Add this to the list of reasons I need to learn Chinese, actual Chinese, not just restaurant and survival Chinese:

About three hours into the trip from Dandong to Dalian, the driver of my group taxi tapped me on the leg and said something utterly incomprehensible. I closed my laptop and squinted at him. He repeated what he’d just said, and I tried to catch a few words, just to get the meaning. Nothing. Well, nothing useful. I heard, “dianhua”—phone—but mine hasn’t been working since getting back into China two days ago. He pulled out his own, spoke in chopped phrases to someone, then handed it to me. It was my friend Wayne in Dandong, my usual fixer for things in that city. He’d arranged the van ride.

“The driver says he needs to drop off two passengers at the port,” Wayne told me. “He wants to drop you off somewhere near your university. You pay him only 100 yuan.”

“Near? Does he know where my university is? The port is on the opposite end of the city.”

“He’ll give you a discount and you can take a taxi the rest of the way.”

“It’s a 30-kuai ride from the port to campus. Tell him he can drop me off last if he has to.” I handed the phone back to the driver. He and Wayne spoke. There was some agreement reached.

A few minutes later, we slowed to a stop. We were still on the freeway, not on the shoulder but in the white-striped area before the lane splits into an exit and the rest of the roadway. The driver came around, opened the door and told me to get out.

I looked around, squinting again because I left my glasses in my apartment, trying to figure out where we were. It wasn’t in the city. “Here. You get out here,” the driver said again.

“Are you joking me?” I said in English. What minimal skills I have in Chinese tend to abandon me at useful moments. I crossed my arms and sat back against the window. He said something else, pleading and annoyed. I pointed to his phone, and he called Wayne again and handed the phone to me.

“Wayne,” I said, “this is nowhere near my university.” I should have stopped there. Instead I added, “Tell him if he wants to let me out here, the most I can pay him is 80 yuan.” Then I gave the phone back. He talked to the driver a bit, then the driver hung up and told me, “Yibai.” One hundred. I let loose a few words I shouldn’t have, mostly in English, but ones that might be considered “international.” Again, maybe I should have stayed put and stayed quiet.

“Eighty,” I told him in Chinese. He threw up his arms.

“Ninety,” he came back, putting his head inside the van, holding up a hooked finger to emphasize the number. We went back and forth a few times, then I budged. I offered 85, he stuck at 90, and he had me. I got out of the van, picked up my bag, and he drove away.

There was another man in the median. He had a hopeless look about him, and I wondered how long he’d been standing there. My better sense was asking me, “Why the hell did you just get out of a van on the freeway? Taxis aren’t going to stop here. If they’re on the freeway, they have fares with them. You just got screwed.”

The other guy didn’t say anything. He looked at me, then went back to trying to flag down a ride for himself. I did the same. If someone didn’t stop, I was already thinking, it was going to be a long walk back. I remember passing Metro, so I figure it’s a 20 minute drive to my street. That entails crossing a freeway on foot, though, and as much practice dashing across busy roadways, I wasn’t up for it tonight, lugging a full backpack and a laptop bag.

“Why the hell did I get out of the van?”

I waved more, frantic, stupid, standing on the shoulder, looking for the little red light in the windshield of a cab that says it’s available. One stopped.

The ride home was exactly 20 kuai. I walked up the street to my friends’ cafe. Now I was thinking about the 85-yuan bus I could have taken and asking myself, “Why the hell did I get into that van?”

What would you have done?

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 8th, 2007 at 4:23 am and is filed under roadside blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.