"Get outta my way, goddammit!"

The longer I live in Asia, the more tired I am of crowds. Walking down the street is no longer a simple affair. Population densities can be so damned high in some of these cities that a typical day here can seem like a festival day in Vancouver.

I must admit that Hong Kong people are slightly better than people in Taiwan and Mainland China at getting out of other peoples' way. I must say that perhaps the majority of people who get in my way on the HKU campus and in Hong Kong's major shopping districts are from the Mainland. Just today, I was waiting to get into a lift at the KK Leung Building during rush hour, and when the lift came, the two guys (Mandarin-speaking) who got out of the lift first got out, then paused to chat with each other for 2 seconds, seemingly oblivious to the dozen people still in the lift waiting to get out and the 20-30 people in the lobby waiting to get into the lift. I couldn't believe it! And yes, I wanted to get violent.

Perhaps what I hate most is that so many people are oblivious to the fact that they're in the way. They have no idea that they are blocking the way on busy sidewalks, in bottlenecks, at store entrances, in the tight aisles of supermarkets, at crosswalks, at the top/bottom of escalators, and yes, in front of elevators.

My anger began five years ago in Taipei, during my first stint in Asia. Most of Taipei's sidewalks are half-filled with motorscooters, leaving a walking space wide enough for two people. In theory, this should be just enough for two-way pedestrian traffic, but sadly, this is not the case. Not everybody walks alone, and when people walk with their friends, many of them tend to walk parallel to each other. In Taipei, when I walk towards a couple of people walking parallel to each other, the vast majority would make absolutely no effort to get ouf of my way. Most would keep walking and cause me to stop, then there would be an awkward moment when we'd have to get out of each others' way. Ideally, people should file into a single-order line when they see oncoming pedestrians or when someone wants to pass. That's what I do when I walk with my friends. I even do that when I hold hands with my girlfriends.

Again, what pisses me off the most is that so many people are oblivious to the fact that they are in the way. When I want to pass people walking in front of me, I usually give them 10-15 seconds to realise that someone behind them wants to pass. In Taiwan, I got so tired of waiting that I began to master the arts of stepping on heels, tripping people with umbrellas, and barrelling my way through gracefully. Of course, I sometimes employed the "excuse me" method, but I usually followed through by muttering, "idiots.." as I passed.

Yes, the longer I stayed in Taipei, the less patient I became. Rather than stopping and getting out of the way of oncoming pedestrians, I began to keep walking and let my shoulders do the talking. In fact, I began to discreetly focus my weight onto my shoulders at the moment of impact. I got a lot of dirty looks, but I always returned these looks with a half-innocent, half-belligerent look. No, no one messed with me in Taipei. I was told that Chen Shui-bian kicked all of the gangsters out of Taipei City when he was mayor, so I wasn't afraid of being swarmed by a dozen armed louts. Oh, I also didn't do this to old people (or pregnant women or young children). Any old ethnic Chinese person who lived through the war went through tough times no matter where they were, unless they were collaborators.

Something else that pissed me off about Taiwanese people was that when they exited shops, they never bothered to see if there were people walking on the sidewalks. Again, I just kept walking, usually barrelling people over. I know this is terrible, but I felt that I was on a civilizing mission to teach these people to watch where they were going.

Things were slightly different in China. I was actually quite discriminatory in Beijing. For some reason, I left the blue-collar workers alone, probably because I've done a lot of research on them and I really pity and admire them. Construction workers, restaurant staff, people who work in hair salons and supermarkets, etc., and people who sell fruit and scavenge for salvagable trash, make very little money, live very hard lives, and their families depend on them - city folk generally treat them like shit. On the other hand, I treated rich people like shit. Well, it's not that I hate rich people, but I hate rich people who think they're better than everyone else because they have money. Still, I wasn't as bad in Beijing as I was in Taipei, maybe because I was never too sure who had money and who didn't.

Because I know a lot more people in Hong Kong than I did in Beijing and Taipei, I really don't want to create a negative image of myself. Imagine my supervisor seeing me get into silly arguments and fights. Imagine my friends' parents seeing me behaving so boorishly. Imagine a stranger seeing me act violently, and the stranger turns out to be someone who will interview me for a job, or is the head of the University Grants Committee. Yeah, I'll try to behave myself in Hong Kong.