The other day I boarded the bus as usual and held my wallet up to the sensor, but there was no sound. I took the transit card (交通卡, jiaotongka) out of my wallet, held it up directly, and it still didn’t work. I tried a few more times, and nothing.

Turns out my transit card was completely dead. It’s not damaged and nothing happened to it recently – it just stopped working.

I’ve still got 70 – 80 RMB left on it, so I went to the metro station to find out what was going on. They couldn’t read the card either, but said I could leave it with them to be examined. In 10 days, if they can salvage the information from the card based, they’ll issue me a new card with the balance from the previous one.

But if they can’t? I’m completely out of luck – all they’ll give me is a new card with a 0 RMB balance.

If I’m out 70 RMB, that sucks but I’m sure I’ll survive… but I’ve seen* people that carry balances of hundreds of RMB on their cards or more. Knowing now that if your card gets lost or messed up some how you could lose it all, I’m never going to carry a balance of over 50 RMB again!

* When someone swipes their card at the turnstile or on the bus, their card balance appears on the screen and is visible to anyone else around. In the case of senior citizens, when their discounted card is swiped on the bus a voice blurts out “老人卡!” (or lao ren ka, literally ‘old person card’). China never was known for its sense of privacy.