China is the birthplace of many things, gun powder, fireworks, paper, the list goes on and on. But in all the millennia of Chinese innovation, there is one advancement that has completely eluded them, the fine art of standing in line. I’ve been here a month, and I’m still having trouble understanding that “wait your turn” is actually more of a western construct, and has little meaning in a culture driven by an underlying desperation to wedge yourself into any possible space, push ahead by any means you can, then stand as close as a lover to the people around you, and hope with all your heart everyone in front of you does the same. Turn order is determined by creeping into the cracks, rather than arrival time. In fairness, the first words I learned in Mandarin were meiyou, meaning “out of” or “don’t have,” don’t have ice at the slushy store, don’t have cones at the ice cream shop, don’t have mud crab curry, which put Porter out of countenance because it was the first thing in China he wanted badly enough to override his dad and frantically blurt out his first Chinese sentence, “Duoshao Qian,” How much is it?

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