Why are All Taxi Drivers Crazy?
We look into the lives of those curious men in their red machines.
Everybody in Hong Kong has a taxi driver story. Some are weird and wonderful; others are outright horror shows. Some taxi drivers want to be your best friend, some want to take a tire iron to your head—and some maybe both. Cabbies can be loudmouths, comedians, know-it-alls or bores. They can also be perverts, drunks, creeps and vulgarians. But more than all that, more than anything else, it seems like all of them are just goddamn crazy.
We read about their ills everyday. They cheat people on their fares. They charge people when returning lost property. They block up the streets with their protests about fuel prices or competition from hired vans. They pollute the air with their idling engines—and when told not to, they protest about that too. Not that they’d have a clue about any of the issues they whine about, as Regina Ip famously told them.
They’re addicted to cheap booze, cigarettes and horseracing. Not to mention prostitutes and sleazy pursuits. Indeed, just months ago, tabloids were awash with rumors of a new device installed in cabs that would allow those beady eyes in the front mirror a quick wander up your skirt.
But that’s just the beginning. The darkest depths of cabbie depravity and delirium made headlines in 1982. Cab driver Lam Kor-wan was arrested after strangling a number of female passengers with electrical wire, then dismembering them in his parents’ house. Police raided the latter to find Tupperware containers stuffed with sexual organs. The case was an instant hit. It shot to the forefront of the popular imagination again ten years later with the horror film “Doctor Lamb” (1992), starring Simon Yam in a role that made Travis Bickle seem like a boy scout. The following year saw Herman Yau’s “Taxi Hunter,” in which Anthony Wong played an insurance salesman who takes revenge on all the city’s reckless, abusive, overcharging cab drivers with a shotgun. His anti-hero was one we were all meant to be able to sympathize with.
So how did cabbies get so crazy? Dr. Edmund Lam, of the Hong Kong Community Psychological Medicine Association, attributes “neurotic tendencies” and general “craziness” among cabbies to overwhelming stress. He gives a list of categories the latter frequently revolves around: income, health, self-image and limited social contact.
Income can be incredibly unstable in the taxi-driving world. It’s contingent on uncontrollable factors like the weather and fuel prices, and some of it lost to illegal discount businesses. “Last month my cab driver patients were particularly frustrated because the rain throughout June brought business down by 20-30 percent,” says Lam. Potential accidents that injure drivers, passengers or the car also bring costly consequences.