People-mountain, people-sea: welcome to our China and … tlickets pliss!

‘Okay, now do you have a bottle opener for me?’ I asked the shop owner of the little store in the train waiting room designated for departures to Suzhou. While we waited for our train I had bought beers for the Chook and for a Kiwi friend who was coming with us, named Ben.

Marion, the Chook, loves her evening sundowner, Rhodesian tea as I call it, as she was ex-Zimbabwean. I did not know the word for tin opener in Chinese, but could say the rest and mime the action with a tsssss. The shop owner said no, he did not have one. I looked at the long fridges stacked with beers, all of the bottles requiring a bottle opener. The simple common sense of providing a bottle opener for your customer, I thought … then just shook my head with a grin and walked off as by now I was used to this stunning lack of reason in China. I wandered down the aisles of passengers and eventually found a gentleman with a bottle opener attached to his key-ring.

Our arrival in Suzhou, whose inner city has lovely, ancient gardens protected by the World Heritage started off with the wonderful disorder within the order of travelling by train in China. We were not asked for our train tickets when we left our designated waiting room for passengers going to Suzhou, which was in a hive of waiting rooms at Shanghai Railway Station. This puzzled us but we found our designated seats, which were printed on our train tickets.

Train officials with ticket-purchasing, electronic gizmos walked past us from time to time. Their uniforms were superb. The ticket collectors looked more like air pilots with all the glistening salad on their shoulders, arms and caps. The Chinese love heavily adorned uniforms, I mused, wondering why they did not bother to check our tickets.

About an hour later, in the late evening, the train arrived at Suzhou. Seconds after the doors opened we saw two or three young men running hell for leather in a direction opposite to the signs pointing to the exit. This was followed by frantic whistles from the railway police. The runners had to be people who had boarded the train without a ticket.

Taking the direction the signs were showing, we milled along with the crowd, renshan-renhai in idiomatic Chinese down the stairs under the tracks along a corridor and up the stairs again to a long row of exit turnstiles. Ren is people, shan is mountain and hai is sea. So “people-mountains, people-seas” is used to describe huge crowds.

To say the whole area was pandemonium would be an understatement. Now, only now, at the end of the journey, were passengers being asked to show their tickets.

The corridor before the turnstiles was surging with people, suitcases and huge plastic bags. Children squirmed between adults’ legs, chasing each other in some game. Most accepted that this was the beginning of their Spring Festival holiday; a half an hour of being slowly swirled around in what was more like a row of tumble-dryers than orderly queues in front of turnstiles.

Some men and women indignantly bawled at the railway police and the ticket inspectors at the gates. A few were being escorted off, both burly and scrawny railway officers’ hands firmly clamped around the protesting offenders’ belts or arms. There was, from time to time, a sort of rush to storm the turnstiles; this was warded off by the police with threatening batons and whistles.

Some holiday. The Chinese sincerely need to be educated about what constitutes a good holiday. They almost have no clue.

There was a strange passiveness to the passengers’ protests – at least those who were protesting. Chinese do not get angry easily and tend to take things more calmly than other people. In South Africa by now there may have been bloodshed, certainly teargas and perhaps rubber bullets, judging from the township taxi riots I have witnessed.

Most people in China just accepted that it would take 10 or 15 minutes to get through the gates instead of one minute. Perhaps it was also just a post-Cultural Revolution resignation to bureaucratic, petty policing of everything they did. But it ran deeper: most just did not see the point of getting peeved and stood quietly waiting their turn or caught up on news with their friends.

In a situation like this people like me, who will get cross, think those twenty or so minutes of waiting are more like an hour of wasted, self-important time. But if I check my watch, I am surprised by how little time is spent.

As I stood there, an alarming thought dawned on me. I shuffled through my pockets and brought out, with relief, my battered train ticket. Once I had left the train I had not thought to keep it safe and there were always pickpockets out. The Chook also held up hers and sighed with relief. Ben’s was clutched in his hand the entire time, globe-hardened traveller that he was.

There were now bags and suitcases being tossed about on a small sea of hands as more and more people, whose tickets had been checked, tried to get though the turnstiles, most with enough luggage to start a corner store. Perhaps this was true. During China’s holidays the streets are thronged with potato-skinned Chinese sellers pleading you to buy their trinkets and souvenirs.

Eventually we came ashore, washing through the groaning turnstile. Surprisingly, the railway officers barely glanced at our tickets, whereas some of the others had received a thorough scrutiny.

We were the only foreigners that we could see. To this day I don’t know why we got through so quickly. Perhaps we were seen as lambs that must be as innocent as babes to come willingly and meekly to this slaughter. Perhaps there was a perception that all waiguoren, foreigners, are honest. I don’t know.

– Taken from my unpublished memoir, Cracking China