At the hotel’s immaculate breakfast buffet, I overheard an American businessman, at the next table, talking to his coworkers about the time in Shanghai he was being driven to a construction site.
The taxi driver was driving recklessly, even for mainland China, and the businessman chortled, said that in China there are “no rules” on the road. It’s every man for himself.
The taxi driver, the businessman went on, was a slender man, who had a ridiculous combover, like what remained of his jet-black hair just plastered to the
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer left side of his skull, and that the driver been quiet. But then the driver began speaking, suddenly, in near-perfect English, of how his family was displaced, forced from their home, their village of centuries, due to the construction of a trendy new English-named shopping/condominium complex.
The driver was tearing up, honking at everything. His driving becoming even more erratic and herky-jerky, full of fits and stops, sharp turns. The businessman getting whiplash. The driver’s voice raising, strained and venomous. The driver recounting how his wife was dragged from her home, beaten and arrested, and his wife’s parents had had their belongings carted out and dumped in the street.
The closer the taxi got… the larger the construction site grew in the windshield…
the angrier the driver became. The driver’s hands trembling, a look of blood in his eyes.
“All this to build shopping mall. Shopping mall, build shopping mall!” the driver kept repeating.
The businessman said that he feared the cab driver might turn on him. That he’d heard of a French businessman recently stabbed on the street in Shanghai and that no one stopped to help and that the police in China generally don’t do anything aside smoke cigarettes and play on their phones and that you’d need to bribe them to do anything. And that they’d certainly never side with a foreigner, even a businessman from a Fortune 500 company...
The American businessman was really panicking, silently. Worried that any second the driver might jerk the car to the side of the road and break out a knife or blunt object.
But once they reached the construction site, the driver hushed silent. The businessman then paid the driver, cautiously, and stepped out of the car.
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