Related stories

Liu Bi Ju's Small Pickles and Big Business Beijing Pop Festival Set for September Olympic Flame Kindles Demand for 5-Star Serviced Apartments Real Estate 2008 Spring A Cultural Setting with a Restaurant at its Heart

The Spring Festival

Imagine riding a bus or taking the subway during Beijing’s rush hour, then imagine each person on that bus or train running late and carrying two or three large bags loaded with gifts for the folks back home, and you may begin to get an idea of what travelling during the Spring Festival, China’s most important annual holiday, is like.

For a laowai [Note: I do not consider the term pejorative.], travelling during the Spring Festival is something you may want to try: once. Suffice to say that with nearly every person in the country trying to get home or to some other special place to enjoy their holiday, the dazed and confused laowai brave enough and lucky enough to get a train or bus ticket to any destination outside Beijing in the days leading up to the Spring Festival will encounter scenes that will be the stuff of e-mails or magazine columns for years to come.

And if you really want to ramp up the story-telling factor, make sure you try to travel somewhere far away with a “hard-seat” train ticket. I tried this in 2000. Thankfully, my travelling companion and I were able to bargain our way up to a hard-sleep berth when people began to leave a train heading to Northeast China somewhere in Liaoning Province.

But during the hours getting there, the Coca-Cola can I had unwisely sipped from, and which I wanted to discard, never found its way to the floor in a train cabin in which we found ourselves packed in like sardines. It just set there, jostling from one set of knees to another for hours.

Later, having secured the hard-sleep berth, I had to pass through seven hard-seat cabins to get to other, more comfortable and less densely populated areas of the train. During my passage, my feet never touched the floor. At just over 200 pounds, I was held aloft by people half my weight like a hero of a football game, except that from time to time I found myself upside down relative to the floor of the train, which I could not see. Sometimes I could see my camera bag, my clothes bag, and the electric radiator we were taking to a relative bobbing along behind me, as if the items were being tossed in a stormy sea.

The people’s patience, good humour and joyful outlook on the whole thing, however, taught me things about the Chinese people I will never forget, including the 23 people who had found a place to stand BETWEEN the train cars. You really had to see it to believe it.

The payoff, of course, comes upon arrival at the home train station. Seeing the happiness on the faces of heavily bundled parents who have waited patiently on some small, snow-covered platform to welcome their sons and daughters home from the big city, the army or a university is nothing less than heart-warming, eclipsed only by the welcome from your own friends and relatives at your destination.

Then the party begins. For several days you can forget about work and enjoy the fireworks, visiting with relatives, the gaoqiao stilt-dancers, new couplets and door gods pasted on doors and gates, good food and drink and the light-hearted atmosphere that makes the annual trial of travel worth it for the Chinese people.

For the rest of us, the celebrations in Beijing are just fine and come packed with their own special attractions and surprises. The people of Beijing like to have a good time, and most want their foreign friends to have a good time too.

Yet, comfort and ease come at a price; your opportunities for story-telling are likely to be fewer and farther between.

Do you have a tale to tell about your business or personal life experience as an expatriate in Beijing? If so, contact us at:  lastword@btmbeijing.com.

If we use your story, a special prize awaits you.