Student (let's call her Shirley), from almost 25 years ago and now in my Tuesday group (after a long break -- from my classes, not from learning Chinese), has sent me something she'd written when she was working in N.E.China, a couple of decades ago. It was about a trip to the hospital there for her husband's broken wrist playing ping pong:
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The men showed the ineptness combined with enthusiasm I had witnessed so often when the Chinese were faced with spatial tasks, whether piling up luggage or moving furniture through doorways.
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This reminds me of my arrival, early evening back in August 1988, in Shanghai for the start of a 37-day film shoot, following an American multi-millionaire on his motorbike across China from Shanghai to Xinjiang (and over to Pakistan for our flight back to London), part of it on the Silk Route.
Two mini-buses had met us at the Shanghai airport and delivered us to the Huating Hotel, which was in its early days at that time. (It'd opened in 1986, googling tells me.)
I say "early" in the sense that they probably hadn't yet, at that point, gained that much experience in the hospitality trade catering to foreigners (they might've improved since), which might explain the no-common-sense behaviour of the young porter in this story.
The mini-bus drivers unloaded our filming equipment (54 boxes) and personal luggage (two bags each for us five crew members and the one motorcyclist), and drove off, leaving them sitting outside the main entrance.
All hands on deck for the crew, therefore, to declutter the front of the hotel, and take them inside to the main hall, which was huge -- about 50 ft (if not 75) from the main doors to the lifts.
There we were, the hotel guests, trying to be extra considerate, picking up two boxes per person (one box in each hand), taking them into the hall, and leaving them there, just inside the main door. Back and forth, back and forth.
A couple of minutes later, a young porter (late teens or early 20s?) turned up with a flatbed luggage trolley (/ luggage cart / platform trolley).
He started to try and load up the flatbed trolley.
For some reason, this young man went first for the cylindrical rigid case, which was the tripod container. It was light, as it only housed a tripod, with a diameter of a large dinner plate, and about 4 ft long.
He picked it up and laid it horizontally in the middle of the flatbed trolley. It took up about a third of the whole trolley area, leaving under a foot of space on either side.
Next, he picked up one of the square filming equipment metal boxes, and placed it on top of the round side of the horizontal-lying cylinder. Of course, it wouldn't sit nicely balanced there, it just rolled off.
He tried to place it in the trolley space on one side of the horizontal cylinder. Nope, not enough space for it to sit flat on the trolley -- it was leaning at an angle against the horizontal cylinder, and started to slide off the trolley.
He tried the other side of the cylinder. Same thing.
Watching this unfolding while I was dealing with the room registration forms, I thought to myself, "I wonder what he's going to do next?"
The young man gave up on the first metal box. Put it back on the floor.
Picked up another metal box, a rectangular one this time. Went through the same steps as for the square one. Each time, no joy.
Gave up on the rectangular metal box, and went for an oblong one.
I wondered again, "I'd be interested to see how he is going to solve this problem, the way he's going about it."
Well, at least he didn't go through the whole batch of metal boxes after that, to see if one of them might get onto the trolley with the cylindrical rigid case.
What he did do was to abandon the trolley altogether.
He picked up two of the metal boxes sitting on the floor, one in each hand, and walked all the way across the long hotel lobby to the lifts where he placed them by the lift doors, ready to go up to our rooms.
Remember I said the hotel lobby was about 50 ft long, if not 75 ft? Back and forth, back and forth, the young man carried, one in each hand per trip, the 53 metal boxes of filming equipment from just inside the hotel main entrance all the way to the lifts some 50 ft (or 75 ft) away. Trip after trip after trip, totally giving up on using the flatbed trolley.
At the end of it, when all the metal boxes had been delivered across the lobby, he came back for the trolley: trundled it to the lift doors, with the cylindrical rigid tripod case as the lone passenger.
He could've removed the tripod rigid case in the first place, piled up as many square, rectangular and oblong metal cases as possible, which would've been delivered in about three or four trips, then come back for the rigid case which he could've simply carried in his hand.
Or: the cylindrical rigid case could've sat on top of one of the piles of metal boxes for one of the trips.
I remember thinking at the time: What kind of educational system (school and home upbringing) did they have that had failed to instil the most basic of common sense. So sad. And this was a country that had devised the most amazing administrative system going back to something like 600 B.C. (at least).
Well, they seem to have caught up a bit now, it's good to see. Blame it on the Cultural Revolution for the huge gap in everything (their education especially) -- which is what they tend to do anyway.
(Shanghai, 1988)
