The train experience

I am just finishing off The Joy Luck Club  by Amy Tan (yes yes, I know, I should have read it years ago, but here in China it somehow seems more appropriate), and I found a passage that describes almost exactly my experiences with trains, planes, and, well any kind of public transport in this place really. I'm sure many expats will sympathise!

The landscape has become grey, filled with low flat cement buildings, old factories, and then tracks and more tracks filled with trains like ours passing by in the opposite direction. I see platforms crowded with people wearing drab Western clothes, with spots of bright colours: little children wearing pink and yellow, red and peach. And there are soldiers in olive green and red, and old ladies in grey tops and pants that stop mid-calf. We are in Guangzhou.

Before the train even comes to a stop, people are bringing down their belongings from above their seats. For a moment there is a dangerous shower of heavy suitcases laden with gifts to relatives, half-broken boxes wrapped in miles of string to keep the contents from spilling out, plastic bags filled with yarn and vegetables and packages of dried mushrooms, and camera cases. And then we are caught in a stream of people rushing, shoving, pushing us along, until we find ourselves in one of a dozen lines waiting to go through customs. I feel as if I were getting on the number 30 Stockton bus in San Francisco. I am in China, I remind myself. And somehow the crowds don't bother me. It feels right. I start pushing too.