So near, yet so feared: first case scenarios
Cecilie Gamst Berg
The last time I went to Shenzhen there were so many firsts I could hardly count them. First of all it was on March 1.
Second, when we reached the Huanggang crossing (taking a bus there from Tung Chung rather than going by MTR to Lo Wu shaves off more than an hour's travelling time for me) we found, instead of the usual zero to two incomers lolling in front of a foreigners' passport line, a long queue of several nationalities, including mainlanders. The time I'd saved by taking the bus was soon lost.
Then my friend was refused entry to the mainland. That was not only a first, but a sub-first, a minus-three kind of first. They took her into a little alcove for "further investigation". They asked her to explain how her Apec business travel card and passport had different numbers (but the same name and photo). Good question, the answer to which was that she'd been issued a new passport since receiving her Apec card.
"It worked in Indonesia, Korea and many other countries," she protested.
Ah, but those countries' passport inspectors weren't as eagle-eyed as those of the Huanggang border crossing, were they!
"You will obey the law of our country," the immigration officer retorted.
After half an hour or so of official teeth-sucking she was taken away and bundled into a bus bound for Wan Chai.
"Save yourself! Tell my mother I love her!" was the last thing I heard. (Later, she told me, she hadn't been "bundled" but "frogmarched".)
Thus rattled I felt some fortification was needed to steady my nerves and told the taxi driver to drop me at the Friendship Mall, comprising hotel, massage parlour and a very good yum cha restaurant I had visited many times.
Today it looked different; brighter. The reds were redder, the golds more golden. Had it been redecorated, with exactly the same decorations?
Then I saw it: the restaurant had been made smoke-free. Each table had a big cardboard "No Smoking" sign with threats of 50 yuan (HK$63) to 5,000 yuan fines for transgressors. No ashtrays were to be seen, but it was still amazing that not a single person was smoking. This was a first so mega-first, I can only pray it won't be the last, and that all restaurants in the mainland will follow suit.
But there was more; in the toilet an attendant rushed into the only cubicle with a sit-down toilet and covered the ring with kitchen roll, knowing the silly foreigner would actually sit on the ring instead of squatting on it like normal people. That was definitely the weirdest first of that weird, weird day.
