Metro Volunteering

Over the National Day holiday, I signed up for a bilingual volunteering program with the Guangzhou Metro, giving directions and solving problems at Airport North Station and Gaozeng Station. When I signed up, I figured it would be simple enough: the metro is always busy, so it wouldn't be boring. A few days in, what I got out of it went well beyond "a volunteering session."

Airport North Station sits beside Terminal 2 of Baiyun Airport: Exit B leads straight into the terminal; Exit A opens onto a coach station, ride-hailing pickups, and the shuttle bus to T2. The concourse is huge and always full—plenty of travelers from other provinces, and plenty from abroad. Being a transport hub, it brings a constant stream of people and stories.

Guangzhou Metro rules say children under 1.3 meters ride free. Some parents come to the TVM (ticket vending machine) just to buy a ticket for their child: the kid has no phone, so no ride code. Others get their child through the gate and then find themselves stuck outside. When that happens, we guide them to the smart service center or the ticketing machines to refresh a code or a card.

For passengers who ride free with credentials—active-duty military personnel, say (veterans don't get the free-ride benefit)—you have to find the "free entry channel" near the entrance, find staff from the service center, or press the "help" button on the gate to "summon" someone over. At some stations there's a camera above the free-entry channel connected to the station control room, so the gate can be opened remotely. In my view this part is troublesome: it still depends on manual checks and is inefficient, and it may lead some people to give up the free benefit just to get in and out faster.

Before I came to study in Guangzhou, I had my worries about "what if I can't speak Cantonese." Many people online said that on campus, everyone generally speaks Mandarin; unless everyone present speaks Cantonese, it usually won't be the default—only some older locals might not speak Mandarin. But during my shifts, passengers did ask me questions in Cantonese. I listened hard, leaning on the ear I've built up over a year in Guangzhou—and they switched to Mandarin almost immediately. This kind of code-switch happens all the time: the moment they catch my split-second hesitation, they move to the safer, more reliable choice: Mandarin.

One passenger asked: "The restrooms at this station are outside the gates. Can I leave and come back to keep riding?" I almost answered, "You'd have to exit." Then I learned: you can exit for free and re-enter through the same channel for free—staff just have to process it. I learned that in pre-service training. If I hadn't come to volunteer, I might have spent the rest of my life holding it in, or paying double the fare. And if I'd simply asked, I could have known all along.

After a few hours by the ticket machine, I found its design genuinely confusing. It only accepts 1-yuan coins and 5- and 10-yuan notes; many foreigners only have 20s, 100s, or 1-yuan notes—none of which fit. Not accepting 100s is understandable: buy a 2-yuan ticket, and it would have to spit out 98 coins. But not even accepting 1-yuan notes is hard to justify. The home screen displays two ways to buy at once (pick a destination, pick a fare), and you don't know where to start. The interface has English, but the current station name appears only in Chinese—foreigners just stand there, at a loss. That missing translation causes foreign visitors real trouble. But that's a topic for another day; I took a lot of photos and will add them later.

The ceiling of Gaozeng Station has 170 lamps (I counted—may not be exact). By day, only 40 are on; around 18:25 in the evening, they all come on. It's for energy saving, of course—but at night the station ends up brighter than in the daytime, and the whole station's vibe shifts away from that dim, gloomy daytime look.

I had always taken the metro for granted. Volunteering was the first time I saw how it actually runs: three kinds of people, with layers of access. Station staff wear yellow, with caps and walkie-talkies; their cards tap them straight through the gates and open the free doors and the control room. Station guides wear red, carry walkie-talkies, and can open the free doors—but can't tap through the gates or enter the control room. Volunteers also wear red; sometimes we clip on a walkie-talkie, but there's no door we can open and no gate we can pass. Who can do what, and who holds what access—behind it all is a full accountability system. And yet, step backstage, and everyone is just a person, with a life and things to talk about; step out of the station control room, and they become part of that vast system as passengers see it.

Volunteering feels great: needed, and respected. Putting on that vest feels like joining a group; the group covers up my personality and makes me one of those people who can be asked for help as a matter of course. Seeing a problem solved—the glance back, the smile, the "thank you"—the sense of accomplishment is real.

But the vest has no boundary. On breaks I didn't take it off: someone asked me for directions on my way to the restroom; in the mall, someone asked where the kids' play area was. A volunteer seems plausible anywhere.

