From Ginseng to Gears (Chapters 5-6)

February 10, 2025:

Mr. Hu (Brother Hu), driving me through the streets of Shenzhen in the evening.

From Root to Road

When I asked him how he transitioned into being a taxi driver, he shrugged, as if it were both obvious and absurd. For a few seconds, that was all that happened as silence temporarily took hold.

“What else was I gonna do? My family’s here now. I can’t go back to Dongbei (the Northeast). Not alone. And you gotta eat, right?”

He laughed. “走着吃比坐着吃强 (zouzhe chi zongbi zuozhe chi qiang, It’s better to work on your feet than starve sitting). That’s what we say.”

The taxi business was steady. In China, taxi driving, food delivery, and express delivery are collectively called a “triathlon” for their labor-, time-, and mobility-intensive nature. These jobs require little skills or training, and so became the default option for white collar and middle class individuals who lost their jobs over the past few years amid rising unemployment rates. He leased the vehicle himself, paid his own insurance, covered fuel, and operated under a ride-hailing app’s umbrella. “But it was still, technically, self-employment.”

“I  work when I want, in a sense. I still have to drive, though, drive until I’m tired, I should say. Nobody’s breathing down my neck, but I’ve got nothing else to do, and my family’s got to eat. There’s got to be a breadwinner.”

He leaned forward, eyes on the road. “It’s not sales, but there’s still a pitch. Every conversation is a kind of transaction. And people love to talk. Especially to someone who listens. Some people cry. Some tell you their entire business plan. I once had a passenger make me detour thirty minutes just to keep talking. He said I reminded him of his uncle in Harbin.”

Nostalgia for the North

“I miss the snow,” he said softly. “Not the cold. Just the snow.”

He described Chinese New Year celebrations, frozen lakes, streets where ginseng roots and other gifts were sold by grams and kilos, then marinated in wine or boiled in soups that steamed through restaurant windows.

“I used to know the vendors. I can tell which ones were honest and which ones sold stuff of bad quality, or used ghost scales, the Chinese slang term for manipulated electronic scales that display weight higher than something’s actual weight, often used by retail sellers to boost revenue. Which ones watered down their stock. I’d touch a root and know its grade. One glance, I’d know the soil it grew in. You can’t fake that.”

He smiled, then sighed. “No one here asks me about ginseng anymore. No one cares.”

But he obviously did. He lectured me endlessly about it.

Passengers and Passer-by

One night, he told me, a teenage boy got into his car at midnight. The boy had missed the last metro and had no money. He was driving his cab to its driving station and was about to end his day. But instead of kicking him out, he drove him home.

“I remember being that age,” he said.

The boy promised to repay him the next day. He never did. The driver didn’t mind.

“What’s twenty bucks, eh? I got a story out of it. Not all of them end that way.”

He recounted another fare—an older woman with shopping bags who opened up about her husband’s dementia. “She just wanted someone to say it to,” he said. “You know, to say it out loud.”

Some nights, he said, the conversations were better than money. “Drivers on this platform don’t do shift work, we rent or buy our own cars and drive half a day or so—12 hours—and then our car goes to rest, lying idle, like we do. I drive in the daytime because there are more passengers, and the night shift bonus is nothing big. Sometimes I wake up late and drive till late at night. Some people are very talkative at night. Others entirely silent.”

“Some of the passengers, you know, think we’re invisible. Just a hand on the wheel, which might be true one day with self-driving cars. But I hear everything. I see how the city’s changing—how prices are rising, how jobs come and go, how dialects mix. I can tell you grew up in Shenzhen, someone else moved here from the Midwest, etc. My dashboard’s like a stethoscope.”

“I’ll probably keep driving until my knees give out.”

“Unless something better comes along. But what could that be? I’m 53. No Shenzhen company’s looking to hire an old salesperson from the Northeast, you know.”

He waved to an electric bike driver cutting into his lane.

As we approached our destination, he gave me a few food recs. Mostly of Northeastern cuisine.

He dropped me off with a firm handshake and a warm “慢走啊 (Take care now).”