Entry the First

There are many, many people in China. The city in which I am living, Chengdu, recently topped 13 million, and Sichuan Province, of which Chengdu is the capital, is home to more people than Germany. Of course, the brobdingnagian character of the Chinese population is not a new development. Around 1800, when the fledgling United States of America was home to a mere five million people, China breached the 300 million mark. (The introduction of western crops to China in the 16th and 17th centuries broke a natural cap on growth, and the population doubled in about two centuries.) Even as far back as the time of Christ, there were some 60 million folks here in Zhongguo, the Middle Country.
With so many people to manage, China has long considered governance something of an art. Well before the unification of the six 'central states' into the first Chinese Empire in the third century BCE, (the heavily mythologized subject of Zhang Yimou's "Hero"), the Chinese have prized skillful governance as among the highest of human endeavors. Confucianism is nothing if not a comprehensive philosophy of government, and even Daoism, with all of its emphasis on quixoticism and spontenaiety, has had plenty to say about the nature of ideal rulership. Thus, whether by Confucian propriety or, perhaps more often, brute authority, Chinese governments have long been known to effectively manage their massive populations, and harness their power as well. The Great Wall, China's astonishing networks of irrigation canals, successful taxation of far-flung precincts, efficient trade networks across thousands of miles - all bear witness to the longstanding tradition of efficiency in China.
This, however, was not my experience of the Beijing Airport.
As with many of the flights which land at Beijing, my Turkish Air flight from Istanbul did not pull up to the gate, but rather parked in a sort of huge airplane parking lot, thence to disgorge its restless cargo into the day. Many times in my life I have referred to one place or another as being 'like a sauna,' but I take them all back now. The air above that concrete field was heavy with heat and domed as if by a thick but infirm bowl of gray smoke. We, the recently deplaned, scurried onto the waiting shuttle. "Rather more curves," read a sign at the rear, "hold the rail." That we did, holding and swaying together, as the bus wound its way toward the terminal.
Inside the terminal we found relief from the swelter, but the density of people far surpassed anything I have ever seen at an airport.
"Ren shan ren hai," goes the Chinese phrase describing massive crowds. "People in the mountains, people on the sea."
I retrieved my bag and made my way into the domestic flights section to try and obtain my ticket for the flight from Beijing to Chengdu, whereupon I was confronted by, well, ren shan ren hai. People lined the walls with their children and their luggage; they surrounded the pillars and slogged through the walkways, halting from time to time at the huge groups which formed in front of the departure information signs like clogged cells in an artery.
Happy to have made it to the desk well in advance of my scheduled flight, I approached the ticket clerk and showed him the number of the flight I was to board. After a bit of back and forth, he conveyed to me that it was too early to check in, and I should return in an hour. I thought that was a bit odd, as it was only two and a half hours till my departure time, but - my crucial error - I trusted that the young man knew what he was talking about.
After an hour of perusing the magazine shops and hunkering down against the wall with the other tired travelers, I returned to the ticket desk. "Xiayu," said the clerk. "It's raining. Your flight is delayed."
I returned again half an hour later, this time choosing a different desk so as to double check what the first clerk had told me. This conversation took place mostly in Chinese, and, flush with excitement at having used my language skills, I headed away from the desk to wait out the rain. The clerk had told me in no uncertain terms that my flight would be long delayed.
I returned about an hour later to check if there had been any developments.
"Here is my flight number," said I to the clerk.
The musculature of his face tipped me off before he said anything, and my stomach sank.
"This flight is closed," he said.
As it turned out, my 5:30 flight took off around 5:45, and then the real rain set in. I spent a cool 22 hours in the Beijing airport, shooting back and forth between help desks with the velocity of a well-struck shuttlecock. Quickly, that is, at first, then slowing to a tiny fraction of my speed as I entered one or another very long line, and shooting quickly away again once I was privy to whatever new help desk had been named as my potential savior. I would perhaps have been more frustrated had I not seen that many Chinese people were similarly in the dark about their flights. At one point, late in the evening, a group of them in front of one of the help desks coordinated an energetic chant to try and get someone's attention. People huffed and puffed and banged on desks. They complained and shouted, slept on the long rows of bucket seats, then rose to inquire and complain some more. To their credit, the airline employees who seemingly did their damndest to keep information about flights to themselves did feed us several free meals. I had my first taste of Chinese spicy pickled cabbage, a staple of Sichuan cuisine, and also my first breakfast baozi, a type of sweet, steamed bun popular here in Chengdu.
A little over 400 years ago, a Jesuit priest with whom I share a name, Matteo, landed on the southern coast of China after a long and dangerous sea journey from Italy. He was among the first Europeans to make it to China. Suffice it to say that when I finally put my boarding pass into the hand of a flight attendant and walked back into the Beijing heat to board another shuttle, I felt some kinship with my distant namesake. As perhaps he did so long ago in Canton, I felt that entry into China was some kind of victory in itself.