A subway ride in Beijing

I rode the subway today back to the Westin hotel from Beijing's Capital Museum.  The subway was fairly empty by Beijing standards.  Most seats were taken and some people were standing.  At one stop some seats empty out and a family of four gets on, a grandmother, grandfather, mother, and son.  They head for an empty seat.  The child, a plump five or six year old, plops on the seat ahead of his grandmother.  His mother hurriedly tries to shush him out of the seat.  His grandmother stands closet to the seat, but the child is bewildered.  The mother starts talking sternly to her son.  People are starting to stare.  Such disrespect of one's elders in simply unacceptable here.  Then again, he is only a child, does he know better?  He squirms and pushes back against his mother.  One of the men sitting across from this situation looks up at me.  Sheepishly, he smiles.  The subway car is observing a middle class family losing face, and there is a white man aboard.

The mother, using a combination of stern words and pushing, eventually convinces the son to move.  His grandmother takes his seat.  And just like that, the commotion settles and all returns to normal:  passengers are staring into space, talking to each other, reading.  The child has stopped crying and started gawking at me.  He is their only one.  And unless they pay a hefty penalty, he'll remain the only one.  And his now-flustered grandmother, who probably usually feeds him candy and spoils him to tears, is now thinking, however briefly, that this might be a good thing.