Freaking China

I'm back, and it's been less than a month since my last post! I'm as amazed as you may (or may not) be.

The driving force behind this post was an experience that I had last Thursday that was quintessentially Chinese. I have talked at length with my parents (and others) about the astoundingly counterproductive competitiveness of the average Chinese. In general (and yes, this is a broad generalization), we're not talking regular "I want to beat you in a race" competitiveness. Rather, we're talking "I would kill my own mother to be first in the line at McDonald's right now" competitiveness. It's crazy.

Now with the vivid picture of a Chinese man stabbing his mother in the back to save five minutes ordering a Big Mac (not a quarter pounder, for some reason those don't exist in China . . . maybe because it would have to be called a 0.113398093 kilo burger due to the use of the metric system. Not nearly as catchy, but I digress . . . ), we move on to my Thursday predicament.

So here is the plain layout of the situation: Ultra-competitiveness + broken traffic lights at a major intersection = ?

That's right. Mayhem. But more descriptively, a really time consuming and irritating jigsaw puzzle of cars.

You see, rather than taking turns yielding right-of-way (as I assume would be the proper course of action in a small midwestern city), Chinese drivers make this situation into a race. A race to the center of the intersection. It does not matter if they can actually pass through the entire intersection or if there is an unmoving line of cars blocking their forward progress. They just go. The inevitable result is a situation where nobody is moving.

For example, when my cab passed into the intersection, I realized that our path was blocked by a bus whose path was blocked by a line of cars who were blocked by a van turning left whose path was blocked by a line of cars whose path was blocked by the same line of cars that was blocking the bus that was blocking my path. Confusing, yes, but it suffices to say that we were not going anywhere unless a number of people went into reverse . . . and that tends not to happen.

My solution: pay the cab driver, get out, and walk.

Worked like a charm.