Forklifts in the Night, Exchanging Autos

During the period of my life when I was studying abroad in Taipei, Taiwan, I was an inveterate walker. Whenever I visited a new place, I would buy a map and set out on a peripatetic exploration at the first opportunity. And while in Taipei, I routinely spent long stretches of time walking around the city by myself at all hours, familiarizing myself with its geography and making serendipitous discoveries.

One of those discoveries occurred late one night when I was walking down a narrow sidestreet. I came upon a forklift that was unceremoniously picking up cars parked on one side of the street and depositing them on the other, proceeding car by car down the block. The scene was so surreal, and yet the manner in which the driver was going about his work was so casual, that I could only stare for a moment, chide my lying eyes, and keep walking. In the years since, I’ve sometimes wondered whether that strange sight was actually just a product of my febrile, sleep-deprived brain, which was on constant stimulus overload back in those heady days abroad—especially since it was the dead of night, and I had quite possibly been drinking beforehand. Now, however, after a quick search online, I have video evidence that such things do happen (in Taiwan, at least):

For all I know, this sort of thing is a routine occurrence that the locals don’t even bat an eyelash at. At the time, it felt as if I had wandered off into some kind of Bizarro World where people with forklifts can do whatever the hell they want, where Dude, Where’s My Car? has a radically different plot, and where street cleaners have a better option than punishing hapless residents with $40 parking tickets. (I make this comment as a former San Francisco resident who, like many others, unwittingly helped fill the city’s coffers by occasionally forgetting to move my car.)

But just as one person’s geeky is another person’s cool, what seems absurd in one society is completely normal in another—a fact I’ve often been reminded of during my adventures in China (and probably just as often living in the United States, which I’m well aware is by international standards a profoundly strange country). In any case, it’s nice to know that this, at least, was not something I merely hallucinated.

A little bonus anecdote: Thinking about different standards across societies, I'm reminded of the radically different idea people in China have of what constitutes appropriate driving behavior. After a Shanghainese friend of ours violated one too many traffic regulations (which presumably are more than just rumors in Shanghai, even if they’re not actually enforced), I asked her ironically if she even knew what a stop sign was. “You know, the octagonal red sign with a big ‘停’ (tíng, the character for ‘stop’) on it?” To my eternal astonishment, she literally did not know what I was talking about. I had to explain the existence and function of stop signs to a woman who had been driving—accident-free, mind you—for many years. And no, she wasn’t joking; although there are stop signs in Shanghai, there aren’t many of them, and the fact is that they just aren’t much of a factor in the decisions that Shanghai’s eminently practical drivers make. As I contemplate the traffic ticket my mother once got in a U.S. suburb for a “rolling stop” at a stop sign, even though the intersection was completely free of any pedestrians or other vehicles and she had a perfect driving record, I can only shake my head. Two different extremes, indeed.

If you don't recognize this, you're probably a
driver in a major Chinese city.