Taxi drivers all over the world tend to be a bit sketchy at times, and I have to say the first arguments I ever get into in another country inevitably stem from the taxi driver trying to rip me off. This has happened to me in Mexico City and Rome, Buenos Aires and London. In this way, you become quite capable of yelling obscenities over miscellaneous unwarranted meter charges, unnecessary detours, and the link. Other times in taxis, you find yourself in the weirdest and most awkward situations. This situation is usually exacerbated by a language barrier. In China, this rule is no exception. Occasionally, there are some pretty strange taxi situations you encounter with taxis in China that leave you with some colorful and crazy Chinese taxi stories.

Photo: Andrew Currie

Most taxi drivers in China generally astound me with their driving abilities and many of them are really cool people. Usually their reflexes are flawless, I have seen them swerve without flinching around a female driver who thought it would be a stellar idea to cross over 3 lanes on Beijing’s third ring road, slowing down to 20 miles an hour, to take a right exit. Another night, our taxi narrowly escaped three accidents in 20 minutes as drivers in front of us simply merged into our lanes or stopped in the middle of the highway, blatantly disregarding the fact that we were in the middle lane. Usually, the drivers are quick, and masterfully weave through the lanes of traffic, albeit faster than you would like at times, but still chatting away with you about the latest current events or about other topics like Led Zepplin.

But sometimes, the situations go from odd to downright bizarre or even creepy and you suddenly have a weird Chinese taxi story. For example, one time I had just returned via train to Zhuji and I got into a taxi outside the train station. There were tons of cabs and tricicaraxis waiting as well, and the cars were all jammed in a row. The taxi started the engine and prepared to leave only to realize there was an unoccupied tricicaraxi in front of us. The driver was a younger guy, about 25 years old, with long tousled hair falling over his ears and into his face. He impatiently smacked the steering wheel, blasting the horn repeatedly at the anonymous perpetrator who was blocking us. An older man emerged with his hands in the air with a look of annoyance on his face. My driver screamed at him to move the tricicaraxi but the old man yelled back something in dialect to the presumed effect of, “chill out! I’ll move it in a second!” Whatever the response was in dialect, it was unsatisfactory, and the driver inched forward and bumped the tricicaraxi, nudging it a few feet forward. The old man was pissed. His eyes glazed over and he tried to brace himself on the tricicaraxi but the driver slowly kept driving forward. The old man ran over to the driver’s side (thankfully not to mine) and opened the door, and reached into the car in an attempt to pry the driver out of the car. The driver stopped yelling and a fiery-eyed dialogue ensued. The driver managed to push the old man out of the way and shut the door, driving forward again but by this time he had knocked the tricicaraxi out of the way. The old man, unwilling to be defeated in some effort to “save face”, lofted himself onto the hood of the car. But the driver refused to stop, and I sat there stupidly unable to do anything while the driver moved forward, the old man clinging like a barnacle to the hood of the car. The driver screeched to a halt and the man fell to the ground and we sped away as my taxi driver yelled obscenities out the window. Young Driver 1 - Old Man 0. Poor guy, I seriously hope he didn't get hurt.

On another occasion, I was in the taxi and on my daily 45-minute commute to work when the taxi driver was asking me the usual but annoying questions like if I liked Chinese food, how long I’d been in China, and so forth. He asked if I liked Beijing Opera music. I lied and said yes and so he went on and on at how culturally relevant it was for Chinese people. In actuality, I only like Chinese rock, punk, or metal bands in Beijing. Suddenly, he turns and looks at me, and starts screeching at me with the most ear piercing sounds I have ever heard in an Opera-like serenade. I wanted to throw myself out the window. With the abhorrence I’m sure my mother felt towards the metal music I blasted in my room at 6am on schooldays in high school, my poor ears instantly empathized with one who is subjected to music that they greatly despise. Sometimes there is nothing you can do about it; some music never grows on you, and the crooning taxi driver with his Beijing Opera tortured my poor ears for a good 30 minutes. Sometimes good intentions are ill received and it just creates a weird taxi story.

One time after a concert there were no available taxis because it was late and all of them had been snatched up. There were several illegal taxis, and while I am not saying this was a superb idea, we saw no real ones so we decided to take one.  I haggled the price down to 50 RMB; we were really far outside the city so that seemed like a pretty good deal. Meanwhile my friend had been negotiating and the driver was trying to get her to agree to pay by the km. I reconfirmed 3 different times that it would be 50 RMB and we got in. About fifteen minutes into the drive, the man points to his odometer and tells us that it’s 2 RMB per kilometer, it had been 30km. WHAT!? Oh nooooo pengyou! I told him that was a bunch of crap and that he said 50 RMB so it was 50. He pointed to my friend and said, “She said 2RMB per km.” I promptly told him that she only briefly discussed it with him and that I didn't care what they had discussed because he and I had agreed on 50, three different times. He sat there and argued for what seemed like an eternity, adamantly refusing to go down in price. We told him we weren’t paying that much; he screeched on the breaks. There was probably not a lot of intelligent thought in the next action, but we all got out of the car on the side of the road. I would never do this in the US by the way, because someone will chop you up into pieces, but China is safe so, despite being a bad idea, we got out and started walking away from the car. The guy stayed in his car wondering what we were going to do. We stood about 30 feet away waiting in the darkness for a taxi to come along. And we waited. And waited. I think about 20 minutes went by when the guy got out of the car to tell us again that he wanted to charge us 2 kuai a kilometer, which wasn’t going to work. Out of sheer principle, we were not going to give into his shenanigans and my friend was drunkenly trying to be belligerent both in Chinese and English but the guy wouldn't leave. So we waited some more and finally what seemed like an eternity later headlights appeared in the distance and a beautiful blue and yellow Beijing taxi pulled up. We practically leapt and ran for it and jumped in, very happy to have been saved from beside-the-highway abandonment on highway-middle-of-nowhere-China.  In the end, we ended up paying 80 RMB to get home in a real taxi, and know what? It was worth every penny. Stay away from the illegal taxi pirates.

The list of weird incidences goes on and on, from having a taxi driver stroke your beard to one chasing after your friend with a brick because he threw up in his car, to a driver who twitches like he is in serious need of a straightjacket, everyone has their own China weird taxi stories. Taxis are a necessary part of life here in China when you can’t drive a car. Like everywhere in the world, you are bound to happen upon some weird taxi situation and encounter some weirdoes here and there creating the weird taxi stories.  The situations might be odd, uncomfortable, funny, shocking, or freaky, but alas, you have no recourse.  You are at the mercy of these taxi drivers and you never know what’s going to happen as they flip up the sign and the meter starts running as they pull out into the highway…all as usual or China crazy taxi story?

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