Passengers by Laura J. Oliver

This is the parable of three hired drivers, proving everyone who facilitates your journey is a story. 

Last weekend, I met a friend in California, where I learned a preponderance of Uber drivers in San Jose drive black Teslas. I’ve only recently learned how to get in one without feeling for the flush door handle like a mime or to get out of one without searching the interior for the invisible door release while everyone already on the sidewalk checks their watches—like if you take any longer, the driver is totally justified in just driving off with you.  

A hotel shuttle preceded the Ubers, ours driven by a sweet, older Latino man my friend knew from previous trips. As he was loading our luggage in his van, an unkempt, older woman with short, steel-gray hair, wearing a shapeless t-shirt and baggy pants, walked up and asked if he was going to take her to the Marriott. He explained politely that he worked for Hyatt. Your driver is on the way, he said. She looked at him as if he were deaf or stupid and asked her question again. My friend and I were now on alert. There was a hostile vibe in the air, and it wasn’t (is it ever?) warranted. 

Our driver was sleight, wearing a newsboy cap over his greying hair, working hard to lift suitcases, to be helpful to this stranger while mindful of us, yet she turned on him again, rolling her eyes. “Why won’t you answer my question?” she snapped.

As someone experienced with the commercial transport system in San Jose, my friend stepped in to repeat the man’s answer, causing the woman to shift her attack. “I know that! I just asked him that! He refuses to answer! What’s the matter with him?” She glared at us as if we knew where her shuttle was and had hidden it.

I can hear a therapist inserting quite neutrally now, “Laura…whose problem was this?” And me leaping to my feet to exclaim, “Mine!” Because his vulnerability made his problem our problem spiritually, and then in reality, because the woman had turned her dark energy on my friend.

 With a final assurance that her ride was coming soon, we drove off feeling a need to purge the vibe. I tried to imagine what had made this woman so small and prejudiced so that I could find a way to care about her. 

Sometimes this works.

I awoke the next morning to mountains bunched at the horizon like a lavender blanket dawn had tossed aside as she rose. By noon, we needed to be at a publisher’s luncheon in the Palo Alto hills, so we called for an Uber and saw that a black Tesla was five minutes away. One arrived in two minutes, and we clambered in. 

We’d been on the road quite a while when my friend looked out the window and whispered, “I don’t think he knows where we’re going. I think we’re on our way to the airport.” 

Upon asking the driver to confirm the address, it became clear that he spoke only Chinese. After much gesturing between the front and back seat, he turned off the freeway and drove us back into a remote residential section to straighten out the confusion. He looked very unhappy. 

“It’s okay. He’s going to check the address,” my friend said, glancing at her watch. 

“Or kill us,” I said cheerfully, looking for a house to run to. 

Confused and unable to speak to one another, the driver held up his phone, and we typed the address on the keypad then asked the phone if we could still be driven to Palo Alto. As we watched, our spoken words were translated into written English then appeared in Chinese characters. He read them and responded in Chinese, holding up an English translation. “Will pay 40 yuan?” the phone asked. 

“Yes,” we assured it, “plus tip!” We assumed yuan meant dollars but didn’t realize it also meant cash.

We climbed switchbacks into the hills until we could look out over the greening valley, the mountains now shouldering an azure sky. At our destination our driver waved away the credit card and, understandably, in retrospect, demanded cash. Miraculously, we had, to the penny, the amount we needed.

The following day, a very cheerful Chinese Uber driver picked us up. He had been in the country two years. I complimented him on his English, which is a remarkable accomplishment as a second language in any degree of proficiency, but when asked how his day was going, his demeanor changed. “Not so good. Not much drive morning.” Then he rallied, smiling at the road ahead. “Be okay.”

My friend and I looked at each other as, once again, my inner therapist asked calmly, “Laura…whose problem is this?”

And again, I elbowed her in her boundary-setting ribs to insist, Mine!

Coming to a halt in a shopping district, I handed him a tip that was 80 percent of the ride itself. His face broke into a wide smile. Thanking us profusely, he plunged his hand into a canvas tote on the front seat and thrust a juice box at each of us in turn. 

“Chinese tea!” he exclaimed, “Chinese!” he emphasized. “Tea! Very good!” 

We thanked him and got out, but that wasn’t the end of it. He got out as well! In the street. So all three of us stood there on opposite sides of the car in a thank you-palooza, us smiling and waving, him bowing with his palms pressed together as if in prayer. 

We left him then and stuffed juice boxes we didn’t want in our purses to lug around. 

“You realize we have to drink this, right?” I asked my friend. “It’s a blessing. No matter what it is, or what it tastes like, no matter how long it’s been stowed in that little black bag, we have to drink it and bless him back.”

And so we did. At lunch, we dug out the boxes, stabbed in the little straws, and toasted the man we would never see again for his kindness. “To his abundance,” my friend said, bright pink bougainvillea spilling over the window box behind her.

“Yes, may he be blessed with abundance of every kind,” we said, knowing it was we who had been blessed.

My flight home, Southwest 5661, was completely full. A guy that looked like Mark Cuban sat in front of me. A man wearing noise-canceling headphones over his silver hair sat across the aisle. Disabled passengers, young parents with infants, Silicon Valley professionals, and people like me packed the cabin.

I thought about us as subgroups of collectives—we are Chinese, we are Latino. We are broken. We are whole. 

We are Americans, and in our totality, we are humankind.  

We are human. Kind. Are you smiling?

Together, we are humanity. 

And the synonym for humanity is compassion. 

Imagine that. 

Just imagine that. 

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.