Highways, Hunger, Home (Chapters 0-2)

February 17, 2025:

Ms. Li (Li Mei) driving me toward Huizhou

On a Monday evening as the amber haze of the Shenzhen skyline dimmed and blurred behind us, Li Mei steered her electric taxi steadily onto the highway. She hadn’t left her car since early morning. By the time I got in, she had completed a full loop through the third biggest city in China. She started from Longgang on the east side, to Futian’s CBD, then to Bao’an on the West end of the city, navigating congestion, recharging between dispatches, and pausing only briefly to chew through a cold Baozi while waiting at a red light.

After pulling two all-nighters for an online debate tournament based in the US with my partner and two other debater friends, we decided to rest in our homes in Shenzhen for the following day and call a Didi (the Chinese equivalent of Uber) back to school at Huizhou, a neighboring city that takes a little less than 2 hours, that evening. The driver we met was a mid-aged woman, her tone weathered from a whole day of work. She spoke with a discernible Guangxi accent, and initiated our conversation—over payment. 

“You’ll need to pay the toll for me to return to Shenzhen through the highway. When we get to your drop-off point in Huizhou.”

Her voice was succinct, practical, edged with a certain weariness. From the outset, she was vigilant and sharp from the outset.

“Which route did you pick?” she asked, her body leaning over to check my navigation APP screen. “Different routes have different tolls. You might as well pick the slow one, the one that avoids all highways just because it’s cheaper. But that’d take forever. That’s not gonna work.”

“Nah I picked the highway, the shortest way. It takes 19 yuan one-way, so going to Huizhou it’ll take 19, and coming back is another 19. That makes 38 and if we’re good with that math, I’m happy to pay it right now.” I titled my phone sideways so the driver could see my screen clearer. Three twisting lines traced out the routes in light blue, and a gentle click dyed the one harboring the sea azure. “19 yuan,” it reads.

The driver’s head lowered, rose up, and lowered again, inspecting my screen from different angles and heights with scientific precision. Her vigilance, at that time, already had me wondering if she had been tricked into accepting the slow route before. Caution this particular was hardly common.

“Going on Huizhou-Shenzhen Coastal Expressway from this entrance…then this exit…that’s 19. Twice of 19 is 38. Twice of 19 is 38.” She spoke, sometimes, like a calculator with a conscience, one used to running the numbers, juggling the geographic and financial costs of every choice she made and deal she accepted. Her Guangxi accent was sharp and fast-paced: efficient, clipped, pointed.

We weren’t fifteen minutes into the drive when she muttered, “哇，车不够电哦.” Her EV—designed and manufactured by a domestic company Shenzhen now favors in its green transition—would be running low by the time we reach our destination. Her car needed a recharge every half-a-day. There was supposedly a charging station at the destination, but she’d never been there herself. “那边一般很少,” she muttered, meaning charging points in that area were uncommon. Her plan was to get to Longgang after the drop-off and charge there. But she wasn’t sure her battery would hold.

Mileage, road tolls, and charging stations. For 20 minutes, we made boring calculations on the mundane basics of taxi-driving. Yet it’s not as if these decisions embody a straightforward simplicity, the whole purpose of which resides within the shell of a cracked nut. The kernel of truth lied outside of the kernel: Li Mei managed every detail of her life like she managed her taxi route. Tightly. Mindfully. On thin margins.

Rooted in Terrace

Li Mei’s story did not begin with the hum of an electric motor or the glare of city lights. She grew up climbing up and down emerald rice terraces in the periphery of Guangxi’s Liuzhou prefecture. “You see those dirt mounds?” she asked, pointing through the windshield at the undulating silhouette beyond the expressway, traced by rich greenery that assumes the hue of dark blue at dusk. “In my village, they were steeper, anomalous—sharp like dragon’s teeth. Some were covered by trees. Others were so vertical that vines barely clung on their sides. We carved rice paddies from every slope possible.”

Born in 1978, Li was the third of six children in a farming family whose lineage stretched back generations. “Every household did a mix of agricultural tasks for sustenance. But my father mainly grew rice; my mother raised pigs,” she recalled. “There was no fertilizer. Everything came from composted straw and animal and human dung. We fed on what we grew.” Her childhood chores began at dawn: feeding the pigs, hauling water from the well, and weeding and planting seedlings in muddy fields. “If you weren’t working by sunrise, you were shirking your duty,” she laughed.

