My reflections on China usually have to do with people I knew or things I saw, and most of those memories come from the perspective of standing at attention in a hotel lobby. Working for 13 months in a hotel, the landscape of my memory is filled with rooms, halls, passages, elevators. But in telling stories of my time in China, I notice that a pattern emerges: many interesting experiences took place in or while hailing a taxi. Hailing a taxi in Hohhot, under normal conditions, was not hard. As a "convenience"-oriented American, one of my guilty indulgences was taking a taxi when I needed to go downtown, rather than taking the bus (even though the bus would have saved me a lot of money). There were some practical reasons for this. As a blonde-haired laowai,
... read more
