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The Case of Standing In Line With Chinese Characteristics2007/06/15
Standing in line (paidui) is as Chinese as dragons (long), noodles (miantiao), and silk, in that a line can twist like a Long's tail, be as seemingly endlessly long as a miantiao, or be as hectic as a busy silk vender giving away free long-flavoured miantiao with every ridiculously cheap purchase of silk. Beijing is the capital (shoudu) of China, as well as the world's capital of paidui! In Beijing we stand in line for many reasons: at the post office, movie ticket office, to get shoved into the bus or subway, even to get into the newest trendy club. We call them lines, but most of these queues are far from straight (zhi) lines. Some are more like arm-flailing mobs and form in semicircle or reverse triangles, nothing even close to being a regular line. Yes, I have spent one too many hours at the post office! Come closer and I will tell you a personal story about a paidui in our shoudu. Long, long, ago, last Tuesday, in fact, I found myself standing in a paidui. As is polite, I stepped behind (houmian) a person standing the furthest away from the counter (guitai). I stood at his houmian for five minutes before I realized (faxian) that the person I was waiting behind was not paidui at all; he was, in fact, just a line gawker! Next I faxian le (le to show the past tense) that because of the foolish (ben) gawker, 10 more people slipped in front (qianmian) of me. Sometimes there are big groups of line gawkers that make it hard to tell where the gawking ends and the paidui begins! The airport and fast-food places have the most paidui gawkers. Is that their ben hobby? I rushed to the real houmian of the line. At least the line was a zhi line. Then a heavy thought came to me, I thought for a moment about the first people ever to paidui. Maybe they were cavemen waiting to drink one by one from a small pond. Then I wondered if dinosaurs ever paidui. Who knows (shui zhidao): maybe the ben dinos even paidui le to jump into the tar pits. Back in our shoudu, the line to the only open guitai moved slowly and there were a couple of line cutters! But shui zhidao: maybe they had friends in the line to let them in. Most didn’t, but I tried to keep my cool. My cool was shattered when I reached the middle of the queue. A second guitai opened suddenly. I thought, “great that will cut my waiting time (dengdai shijian) in half!” Now it was me who was being ben. Wo faxian the person in the houmian elbowed her way forward to beat everyone to the new guitai that opened. Instead of carefully breaking the line in two, thus systematically sending part of the line in order, there was just a mad rush. When I finally got up to the guitai, the window slammed shut in my face, just nearly pinching my large foreign nose. The guitai had a sign saying, CLOSED. (guanmen). It had guanmen le because of lunch. But it was only 11:30 a.m. and it was guanmen until 2 p.m. Wow, that is a long lunch! I wondered if they ate a whole bucket of long-flavoured miantiao! Of course they kicked us out of the building so at 2 p.m. I had to paidui all over again from the very houmian. But eventually at about 3:30 p.m. I made it to the guitai again. Why was I in line in the first place, you ask? I was in that queue to go to the doctors, because my feet were hurting from paidui le too much in the shoudu. “You may go in now,” a worker said while pointing at a door next to the guitai. It didn't look like the doctor’s office, so I asked, “Is the doc in there?" "No, you must be ben. That is just the room where you paidui to get a number (guahao). After you guahao you can get an appointment to go line up in the waiting room." "EEEEEEEEK!" P.S. Do you ever wonder if the famous playwright Samuel Becket, author of Waiting for Godot, ever spent anytime in Beijing, the shoudu of paidui? |
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