One of the things you hear the most about China is that people are obsessed with “face”. I’ve always thought this was a bit Orientalist, since it suggests that we (i.e. Chinese) are only concerned with superficial things. But sometimes, “face”, understood a strange intangible honour system, shows up in unexpected places in China.
There was a typhoon in Hong Kong the day I was supposed to fly back from Beijing, and my flight got cancelled. I showed up to the airport anyway, just to figure out what flight they were going to put me on – the customer hotline was inundated with calls and stopped working. Naturally, there was a long line in front of the check-in desk, one for economy, one for business.
A group of middle-aged women, who I assume were in economy, went through the business line, which was considerably shorter. When they got turned away at the business check-in desk and told to go to the economy one, they simply walked over instead of queuing up again.
Needless to say, most people in the economy line were pretty annoyed. This was understandable, since most of them were meant to fly out the night before but had their flight cancelled, and had to spend the night at a crappy hotel the airline put them in. Contrary to the stereotype of Chinese people being line-cutters, I think for every line-cutter, there are at least 10 people willing to call them out for it.
The initial remarks were pretty polite, but things soon escalated. It was not long before people started screaming at the small group of women, who were getting increasingly defiant. There was some post-truth logic in play here, where the line-skippers were saying that “it doesn’t mean anything” that everybody in the economy line saw what they did. The airline staff got involved, but to no avail. At some point, I thought I was finally going to witness a public fight in China that you see so often in online videos.
As things got even more heated, a person behind me yelled “do you have no shame?”, to which one of the line-skipper replied “Yea we have no shame, what are you going to do about it?” And voilà, people laughed. Genuine laughter that spread down the long economy line of tired, anxious travellers, resulting in a collective shrug. Someone said “Well, there’s nothing we can do now then. Just let them be.” No one said another word to the line-skippers, not even when they got served before everyone else.
I don’t know if the same “I have no shame” defence would work anywhere else, but I doubt it. What does that tell us about “face” China? Instead of some superficial need for lavish displays of wealth – not to say it no longer exists, I’ve been party to a few business meals where playground competitions of masculinity manifested itself in copious amounts of leftover food and an eye-watering bill – “face” appears to be a deeper, medieval sense of honour. After all, if “face” was just a fig leaf for superficial rituals, the crowd would never had been content with the “no shame” defence.
Life on the Wall 