Feel the Cracking Sound

Uninspiring, I must say.  A hot day.  The capital is blanketed it humid smog.  I’m on my way to the southern station on the opposite side of town.  It’s early afternoon so the coagulant of rush hour hasn’t yet stilled the roads.  We’re moving.  I’ve a good, taciturn driver with a screwed-up face who’s using every opportunity he can to cut in front of the next car. 

Our Chinese friends have a different tolerance threshold for noise pollution.  That or the system is particularly unresponsive to complaint.  Once again, I was in line for a high-speed rail ticket.  One can pay for them online, so there is no mystery about whether you’ll be on the train, but you’ve got to stand in line for fifteen minutes or so, every time, to get your tickets to pick them up.  And there is no frequent flyer, biz-class-ticket line, that I’ve discerned to get around this queueing. 

If you put the e-ticket receipt on your phone up to the glass they insist they can’t read it and so you must slide it under the grating with your passport.  Standing there practicing my reading with the flashing sign up above, listening to music, gazing at the other people in line, a familiar announcement began:  “Those of you who are concerned about time, can consider going Line Seven where the lines are shorter and they are at-the-ready to expedite your request.”

It’s a perfectly pleasant message.  Who wouldn’t want to know that?  Real time manipulation of crowds to ensure people are processed faster makes sense.  The problem is the volume.  This message is broadcast with all the grace and tonal subtlety of a Black Sabbath power chord from a wall of amps.  All four hundred people standing in line, directly beneath the speaker, can feel the cracking sound as the mic is turned on.  “Ladies and Gentlemen, Ladies and Gentlemen” is uttered so loudly that every conversation in this loud hall is necessarily interrupted.  Some people put their hands over their ears.  It dehumanizes people and, in my opinion, embarrasses the nation, as lacking in refinement.

Clearly this is a legacy from the war years, the revolutionary period when people in charge had to move lots of people all the time.  Perhaps not unlike the call to prayer in many Muslim countries, ritualized communication with large groups, became something rather different with the introduction of electrically amplified sound.  When the technology was first introduced, there was probably a simple calculous:  make it louder so you’ll reach more people.   And ‘serving the people’ did not necessarily mean provide them with service level agreements and feedback loops, and volumes adjusted-to-taste. 

But China is changing.  There are no fewer people, but people are more likely to have voices and means to express them.  I suspect if a telling video or two of people holding their hands over their ears listening to the announcements that occur every day, done properly, perhaps in a humorous way, or a manner that casts shame, asking why it is the citizenry puts up with this crude treatment in the nation’s capital, might go viral and force the issue.  Perhaps this has already happened.

But something deeper is going on, I suspect.  Most Chinese can tolerate this effrontery because it is seen as normal.  On the train itself people talk loudly with abandon, turn on the video on their phones to watch and listen without ear phones in a way that would be outrageously offensive in Japan and we all know this to be true . . . most Chinese are well accustomed to noise pollution.  But they were once accustomed to foot binding as well, for about thirteen hundred years.  When will the public discussion of noise pollution begin in earnest.  Chinese people deserve better.   The hardware of the high-speed rail network is astounding.  Bravo.  The software of service however lags notably behind. 

Fortunately I had Hendrix up in my years who was more than prepared to ward off this assault with his own beautiful amplification.

Tuesday, 8/15/17