The Metro and Me

Metro comes from the French Métropolitain, itself shortened from the name of Paris’s metropolitan railway. The metropolis is there inside the word. No wonder the Metro should feel like the very emblem of a great city. That was what I thought the first time I rode one in Chongqing, although I knew nothing of the word’s history then. The now-famous surrealism of Chongqing’s transit system is another story. Back then, to me, it meant clean, gleaming, and five minutes from the end of class to Jiefangbei.

That feeling did not last. Then came the Shanghai Metro. Pudong to Minhang: three hours, a suitcase, and me. I hated it. A fierce-looking old woman was unwilling to say sorry, but perfectly willing to step on my foot. Next came Lille’s driverless Metro, and I fell in love again. Precision is a temptation I have never been able to resist. I memorized the journey time between every pair of stops. What could be better than slipping through the gates at the last possible moment and appearing before her exactly when I had promised? In Paris, Métro stations are everywhere. Imagine being launched by catapult toward any point in the city: once you land, get to your feet and look around, and you will find one. Some might say you would smell it before you saw it. But that isn’t true. The best thing about those carriages was that you could catch your neighbor’s eye and smile. The longer I am away, the more I miss that.

No one steps into the same river twice—perhaps because the second time, it is what he notices that has changed. By the same token, no one rides the same Shanghai Metro twice. Douban is a place where people talk about films. The nonlinear structure of Crazy Stone is brilliant: every character makes his separate preparations, only for all of them to meet at last at center stage, amid soaring music. Isn’t a life—or a Metro train—much the same? That was what occurred to me when I returned to the Shanghai Metro. Each of us comes wailing into the world, spends years stumbling and scrambling, and eventually meets in these few carriages. Every life is a line; for this moment, they intersect. Here, fate ties a knot.

The short-haired girl has a beautiful profile. One hand holds the pole; the other holds a phone filled with Japanese vocabulary. A university student, I imagine. She has loved anime since secondary school, and Japanese subculture along with it. To my right, a middle-aged woman, her mask hiding a face much like everyone else’s, is watching the stock market. She does not drink baijiu, but she has gone all-in on liquor stocks. After half a lifetime in the public sector, she still holds on to a dream of wealth. Behind me, an older man finally answers a question I have long had: who reads NetEase News? A black genuine-leather briefcase and NetEase News are not, it turns out, mutually exclusive. Whatever struggles he has lived through, the motherland still needs defending—and his keyboard is ready.

Our inner lives occupy parallel universes. Thanks to the smartphone, we now have windows into them. We—the hundreds of millions of Chinese—have no points of contact. Each of us is comfortable inside our own social circle; the ideas of people more than two degrees removed have become almost impossible for us to imagine. Weibo showed me that there really are people who believe gravitational waves were discovered in China and then suppressed by experts. The Metro lets me glimpse lives three degrees away.

However many times I ride it, I may still complain that the Shanghai Metro is too slow and the distances are too great. But today, in an age when we routinely call a place made of nothing but text—topics and replies on a screen—a community, the Metro is one of the few places left that still retains the warmth of other people. My driver’s license, for now, can only lie in a drawer. So I suppose I’ll keep riding.