Taxi app

By:  September 6, 2025 Categories: , 

I get into the taxi, as the driver looks at his phone to see the route.

Driver: “What?! A six-kilometer drive, I only get 13 RMB?!”
He looks over to me in the back seat.

Driver: “How much do you pay? What does it say on the app?”
Me: “16 RMB it says.”

Driver: “Yesterday I did a 23-minute drive, and I only got 13 RMB. What’s the point, how can I earn money? I better stop the app in the morning and take a rest, just do evening and night.”

And he continues: “Last week, I did a ride, the passenger paid 98 RMB, I got 57.6 RMB. The app says they have a rule that it’s a maximum of 20% cut they take, but that’s way more. More like 40%.”

(At the next red light, he sends a voice message about this in a WeChat group he has with other taxi drivers. He’s angry, although not at me. I leave a tip, but ask for his WeChat payment QR code, so 高德地图 cannot take a cut.)

Latest

Searching for meadows

Searching for meadows

Our new home in the Netherlands sits in a mundane residential area full of young families like ours. The street name comes from made (‘meadow’), still referring to a field that once lay here and now survives only in the name (just how the name Shanghai refers to a river that no longer exists). And […]
August 5, 2026
Degrees of wealth

Degrees of wealth

In eight years of living in China, taxi drivers or older colleagues loved to ask, “Which is better, the Netherlands or China?”, hoping for a single insightful answer that would explain everything. And now, back as a resident in the Netherlands, people ask the mirrored version: do I miss living in China? Neither question is […]
July 11, 2026
Goodbye to Guanyin

Goodbye to Guanyin

It’s a Saturday morning, and we’re in a taxi on the way to the airport. My clothes cling to my body and already reek of sweat, and that’s even before our 12-hour flight has started. Today I woke up at 5:30 to get up early and throw away the last furniture and items we used […]
June 30, 2026
Half a Jin, Eight Liang

Half a Jin, Eight Liang

Learning Chinese, or any language, makes you more aware of language in general. And one thing that surprised me is that, despite Mandarin being so different from my mother tongue (Dutch), both languages reach for the same units when weighing things: the kilogram (公斤, gōngjīn) and the half-kilogram (斤, jīn). It’s a small thing, but […]
June 24, 2026