The most fun of all was dealing with foreigners. For my first 18 years, I'd hardly ever truly put the English I'd learned to use: apart from platforms like Discord and Tandem that I sought out myself, offline it was basically zero. I saw this event as a precious chance.

Among the foreign travelers at Airport North, many come from the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa; European and American faces were rarer, and rarely came to us for help.

Exam English is one thing; real English is another. Terminal, interchange, transfer, change, currency exchange, banknotes... words that exams rarely touch—I learned them all on this job.

ride code——乘车码
payment password——支付密码
terminal——终点站
interchange——换乘站
transfer——换乘
change——找零
currency exchange——外汇兑换
banknotes——纸币（as the ticket machines put it; "bills" in American English）
n yuan notes——n 面额的纸币（same）
platform——站台
concourse——站厅
tap in——进站
tap out——出站
last train——末班车
…

After answering a foreigner's question, I'd smile, nod, and send them off. Only before my last shift did I learn to close with "have a good one."

The traveler who left the deepest impression spoke fluent American English. He spent a quarter of an hour buying his ticket, then passed security and just... didn't go in. I watched him for a while, then decided to ask. He'd booked his hotel through Booking, and the "hotel" had no name—its name was its address. Neither Amap International on his phone nor Amap on mine could find it; then I tried searching "street name plus house number"—"Tianhe North Road, No. n"—and found it. Looking at his screenshot, I realized: it was a room in a residential compound—a homestay, not a hotel. I think the platforms and hosts that provide lodging should offer English or language-matched versions, to make searching and asking directions easier. As he left, I taught him the "street name plus house number" search. He said something that made me happy for a long time: "You are the first one I met who understands where I am going." In that moment, I felt that learning a foreign language was worth it: I really had become a piece of the bridge linking China and the world. Using a translation app and speaking off the cuff are two entirely different things.

Of course, there were times I had to use a translation app. To avoid being presumptuous, I handed him the language-selection screen and let him choose for himself: it turned out to be Russian. With a middleman in between, communication gains a little friction. Still, with simultaneous interpretation getting better by the day, perhaps this won't be a problem for much longer.

Another passenger looked nothing like a Chinese person, yet spoke remarkably standard Mandarin. We were addressing him in English when he asked us to speak Chinese: "Talk to me in Chinese—I understand it." While answering his question, I stole several glances at him; he didn't seem to be from an ethnic minority, either... I pulled out my Amap, which I hadn't yet switched back to Simplified Chinese (so the interface was still in English), and told him to transfer at Jiahewanggang. He read my English screen with surprising smoothness, murmuring "Jiahewanggang" under his breath—which left me wondering once again: was he simply practicing his Chinese?

One more encounter: a passenger who looked a bit like a Cantonese local asked me how to pay. I said, "WeChat or Alipay—just your payment code." Then he opened his mouth and said "Alipay," followed by an enigmatic smile. I froze: another Chinese person practicing English, or had I mistaken an East Asian from somewhere else for a Chinese person? Luckily, my story with this passenger wasn't over. I saw that his payment page wouldn't even open, so I said to him in English: "Need a hotspot? I can turn one on for you." (There's free Wi-Fi in the airport terminal, but none in the metro station.) That was when I saw it: his phone interface was in Korean. During the minute I spent waiting for him to buy his tickets, my brain was frantically searching for Korean greetings, and all it could come up with was "안녕하세요" (annyeonghaseyo). "Come on, brain, think—how do you say have a good one in Korean?" Unfortunately, I still couldn't squeeze out a single sentence. I just sank into my own private misery: over having presumed his nationality and his language, and over being unable to make it right (how do you say goodbye to a stranger in Korean—politely, without being overly familiar?). After the passenger got his own and his child's tickets, he simply looked back at me, nodded, and gave me another enigmatic smile. After the awkward laugh, I made up my mind: learn more everyday greetings, in more languages. They'll come in handy someday.

Looking back over those days, I realize I was doing the same thing all along: when a flaw in the system traps a passenger, a volunteer steps in to patch it. So if this volunteering had to be summed up in one sentence, it would be: we volunteers fill the gaps in the system (ticket machines, signage, route maps...). And most of those gaps can be improved. How much improvement counts as fixed? Roughly this: enough people can buy tickets, get into the station, and find their way—without any of us standing there. A better system, perhaps, should leave its volunteers idle.