Chinese Chicken

Having just finished two weeks of "Model School" (teaching local Chinese kids English), I can attest to the passion, intelligence, and discipline many Chinese kids bring to learning. My kids were awesome.

I can't quite say the same thing about Chinese drivers. They're utterly insane! Maybe it's precisely because the culture at large is so disciplined and conscious of the greater good--and maybe we can be disciplined for only so long. And what more potent symbol of freedom and autonomy is there than the key to the car? That symbol is potent in the US: Sixteen-year-olds crave it, and seniors don't want to lose it. So why wouldn't the same symbol have potency in China, where millions and millions of drivers JUST got the key to the car (which happens to be a little space of pure agency, at least in the imaginations of said millions of drivers)?  There are red lights? Who cares! Cement truck drivers go barreling through them. Florists on bicycles, grannies on motor scooters, bike-riding trash collectors with plastic-wrapped cargo ten feet high and five feet wide, and shop girls with fru fru dresses and umbrellas all vie for the same public space with the color-blind cement truck drivers. Pedestrians have dubious rights, even on sidewalks--that is, if one car decides to pass another via the sidewalk.

But, while I can observe the road through the bus window, I really don't have to deal with it since I won't be allowed to drive for the two years I live in China. Instead, I have to deal with the sidewalk. There the nominal rules of the road (occasionally sticking to the right) vanish. At first, I was simply put out by the madness on the sidewalks. Masses of people would move toward me every day on any given sidewalk, and it seemed like there was no deferential yielding to anybody, let alone to white-haired ladies.

But people don't crash into each other. (If anyone crashes into things, it is the white-haired lady with sized 9 1/2 feet.) What invisible laws of physics are at work? While I am wary of finding out the mortality rates for the road, I seriously doubt that the mortality rates for the sidewalk are all that bad. For a long time, I simply couldn't explain why.

And then slowly I began to understand a few things about the great game of Chinese Chicken. It's played on a nano-scale, even though I still don't understand the physics. If played artfully, it seems to work and you can't quite tell who's giving way or by how much. But the key seems to be not to hesitate and to let blind intention move you and protect you.

How that applies to things with wheels, I've already suggested, and how it applies to standing in line, I'll save for another day. But the thing is, on the sidewalk, Chinese Chicken seems to work.

That said, I need to make several things clear:  When I say "Chinese Chicken," I'm referring to the US notion of chicken; I'm decidedly not calling any Chinese person a chicken, which is a particular kind of insult. And, whenever I am overwhelmed by games of chicken or rules of the road (or lack thereof), I don't have to look far to find practices, some thousands of years old, highlighting Chinese intelligence and ingenuity. And my host is both very kind and fiercely protective, which I think is not uncommon among good Chinese mothers. And, for all I know, she's a gold-medal driver, but, after all, we just walk and take the bus.

[I usually write on Fridays, but my laptop was out of commission for most of last week, so this post is late.]