Taxi Driver

The title of The Shanghai Free Taxi refers to a rather charming and novel way to meet people, but the author intends it to be quite a bit more: a snapshot of modern China. Frank Langfitt had driven a taxi in Philadelphia in his teens, and had noticed that his passengers were conversational and forthcoming in the safe enclosed space. Decades later, when he became an NPR correspondent in China, he wanted to know how ordinary Chinese were reacting to the tectonic shifts in prosperity and culture over the last twenty years. But

Because of the authoritarian political system and circumspect culture, it wasn’t always easy to get Chinese people to speak openly

That’s where the taxi came in. Perhaps people would be more willing to talk to him if he was driving them somewhere? Foreigners are not allowed to drive taxis in China, so he came up with the idea of a free taxi.

He didn’t know the city, and was nervous that people might simply laugh at him, but

I found when you offer something for free, people don’t expect too much.

Over the next few years, Langfitt met ‘scores of passengers, from factory workers to bankers and lawyers’. He speaks Mandarin, was open about the fact that he was a reporter, and had a Chinese assistant, Yang, who accompanied him. About 10 Chinese people are followed through this book, with some more described in passing.

It’s an interesting and unusual concept, but was it successful? Judging from the book, he did get to meet people who he might not have crossed paths with otherwise. A reader may wonder how many people would (a) get into an unusual taxi driven by a foreigner and (b) speak openly to him. The author notes as a caveat the fact that his passengers are a self-selected pool.

All the Chinese are referred to by an English name or a Chinese surname to protect their identities (though I did wonder how hard it would be to identify ‘Ashley’, a Beijing University graduate with a MBA from Chicago who had worked in Paris before moving back to Shenzhen).

One thread follows Chen, a migrant construction worker from the provinces, whose wife and two daughters live outside Los Angeles. Chen’s wife, it turned out, had flown to the US when pregnant so their child would have birthright US citizenship, and then applied for asylum on the basis that she would not be allowed to have a second child in the US. Chen talks of wanting to give his family a “freer life and less oppressive education” — this seems so much like telling an American what they would want to hear, and it made me cynically wonder if there was any corroboration of some stories they told Langfitt.

Other Chinese in this book include ; an entertainingly unreliable car salesman called ‘Beer’; ‘Johanna’, a human rights lawyer who is continuously harrassed by the state police; ‘Fifi’, a teacher of politics who is in a long-distance marriage with a Frenchman (they meet every summer in France); ‘Max’, a barber called Max who provides free haircuts to the elderly, and Sun, a conspiracy theorist who insists his son works at the White House.

Langfitt ventured far beyond Shanghai when he drove two of his passengers 500 miles to Hubei province for their weddings. ‘Rocky’ worked hard to pass the bar, and is a successful lawyer in Shanghai — the epitome of the Chinese Dream. ‘Charles’ graduated from college in 2008, and travelled ten thousand miles up and down China for jobs in factories, sometimes exploited and cheated. The contrast between their parents and themselves, and between rural and urban life in China was fascinating.

At times, the book seems like a vehicle for the author’s own beliefs, especially when it comes to religion. Christianity is described as the foundation for a belief in human rights, a sense of justice, and other positive virtues.

While Christian faith helped account for the kindness and generosity of some people I knew […]

[..] the Christian faith she shared with other human rights lawyers […]

If people could worship freely, how different China might become.

At other times he appears to ascribe thoughts and reasoning to people, such as an explanation for why ‘Amanda’ did not continue meeting him.

[Government policies[ created distance between people, and in the case of Amanda, a calculation that continuing to speak with me entailed too much risk. Which is why she never showed up [..] and I never saw her again.

That might well be the reason, but I’d expect some evidence for this conclusion from a journalist.

The novel bounces back and forth between Langfitt’s various stints in China, and this can get confusing: when he says ‘One morning in July’ is he talking about 1995 or 2005 or 2015?

At times the author seems oddly naive, especially for a journalist:

I began to think that the transition to a more civil, liberal society that Americans like me had thought inevitable might take a very long time.

One very odd chapter is about Ashley, who was not a passenger in the Shanghai Free Taxi. In fact, the author first meets her online when she responds to a discussion about The Great Gatsby. Over the years, they chat online. Later he flies to Chicago and Paris to meet her, and their meetings are described in tedious,baffling detail, down to the sofa on which they sat and the fancy handbags (‘Birkin’) they examined while wandering around Paris.

Langfitt meets a miniscule fraction of the 1.5 billion Chinese, but this book provides an engaging description of that fraction.