Rachel Feng missed the funeral, but she still got to see her dead cousin while she was stuck in the back of a Chinese taxicab.
Cho, the deceased cousin, or at least his identical twin, signaled her from a white Range Rover in the right- hand lane of Harbin’s main highway.
Rachel clutched her burgundy faux Prada handbag. Her damp fingers slipped off the cheap leather. This could not be happening.
On the other hand, a lot of weird crap had unrolled lately, from Rachel’s newfound love for steak tartar to Cho’s alleged funeral scheduled five hours from now. She’d recognize Cho’s bulbous nose anywhere. It ran in the family and dominated Rachel’s otherwise delicately-featured face. At least her nose wasn’t cocked to the left, the way Cho’s had remained after one too many fist fights.
Cho took a hard right and bumped to a stop on to the side of the road, which looked too narrow to handle a Range Rover, but a cyclist swerved around him like this was business as usual.
Rachel knocked on the Plexiglas separating her from the taxi driver. “Pull over, please,” she called in English. He didn’t turn around. All she could see was his well-trimmed, graying hairline, the weathered back of his neck, and the cigarette tucked in the corner of his mouth. She rummaged her brain for the correct Mandarin and finally dredged up a “Stop! Please!”
She pressed the lever to roll down her taxi window. Humid smog smacked her in the face. A woman’s voice said, in English, “Please do not touch any button” and the window began to roll back up again.
“Stop! It’s my cousin!” she yelled back in English, and through the glass, she called, “Cho! Is that you?” She jammed her arm into the remaining window gap, but when the glass kept rolling upward, she yanked her hand back and hammered on the Plexiglas taxi divider instead. “Let me out!”
The taxi crawled a few more feet on the highway. The woman’s voice said, “I’m sorry. We have not yet reached your destination.” Rachel had read somewhere that, since the 2008 Olympics, Beijing drivers used portable translators in their cabs. Too bad the translation only seemed to work one way. She craned her neck to stare out the back window.
Cho popped his door open and jumped out of the vehicle. She recognized the tilt of his head and the way he kicked the pavement, although he’d grown a little potbelly over the past fifteen years and he wore a camouflage hat and matching jumpsuit, like he was in the military.
It was him. Why the heck had she flown down for his funeral when he was alive and driving a Range Rover? Her aunt had said he’d been mauled by a tiger, which sounded so 18th century anyway. Maybe it was all an elaborate plot to get Rachel to fly from Canada to China? Or, more likely, Rachel was hallucinating after traveling for 24 hours?
She ripped open her wallet and grabbed some Chinese cash. She waved it at the driver and yelled, “Take it!”
He finally met her eyes in the mirror and rolled down the divider. “No,” he said.
Something about his expression made her hesitate for a second. The whites around his dark irises. The lift of his eyebrows. Then she figured she must be getting heat stroke in the confines of this greasy little cab. She left the money on the seat and yanked on the door handle.
“Wait!” he said in Mandarin. “It’s dangerous. You shouldn’t be meeting a ghost.”
She nearly laughed. She’d heard about Chinglish, that weird combination of Chinese + English = charming nonsense. But with her rusty Mandarin, she could make up Chinglish out of her own head. She opened the door.
The driver muttered to himself, but he finally wove his way on to the highway shoulder and popped open the trunk. She seized her luggage and wheeled it toward her cousin as fast as her running shoes would take her.
It was Cho. For sure. She spotted the scar under his left eyebrow from when he fell skateboarding, showing off in front of eight-year-old Rachel and her sister before their family emigrated. He’d developed a red nose and broken veins on his cheeks. Her aunt had never mentioned booze, but no doubt it had played a role in any alleged tiger mauling.
“Cho. I thought you were … ” Dead. But the words locked in her throat. She felt all wrong in China, a Chinese girl who could hardly speak Chinese. She wished again her family could have come with her. She tried again. “It’s good to see you, cousin.” Nervousness bubbled in her stomach. A burning pain lodged behind her heart, even though she too young for heartburn. She pressed her hand to her heart. Her seemed to rebel lately.
“Come on. I’ll show you the tigers,” he said.
“Tigers?” He spoke English with a Mandarin accent, so maybe she’d misunderstood him. Or maybe “tigers” was slang for how he talked about his family, the way English people would talk about bearding the lion in his den. “I’m on my way to, ah, see your mother and everyelse here.” She showed him the printout of the funeral home information. He stared at the paper blankly. She was so punch-drunk tired, she wanted to say,
“Come,” he repeated, and jumped back into the Range Rover. He must have been lighter than he looked, because the vehicle didn’t sink under his weight at all.
She hesitated for one more second. “Cho. Can you take me to see Auntie—”
“Come,” he repeated, and revved his engine.
She tossed her own luggage in the back before she climbed beside Cho and dialed Auntie’s number. It rang five times before it switched over to voice mail.
Meanwhile, Cho took the first exit off the highway and the signal faded.
Rachel cursed and texted Auntie instead. It slipped through the ether. “Cho picked me up. See U soon.”
Auntie immediately texted back, but before Rachel could open it, the signal died again.
Rachel shoved her useless phone in her shorts pocket. “Do you have a phone?”
Cho lit a cigarette held between his lips while he held the wheel steady using his knees. Just when Rachel felt like lunging for the wheel and driving herself, the tip of the cigarette glowed orange, the smoke curled around his face, and Cho grabbed the wheel in his left hand. He said, “No.”
Man. Who didn’t have a phone in this day and age. “How far is it, anyway?”
Cho shrugged. “Nothing’s far in Harbin.”
Rachel squinted at the road signs, but most of them were in Chinese. All Rachel knew about Harbin was that it was located in the northeast corner of China, it was famous for its ice festival, and Cho’s family had moved there almost ten years ago. Rachel had downloaded a map of the city, but Cho seemed to be taking the back roads and she couldn’t read the calligraphy. She said, “Is this the way to the funeral home?”
Cho smiled around his cigarette. “Trust me.”
After twenty-four hours of traveling, she really wanted to. She rolled down the window and closed her eyes.
The smoke curled in the cab, haloing Rachel’s face, but somehow the tobacco didn’t stink as much as it usually did. Muggy air drifted in from the window. Surprisingly, the weather in Harbin in August didn’t seem all that different from Toronto.
A ghost, she remembered the taxi driver saying, but she pushed the thought away and flickered in and out of a dreamless sleep. At last, she woke up with a dull headache and a dry mouth. The moon rose behind clouds, but the sun still glittered in their rearview mirror. At least it was cooler, but hours must have passed.
No response. They hit a pothole and Cho steadied the wheel.
She reached for his sleeve, but he moved away before she made contact. She realized they hadn’t touched each other, not even an air kiss. Which was okay—who knew how to greet a cousin you hardly remembered and never visited—but still.
“Cho? Food? Supper? I’m kinda dying here.”
He didn’t even look at her.
She unearthed an airline packet of pretzels in her bag and sipped her water. Soon the bottle would be empty and she’d have to pee. Either he’d let her out or she’d have to fight for the wheel. She laughed a little at the
