Fraters Libertas

He entertains people at bank-machines and other of life's many lineups

Linda from Denver e-mails with more on queues in China:

I had a sabbatical year in China (1987-88) and noticed that the lack of the custom of queuing was only in the PRC (where people pushed and shoved even when there was no earthly reason to (two young men fighting to board first on a bus that had no passengers at all), while in Hong Kong they queued automatically even when it obviously wouldn't be necessary.

The PRC hasn't done well at engineering crowd control. If you want to buy a ticket on the Beijing subway, you have to push and shove or you'll never get to the window, because that's what everybody else is doing. And once you get to the window, you have to push and shove again to get out, because there's no established one-way traffic pattern.

I panicked once, in such a crowd, and when a guy shoved his arm in my face, I bit him. I was then able to buy my ticket and exit without interference.

Once I took my film to the main post office in Shanghai to send it back to the US for processing. There was the usual melee and I was grumbling under my breath because people kept pushing ahead of me (we've been socialized not to do that, and it is difficult to change). A man looked around, saw me and started marshaling the crown into lines. "You are embarrassing all Chinese with this bad behavior!" or words to that effect. (No Chinese ever stops to think that foreigners might speak the language.)

Well, it was a miracle. Everybody in that unruly mob knew exactly who had arrived just before him, and just after, and with no disagreement they sorted themselves into a snake. The man who had organized them was several people ahead of me, and when he'd finished and was leaving, he stopped near me and explained that he had been a graduate student at Ohio State.

The other interesting thing was that the people in the line maintained it. Someone would come in the door, see nobody pushing toward the counter and walk right up -- until people started loudly complaining about him, at which point he would slink to the end of the line and become one of the loudest complainers about the next unaware line-cutter.

There must be a dissertation in there somewhere.