig knuckle special at the Golden Dragon? Wearily, I looked at my ticket. It’s assigned seating, right? Please?
I concluded that the seat number on my ticket was a mere ruse and that trains in China, particularly hard-seat-only trains like the one I was about to board, operate on a first-come basis. Nothing else could explain such a lunging, shove-the-kids-aside, leap-over-grandpa stampede. Grimly, I joined the horde and was sucked through, only to find that the train hadn’t yet arrived. On the platform, guards checked our tickets and pointed to where each of us were to line up. Other guards were holding signs with numbers—1, 2, 3, 4, and so on—and I deduced that each number was meant to match the number of the individual train cars. I studied my ticket—seat 17 in car 4—and found the appropriate line. The train approached. The crowd tensed. The woman next to me began to vomit, extravagantly and copiously. Poor thing, I thought as I made a mental note to never, ever dine on the gloppy offerings of a train station lunch cart. Things can always be worse, however, and then, as the train pulled into the station, they grew so at an alarming pace.
As the train rolled by, conductors stood in the open doorways holding numbered signs, and as I watched them pass, I came to the startling realization that each train car was randomly numbered. 1 was not followed by 2 and then 3. There went train car 7 followed by train car 2, and was that train car 4 rolling ever farther down the platform? Again, pandemonium ensued. Hundreds of people were now running like headless chickens, chaotically dragging their bags up and down the platform, desperately seeking their car before the train departed. I leapt over the pool of vomit and raced down the platform. When at last I tumbled toward car 4, I was dismayed to discover a hundred or so others urgently trying to clamber aboard, the preferred method being to shove and toss aside anyone who might be in front. For someone coming from a culture where people are taught to wait their turn at an early age, to never push, to magnanimously insist that ladies go first, the spectacle of watching people board a train in China is a jarring,