IT was a tragicomedy that migrant worker Chen Weiwei would never have imagined.

Tragic because last week he was unable to buy a train ticket home for Spring Festival even though he had waited 14 hours in wretched cold and was No. 3 in a long line in Jinhua City, Zhejiang Province.

Chen was confident his position near the front of the line would ensure tickets for himself and his pregnant wife - if a couple of scalpers had not jumped ahead of him the moment the ticket window slid open.

In despair, he stripped down to his underpants, broke into the railway station office, and began ranting at a duty officer about possible fraud.

It was comic because Chen's half-nude photo spread like wildfire on the Internet. After Chen became a national celebrity of sorts, embarrassed local rail authorities agreed to help Chen and his wife get home.

Railway authorities denied any deal with scalpers to snap up and hoard tickets at a time when about a hundred million migrant workers like Chen were heading home for the holiday, the single most important Chinese season for family reunion.

Alas, near nudity does work wonders, though the naked truth about what happened may never be exposed.

This farce began at 22:00 on January 17, when Chen arrived at a railway station in Jinhua City, and then camped overnight to be one of the very first in line.

He was third in line when the ticket window opened at noon the next day. When it was his turn, the clerk told him all tickets for his hometown in Henan Province - about 1,000 kilometers away - had been sold out. There were only 100 tickets that day for Chen's hometown, and 40 ticket windows were open at the same time, the clerk reportedly told Chen.

Chen would not buy the excuse. In disbelief and despair, he twice stormed into a local railway office wearing only his underpants in a bid for attention. He first barged in on January 18, then again on the following day. "I would have run naked every day until I got tickets, if things had not worked out my way on January 19 when my (half) nude photos were taken and uploaded on the Internet," an excited Chen told Xinhua in an interview published on Saturday.

It's unclear if he deliberately had his sensational photos taken and spread. No matter, it worked - local railway authorities soon came to his rescue, agreeing to give him and his pregnant wife a pass.

Comic turn

The comic turn and "happy" ending, reminds one of Shakespeare's play, "All's Well That Ends Well." But a closer look shows that all's NOT well that ends well.

Before this article went to press, Chen and local railway officials had given many conflicting statements about how Chen would be helped.

At first, Chen said authorities helped him get tickets, but officials denied that, saying it wasn't possible because all the tickets had been sold (or so they had said).

Then officials said they got the tickets by hiring someone to queue up for Chen for around 20 hours.

And then, Chen said authorities had just flashed some tickets in his face but had never placed them in his hand.

Finally, local train bosses said they did not get any tickets at all but would still send Chen and his wife home.

These statements were so contradictory that it doesn't matter whether some new arrangement pops up before this article is printed. Any new version would reaffirm one point: local railway authorities did Chen a big favor.

Indeed, Chen was strangely calm and civil when he last talked to media on Saturday: "Sorry I was too rash in stripping. If everyone who could not buy a ticket acted like me, it would be a mess." He reaffirmed: "I didn't get any tickets from the railway station."

Good. If he did, it would be difficult for the station to explain the source of those tickets. After all, the station claimed that the daily allotment of 100 tickets for Chen's hometown is always sold out quickly. If Chen, standing third in line, could not buy one, then who could?

Let's not dwell on the dubious business here. Let's suppose everyone is clean and everything is above board. Even in that case, all is NOT well that ends well for Chen.

Chen's good luck has not and will not trickle down to millions of other low-income people.

Sheer luck

Since January 19 - the first day migrant workers began to head home for the Spring Festival - many of them across the nation have been forced to walk more than 100 kilometers in the teeth of freezing wind because either there's no public transport for their homes tucked away into mountains, or service has been suspended because of heavy snow.

Nor is Chen's sheer luck likely be repeated next year, when he again has to travel 1,000 kilometers for a family reunion. Nudity can work once, but not twice.

Actually, it was public opinion that got Chen home. No one would be interested in Chen taking off his clothes had his photos not been spread online. And every one of those photos was compelling not because of Chen's muscle or fat, but because of a railway officer's expression of impatience and indifference.

The officer was busy smoking and working his mobile phone, hardly lifting his eyes toward Chen. In each photo, half-naked Chen is seething with frustration. It's that trademark impersonal, uncaring face of an officer that most outrages netizens.

The heart sinks just to see a cat or dog shivering and hungry in the cold. How could a public servant be so cold-hearted to a man yearning for help?

Make no mistake. Chen and a couple hundred million other migrant workers are the unsung heroes of China's economic miracle. They're forced to abandon their farmland and sell their cheap labor to enable us to live better in cities, and yet some of us treat them shabbily.

Certainly, that individual officer at the Jinhua railway station cannot be blamed for the country's poor rail service for needy people, but at least he could have talked to Chen like another human being and heard him out, instead of turning a cold shoulder and yelling out, "Dress yourself!"

If the unsung heroes of China's economic miracle, such as Chen, could travel and live decently, why would they strip in the dead of winter?

People shape history; they may be cheap as labor, but they are not cheap as men. Jinhua's railway authorities are to be commended for helping Chen, but there has been no apology for that civil servant's lack of civility.

By contrast, Chen frankly apologized for his "uncivilized" behavior. He and many other migrant workers know the meaning of shame.