Slip-slidin' away

Making my way to work through the snow early yesterday morning was a bit of an ordeal.  I knew there'd be chaos on the roads, so I thought I'd take the subway - but that left me with a mile or so to slither along slushy roads and uncleared sidewalks.   The trek, however, was made rather more tolerable by a surprising outbreak of courtesy and good humour among my fellow Beijingers.   I first noticed something was up on the subway: people on the platform were standing to the side of the doors, to let people out of the carriages first.  Almost unheard of!  Well, perhaps, I thought, this is a recently learned behaviour, and founded on self-preservation rather than good manners.  In the morning rush-hour, if you stand in the middle of the opening doors, you're likely to get bulldozed to the far side of the platform by the ruck of people exiting the train.  The trains going north on Line 13, though, weren't very busy; yet people on the platforms were standing to the side anyway. I fancied I even saw one or two of them making deferential eye-contact about it - and not with me, but with their fellow Chinese commuters!   Eye-contact!  Whatever next?  It was the same story out on the streets.  Where there was only a narrow path through the snow along the sidewalk (a "goatpath" produced by early morning pedestrians; there hadn't been any snow-clearing at all up in the Wudaokou area), people were actually stepping aside - putting one foot into the snow - to let others pass.  You may think that there was really no alternative, but I have often seen similar situations (minus the snow) where people would just blindly walk into each other, or get involved in an obstinate face-off where both were reluctant to yield priority.   And again, there was eye-contact between people passing like this.  Even the occasional smile.  And a couple of times I saw people put out a steadying hand when someone lost their balance on the glassy compacted snow - yes, some people were helping complete strangers to avoid a fall.  That just doesn't happen in this country; or only very, very rarely.   Perhaps I exaggerate the significance of a few, untypical instances.  Perhaps the only really unusual thing about yesterday morning was that people were actually looking where they were going, for once.  And perhaps, again, that is a necessary act of self-preservation: when things are so perilously slippery underfoot, you have to show more awareness of what's around you.  And if that means that you give a bit more attention to your fellow citizens, that is just a fortuitous by-product.   However, I really do think that there was some rarely-seen human warmth about interactions on the sidewalks yesterday morning.  Maybe it's a kind of camaraderie, born of shared suffering, shared challenge: we were all sharing the common difficulty of a long, cold, wet trudge to get to work or school, and circumstances like that perhaps engender a sympathy, and even on occasion a helpfulness, that is absent in more routine conditions.  Maybe, indeed, it's an emanation of the old communist spirit: most people here, most of the time, behave as though they wouldn't throw water on their neighbour's house if it were burning; but give them a community-threatening event like a flood or an earthquake and they all happily pitch in together to overcome the difficulty as quickly as possible, humming revolutionary songs the while.   I rather suspect it's mostly, in fact, down to an endorphin-rush.  However inconvenient the snow may be, everybody feels a little buzzed about it - especially with one of the first big falls of the season.  I think it was that childish snow-ecstasy that was breaking down people's barriers yesterday, making them behave more amiably and considerately towards each other.   The effect didn't last very long.  By the end of the day, Beijingers on their way home from work were as dour and solipsistically bloody-minded as ever.  And they were standing in the middle of the subway doors again.