This week the orchestra is on tour in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia and, as always, it has turned out to be a comedy of errors.
We are here to play a piece called Buddhist Symphony: Chinese Harmonious Music. It is actually a very good piece, but more about that on another post.
The trip started out with a bus trip to Hong Kong where we were to catch our plane to Singapore. The orchestra was to travel in two groups, one on a 4:15pm flight, the other at 8 pm. The 8 pm group, of which I was a part, traveled in two buses and consisted of half the Chinese members of the orchestra and the foreign members. Most foreigners in our group are Russian. As such they all need Visas to enter Hong Kong, even if it merely to transit. You would think that the orchestra would take this into consideration when making our travel plans by either getting them all visas, or putting them on the ferry from Shekou which goes directly to the Hong Kong airport, bypassing the visa process. Unfortunately, the orchestra did neither of these things.
When we arrived at the Wenjindu border crossing we all crossed out of China without incident, but after we took the 30-second bus ride the the border entrance to Hong Kong things got interesting. I actually had no idea the orchestra had not gotten visas for our Russian members until they tried to cross. Naturally the immigration officials wouldn’t let them through, so they all gathered with Luo Bin, whom we not so fondly refer to as “the captain”. He’s our personnel manager and is generally our goto man when we have questions about scheduling, general questions for management, or making sure things go smoothly when we travel. All through the trip preparation process, while the orchestra was getting us all visas to Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia, many of the Russians asked about whether they had visas for Hong Kong, to which they received the stock answer: mei wenti, mei wenti! (no problem, no problem!).
Meanwhile, I entered Hong Kong and boarded the bus. I was traveling with a fairly sizable suitcase, my cello in its travel case, and a bow case and it was raining, so I let one of my colleagues put my cello on his bus since there was more room than on my bus. It was after sitting on that bus for 15 minutes that I realized there was a problem. It was now 5:30 pm and we had to be at the airport by six. The bus was parked in front of the immigration station so we had a more or less clear view of what was happening inside. Luo Bin, still on the “limbo” side of the border crossing (i.e. not China, but not Hong Kong) was negotiating with Hong Kong fficials while the Russians just stood around, undoubtedly laughing at the sheer amazing incompetence of the orchestra’s administrative apparatus (I know I was doing the same on the bus, safely inside the border). I suspect Luo Bin was trying everything in his arsenal to get the Russians across the border, everything from pleading to bribing. Clearly nothing was working. I suspect Hong Kong officials are not as easily bought or swayed as their mainland Chinese counterparts. (I have actually seen this work in mainland China, though not at a border crossing. We were traveling to Guizhou Province when I realized at the airport that I had left my passport at home. I had my Ohio Driver’s License and my Chilean National ID card, whose number exactly matches my passport number, so I thought I had a good chance they would let me fly with two pieces of official government ID. It turns out Chinese officials will not let foreigners on a plane with anything short of an official passport. No other form of ID is valid or acceptable to them. So I went to Luo Bin, and somewhat embarassedly told him my predicament, worried I would be unable to board the plane. He made two quick phone calls, and within 10 minutes an official came out and escorted me through security, safely onto the plane. Clearly anything is possible in China.)
By now it was 5:45 and we were all starting to wonder if we would make our flights on time. I presume Luo Bin started to wonder the same thing because I suddenly saw him call out to a colleague on the other side of the border, waving what I recognized to be the paper shopping bag that contained our plane tickets. I saw him try to hand the bag over to his colleague across the border, but apparently the Hong Kong officials didn’t take too kindly to this because he was quickly pushed back from the gate.
So here we were, about 50 people on two buses on one side of the border, and 20-odd Russians with Luo Bin and all our plane tickets on the other side. It was nearly six o’clock and we had at least an hour bus ride to the airport. In a stroke of genius (or desperation, I’m not sure which), Luo Bin handed the bag to a stranger who was to transfer them to one of our managers on this side of the border, while he sorted out the visa situation.
