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China is big — you have to make time for it
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“ China’s really big.” This would be one of the first observations my dad would make about China, after we’d navigated Beijing, and then made it to Hangzhou during his visit. “It’s just so big.”
From a geographical standpoint, he’d be very much correct. China has about the same land mass as the United States, covering just about every climate and landscape. There’re the frigid snows of Harbin, the tropical climes of Yunnan, the breathless mountain air of the Tibetan Plateau, and that’s only the beginning.
In my travels around China, I’ve come across so many different kinds of people and Chinese dialects that it seemed I’d crossed into different countries, and I’ve ridden trains that took more than 30 hours to reach their destinations.
China is very big, and in ways that are hard to comprehend to the casual viewer.
This was not what he was referring to, however. My dad was talking about the “bigness” of China in the more immediate sense: The cities were huge to him, and whenever I said “Oh, it’s not far” when we’d set out to go exploring, I’d see him cringe as he tried to decide if “not far” meant half an hour on the subway, or 45 minutes on a bus.
“We’ll be meeting my friends for dinner,” I said.
“It’s not that bad; 20 minutes on the subway, and then we’ll just walk for 10 minutes.”
My dad nodded, probably thinking about his daily work commute that would take 20 minutes in total by car to go from one city to the next. “Not far,” he repeated. “Sure.”
The concept of “close” and “far” changed dramatically for me after coming to China, based on this very “bigness.”
Whereas I once complained about a three-hour car ride to my grandparent’s house as a child, I now consider an hour and a half commute across Hangzhou to be not bad at all.
In fact, I once even rode 48 hours on a slow train from Lhasa thinking, “Well, all things considered, 48 hours isn’t that bad.” Distance does this to a person.
More than this, living in a big city like Hangzhou does this. I remember being baffled at first by the sheer scale of the city, and how a simple stroll along the West Lake could actually take longer than I’d anticipated.
It looked small on a map, not because it was small, but because Hangzhou was just that big.
And so, Lingyin Temple is “not far” from the Longjing tea fields, Baochu Pagoda “not far” from Hefang Street, and the City God Pavilion “super close” to the subway stop we needed to get there.
My dad was a good sport about it, which was good, because he didn’t really have any other choice.
Where we’re from, a 50,000-person town that in America is considered “mid-sized,” distance is measured in the amount of time it takes to drive a car to get there.
The local grocery store is a 10-minute drive. The post office about 15 minutes. Once you get on the freeway, it’s only 20 minutes (depending on traffic) to get to the big city. By Chinese standards, most things are indeed “not far” in my hometown.
It’s funny, though, because when I lived there, I thought it all to be “super close” too, but once you take away the car, daily necessities in American towns are actually pretty far-apart, sometimes taking a 20-30 minute bike ride to get anywhere. But no one thinks like this, because it’s true, every household has a car, making everything “super close.”
I could see it in my dad’s eyes as we navigated Hangzhou: He was genuinely surprised by the sheer scale of the city, by the amount of people shuffling from one end to the other, and by how sometimes just walking could be faster than taking a bus because of traffic.
Less than an hour after landing and seeing traffic jams firsthand, he agreed that having an e-bike was the best way to get around China. Less than a day, and he agreed that the subway system was a blessing to the city, and that we should use it as much as possible given that there was simply no way I would put him on an e-bike and set him loose on the streets.
He loved that a high-speed train from Beijing to Hangzhou could take as little as five hours, and that public bike services were becoming so common to weave through traffic with more ease.
Still, the idea that a small city in China consisted of “only” 1 million people baffled him, as did the notion that you could travel for two hours on a bus and still technically be in municipal Hangzhou.
But by the end of his visit, I think he reached the same conclusion I had long ago: China is just really big, and so you have to make time for it. And so, during one of our last days, when I said, “It’ll take about half an hour on the subway to get there,” he didn’t cringe. Instead he said “Oh, that’s not too far.”
What can I say? Once in China, what makes something close or far is just something you get used to, because as my dad so helpfully pointed out, “China is big,” but as he discovered during his stay, it’s not so far away as you’d think.
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