She remembered 2006, the year the flood came. “They called it a once-in-a-century torrent, the same label they used on the flood that came about a decade before. Every time there’s some sort of mass destruction, they blame it on a ‘once-in-a-century’ natural disaster.” The tides washed away homes and harvested paddy alike. “I was fourteen, or fifteen,” Li recounted. “Water reached my waist. We carried our siblings on our backs to the hilltops and watched everything float away—our crops, our fences…It just happened. Fate or luck or deities, there were all sorts of narratives around. It’s hard to tell.”

Education was a luxury in her village. The nearest school was kilometers away, in a valley blockaded from the outside except for muddy, twisting roads that crack open the mountains’ barriers. Natural barriers were not half as potent as familial ties, however, as many families kept their children away from schools to help with the fields at home. Li attended sporadically but excelled in reading, devouring borrowed textbooks by candlelight. “I loved stories—of far-off places outside of the mountains, of people who weren’t farmers,” she said. “It wasn’t until I escaped the mountains that I realized how Guangxi is deemed a pristine place of beauty, a top tourist destination. I was desperate to get out, and others paid to come in for a visit,” Li said with a wry smile. By her early 20s, she had saved enough through odd jobs to move to Liuzhou, where she found work in a small guesthouse.

Li Mei still refers to Guangxi as “back home,” though she admits she has no plan of going back. “Maybe when I retire,” she says, half-heartedly. The truth is that return—like retirement—is a fantasy she no longer believes in.

Sometimes, when the exhaustion hits hardest, Li Mei fantasizes about the village. The sound of frogs at night, the smell of rain on red soil. “I miss how quiet it is. How the stars are so bright, you can’t even count them.” But the same silence feels lonely now. “I went back once during the Spring Festival. I couldn’t sleep. No cars, no phones buzzing. I didn’t belong anymore.”

Return, then, is not about geography. It’s about a time and self that no longer exists. “Even if I went back, who would I be there with? Not a daughter. Not a wife. Just someone passing through.”

Captain Clock

Li Mei started driving taxis nearly nine years ago. “I used to work in a hotel—cleaning rooms, folding bedsheets, wiping mirrors and windows. Six days a week, twelve hours a day,” she recalled. “You always had a supervisor watching, telling you to bring a bottle to Room 803, or to search Room 507 for a customer’s missing belt. The higher-up felt like a shadow. And I don’t like being watched.” Taxi driving freed her from the supervisor’s gaze. “I pick the hours, I pick when I eat, I pick when I stop, for most part. No one’s out there checking on you,” she contemplated. “But still, that doesn’t mean it’s not tiring.”

A typical day for Li Mei starts at 6:00 a.m. “I wake up, heat up a bit of water, boil an egg, stretch my legs, and then head out before the sun gets too high.” She prefers morning rush hours: fewer drunks or erratic passengers. By midday, she’s already driven ten to fifteen passengers. She’ll have grabbed a bun, maybe some porridge, from a street stall near wherever she happened to be at that time, most often Luohu. “吃外面的不好,” she did not trust food away from home. But “there’s no other choice for lunch when you’re out driving.”

By the afternoon, the hours blur. “You’re not thinking. You’re just automatically moving and scanning—app, street, app, passenger. Red light. App. Ding! New order.” She’d need to make choices: will this fare take her to a place with charging? Will she arrive at the pickup point in time? Will she hit the 500-yuan threshold for the day, or will traffic and a string of short-distance fares kill her earnings?

Evening gets tougher. “I don’t eat dinner until I get home. I don’t like eating away from home or on the road. It’s not healthy.” When I asked what she ate at home, she said, “Sometimes a bowl of noodles. Sometimes porridge or rice noodles with pickled vegetables. Nothing fancy.”

Li Mei lives in an urban village in Longgang, on the far edge of Shenzhen, where rent is lower and buildings are older. “We don’t have elevators,” she said, “So rent goes down as you go up the floors—no one wants to spend two minutes climbing the stairs after ten or twelve hours of work. I rent a small room on the fifth floor. Though to be honest, not everything about living on the top floors is bad. Take the second floor: it’s a lot more gloomy, humid, drab. It’s blocked off from sunlight by the neighboring building, and its windows open directly to the wet, narrow, slippery, smelly alleys. Theft usually happens on the lower floors, if it does happen. Almost every window is covered with anti-theft nets now.”