With tickets in hand, one of the buses (the bus I happened to be on, the one my cello happened NOT to be on) quickly departed for the airport. We arrived at the airport shortly before seven, which should have been plenty of time for us to make the flight. I, however, was not sure I wanted to travel without my cello because I wasn’t sure I could trust Luo Bin to remember to travel with my cello when he’d just made such a mess of the visa situation. I waited for the bus outside for about 20 minutes, but when I saw some activity inside the airport I went in to see what my colleagues were up to. I was to be treated to the second surprise of the evening. As it happened, the division of the plane tickets at the border crossing was done hapharardly enough that those of us at the airport didn’t match the name on the tickets our personnel manager sent over. In short, most people had their tickets, but at least 10 of us (myself included) didn’t.
It was now 7:20 and the Cathay Pacific personnel were starting to get very anxious because the flight was going to close very soon and it was the last flight to Singapore for the day. At the same time, the bus with the other orchestra members, though finally on its way (the visa problems solved somehow) was not going to make it in time, which in effect meant no tickets, and therefore no flight. After a while, one of the viola players who had taken over as temporary leader came scurrying over to tell me she desperately needed my passport. Apparently the orchestra worked out some deal with Cathay Pacific whereby they could reissue tickets to those of us whose tickets were on the bus. Not only that, they would try to hold the plane for us as long as possible.
From this point, things started working out surprisingly well. We got our tickets in what must have been a new record for the industry, checked in our bags, and got through security and immigration. After crossing what seemed like the entire length of the airport and taking a train to the appropriate concourse I boarded the plane with my colleagues at 7:55 pm. Amazingly, the flight took off only 10 minutes late, and arrived on schedule. Perhaps even more amazingly, my luggage arrived, my cello a day or so later. I have to give major props to the Cathay Pacific staff and pilots for being so amazing to us when our bosses were clearly not doing their job. Staying in Hong Kong would not have been that tragic really, but I much preferred to get the flying part over sooner rather than later, particularly since I was already at the airport.
The clincher to this whole story, and something that still makes me furious, is the reaction of some of my Chinese colleagues. Three out of three people I talked to about this blamed the Russians. In fact, in all three cases, the very first thing to come out of their mouths was how frustrated they were at the many problems the Russians had caused everybody, because obviously it was their fault that a) Hong Kong won’t let them in without visas, b) that the orchestra management didn’t see to it that they had visas to get into Hong Kong when they are perfectly aware of this, and c) that Luo Bin refused to divert the bus to take us all through Shekou where Russians and others without Hong Kong visas can bypass the immigration process and go right to the airport from the mainland. Yes, of course, it’s the Russians’ fault! There is no doubt in my mind that while this was all going on, Luo Bin and others were trying to deflect responsibility on those who couldn’t defend themselves because they don’t speak the language, and there was no shortage of those who believed the grumbling as gospel truth.
I actually encountered this “sheep” mentality while teaching English at Hunan University. Sometimes I would ask a question and someone would raise their hand and give me the stock party-line answer. Or they would quote something they read somewhere, or a CCTV news story, and they wouldn’t do it by attributing where they obtained this information, they just regurgitated it. Gospel truth. It was frustrating then because I was actually trying to get my students to learn something, and in order to that you have to be able to question things every once in a while. It is infuriating to me now because the management is using this as a tool to divide the Chinese and the foreigners. I actually had a very hard time being friendly to those people with whom I spoke about this. It wasn’t really their fault, and yet I still blamed them. Perhaps this is one aspect of Chinese culture as it stands today that I will never accept.
Technorati Tags: Chinese Orchestra, Shenzhen Symphony Orchestra, Music, Life, Classical Music, Travel
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), use the web browser that’s built in (Konqueror), and off you go. It’s faster than Privoxy/Tor, and you don’t have to worry about enabling Privoxy/Tor for every other website.
The other thing that might happen though, is if thousands of people try this at the same time, NoMachine’s test servers will get overloaded and they’ll have to take them down. That will be a shame when it happens, but for at least a couple of months this should work alright. I don’t know if this has been documented somewhere, but if isn’t, now it is.
