Death proof
(Downtown Suzhou in rush hour)
Rush hour is pretty horrific here. This picture is taken of the bike lane with all the cars behind. You can see the ridiculous UV visors that many people wear – but you need them to keep the flies out of your eyes and mouth! You can see one lady in the centre of the image wearing a shirt backwards; this is really common and I think it’s to keep clothes clean from the fumes and to protect paler skin from the sun. There are also fabric armbands like shirt sleeves and long shawls with arm sections to keep the sun off. A bit like Britain four hundred years ago, it is deeply unfashionable to be brown here – the theory goes that the whiter you are, the less you must work in the sun, and the better family you must have. Slightly more harsh than the British model of whiteness – which just means you haven’t been on a beach for a while. As you can see, no one else has a helmet – just me, but it does have a nice visor.
Taxis here look like a blue version of the yellow cabs in New York, much more speedy looking than the chubby black hackney carriages in the UK. The outside generally looks tatty, but only because the fumes degrade any shiny surface in a matter of days. Once inside, the seats are covered in a probably flammable synthetic fabric in white. Every taxi has these elasticated covers and always in fresh white.
To achieve the atmosphere of a Chinese taxi, watch the film ‘Death Proof’; it’s a very stupid movie and I don’t recommend it, but the car featured has an impenetrable cage built around the driver, hence the name. So it is here; a fairly ordinary car interior is divided by roughly welded metal bars (in the case of a female taxi driver) or in most cases with a thick transparent plastic shield. Either fortification is lashed to the base of the seat and to a bracket on the ceiling with cable or rope. This shield protects the driver only, so they are boxed into one corner of the car. Money and receipts have to be handed under or over these barriers with an awkward twist of the drivers elbow.
It’s the same as taxis anywhere, just it has this home made, improvised feel about it. The best bit though is the automatic machine in some that reads out the price in a little electronic Chinese lady voice. In Shangai she reads in English too and it says something along the lines of; “Thank you for travel in my Taxi, Thirty dollar and ten. Please check all your items before leaving my taxi. I wish you harmonious day”. Funnily enough, whilst many drivers in Suzhou are cheery and often chatty, the ones we met in Shanghai did not look very harmonious at all.
