Danwei Travel

A couple weeks back I was on what I thought was an ordinary flight from Nanchang to Beijing. How could I be so naïve? I’m not exaggerating at all when I say that I was one of only about 5 people who were not associated with a group that filled the plane’s 100+ seats; a group that I quickly learned had never been on a plane before.

Since I’m guessing that these travelers did not find sponsorship from the private funds of a wealthy entrepreneur, the only viable explanation for how they all ended up on a plane together is that the leaders of their 单位 (danwei) were feeling especially benevolent. The Chinese danwei, or work unit, is the building block for a social and spatial system that is responsible for the care and control of Chinese citizens. The danwei is one of the fundamental centers of family life. As such, it often provides (among many other things) the logistical know-how and financial provisions for travel. Click here to read an old, but useful overview of the Chinese work unit by Dorothy Solinger, a fellow at UC Berkeley’s Center for Chinese Studies.

While the support for this type of group bonding ought to be lauded, it’s too bad those who organized the trip didn’t devote a few minutes to explain that standing up during take-off and landing is not ok. Sneakily turning on your cell phone to call home when you’ve been explicitly told to turn off all electronic devices is also not ok. Drinking lots of cheap beer and then vomiting repeatedly is also not the coolest thing in the world. Anyway, those behaviors can be easily explained away by the wonder of one’s virgin voyage on a plane. But while my experience and the photographic evidence below to support it (women posing for glamour shots during landing) still cracks me up, I honestly felt bad for the stewardesses who were forced to yell repeatedly at the people who refused to stay in their seats, buckle their safety-belts, and not spit on the ground.



A dialogue between one of the group members and I after the plane finally completed its taxi to the gate and people started to collect their luggage from the overhead compartments:

Chinese Guy (to his buddies, while pointing to me): 老外！Foreigner!
Me (to myself, while pointing back at him): 本地人！Local person!
Chinese Guy: 哦！那我们说的国语你听得懂吗？ Oh! So you can understand our language?
Me: 不好意思, 我完全听不懂你刚才说的话. 我从来都没学过你们的语言. I’m sorry, I totally don’t understand what you just said to me. I’ve never studied your language.
Chinese Guy (to his friends, as he turns away from me): 他听不懂... He doesn’t understand…
Me (to myself again): 哈哈. Haha.