What exactly are the odds against meeting someone you know on the subway?
Not just in the vicinity of a station, passing in opposite directions on the stairs, milling through the ticket hall, or glimpsing someone at the far end of the platform - but actually finding someone you know standing (or sitting) in the same portion of the same carriage of the same train??
It happened to me again just last night: I bumped into a nice young German chap (Ben the Jerry) who hangs out in my 'second home', The Pool Bar, quite a bit. I hadn't seen him around for a while; it transpires he's just got back from a few weeks holiday in south and west China. It was good to see him again.
Now, I know Beijing still doesn't have all that many subway lines and stations (only 4 lines, so far, though another - serving the Olympic venues on the north side of town - is due to open any day now). And the number of us laowai using them is disproportionately high (the 2 kuai fare is risibly little to us, but the majority of Chinese - even white-collar workers - still enjoy next-to-no disposable income and are thus obsessively thrifty: the subway is 5 times more expensive than the bus, so about 80% fewer people use it). And, yes, yes, I do know a heck of a lot of people here.
But that still doesn't quite account for it.
I run into people I know almost every week on the subway. In fact, last night was the third time it's happened this month. I've run into all sorts of people: Chinese friends and foreign friends alike; former students, business associates, bar cronies, and fellow teachers. I think, at one time or another, I've run into almost everyone I know here on a subway train somewhere. And I don't even use the subway all that often! Like many of my 'affluent' foreign friends, I have become more and more a taxi kind of guy. Am I really giving myself such a high exposure to the population of my address book with just 20 or 30 subway journeys (at the very most) each month??
Is this really just one of those odd cognitive phenomena whereby our minds exaggerate the frequency and significance of accumulated coincidences?? Does anyone have a more thorough explanation they could offer??
The number of these encounters seems far too many to me to be explained away as a mere coincidence - even if boosted to the max by a random statistical blip. Your thoughts???
3 comments:
happens to me all the effin' time.
you should check out your THIRD POLICEMAN review at thebookbook... someone left an interesting comment. (i get updates when people leave comments (!) but i know not everyone does!)
Well, thanks for the tip, MR - I'll go look.
And I consider myself suitably chastised.
I really am trying to crunch the numbers on this. It surprised me how often it seemed to happen on the London Tube. And there's way more stations and line mileage on that - but also, I guess, more people I know in London - particularly within certain neighbourhoods where I hang out a lot.
In Beijing, it really seems quite spooky.
I'm thinking in terms of a concentration of overall traffic around a handful of key stations, and a concentration of laowai (or middle-class Chinese) living or working close to those stations.
The frequency of these "random" encounters, though, can get pretty mind-boggling. Small world!
Quick back-of-an-envelope calculation the other day suggested that this should happen about once a year.
Can the focus of activity around a handful of main stations - Xizhimen, Dongsi Shitiao, Jianguomen, Guomao - really raise that strike rate by a factor of 30 or more??
Or is there something else I'm missing???
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