ESL Blogs

Yesterday morning, I was waiting in line to get on my train to office. A young woman with her child stood beside me. The line went too slow, and the woman began to be anxious. After a while, she began to cut in line, try to move forward a little bit further. Maybe her move enraged the man who was in front of her. The man said to her angrily, 'don't haste, okay! There's enough time to let you get on the train.' Yeah, I thought that was right, it was a lot of time to get on the train indeed. But, obviously, the woman didn't buy it. She glared at the man and said, 'You idiot! I have to get on the train earlier than others, otherwise I have no chance to grab a seat for myself. I got the ticket without a designated seat.'

I'd like to say that any action or habit of a group of people you may see apparently must be formed based on the way how people grab the resources in a particular period of time or circumstances. We may think that the woman bad, but, on her side, it is reasonable, isn't it? Resource deficiency may compel people to compete with each other. The unfair distribution of social resources in China in the past years develops people the habits to grab resources without caring about others. And this is why people living in other countries cannot understand. They are living in different world, and they have different ways to live their lives.