Notes on Singapore

At the risk of sounding condescending, I cannot escape the conclusion that Singapore is the most adorable of any ‘major’ city in the world. Since large human conglomerations are loath to arouse such sentiments, perhaps this is a misnomer. Cities – real ones at least – should not conjure fuzzy feelings, warm afterthoughts or a yielding desire to bend over. Yes Singapore somehow does. Is the media almost entirely state-owned and censored? Yes. Military service obligatory and ethnically discriminatory? Right again. Comically patriarchal? But of course. Political demonstrations of three or more people illegal under pain of immediate arrest? Economic inequality of 22^nd century East Asian proportions? Yada. Yada. Yaditsky. All the same, the city strikes the ignorant observer as an epitome of socio-political harmony – a philosopher-king’s dream state, Plato’s Multiethnic Jungle-cum-Golf Course Republic to a T. But how do they pull it off?

I arrived at Changi airport from Jakarta and headed straight for Raffles Place – the epicenter of the city-state’s financial and commercial district – to meet an old acquaintance for dinner. Entering the plaza from the metro, you emerge into a smallish public square of perfectly trimmed grass crisscrossed by cobbled paths and ringed with rocking swings (yes, wooden, love-seats swaying to and fro). Each of said metro exits is a 15-foot, whitewashed Art Deco relic of the colonial era similar in size to those of Paris from the belle époque. What pre-mass transit purpose they may have served under the British remains a mystery, though they’re underhandedly charming all the same.

It was a warm but pleasant evening, nearing the end of rush hour, buzzing with hurried suits and perspiring whites just leaving the gym (not otherwise mutually exclusive). The smallish plaza is flanked by thundering commercial towers on each side; at least two of them jealously advertise the city’s most coveted address, ‘One Raffles Place,’ in staid neon letters somewhere between the pavement and the sky. The ground floors of each building are lined with standard high-end Asian fare: exotic sporting goods, algae-based smoothies, generic soy-based cappuccinos. A muffled ditty from ‘Brunei’s Got Talent’ hums in the background.

Of all the noise pollution, one in particular stood out. Facing the middle of the plaza from its southern end was a massive 12-by-15-foot plasma-screen projector beaming images of the good life down upon the manicured masses. As I looked up, a beautiful 7-foot blond was diving into an Olympic swimming pool somewhere in the tropics, her Patek Philip-toting 5-year old just behind her. Singaporeans were kindly reminded to consider their forthcoming vacation.

All that is good and well – such is the imagery one gets in Hong Kong and elsewhere on the double. What struck me, however, was the byline along the bottom – that ubiquitous ‘second (and third and fourth) chance’ that broadcast media gets these days: “Maoist terrorists attack farmers in vast majority of India. Thousands shot, hundreds killed. Villages razed to the ground to justify antiquarian ideological obsessions. State of national emergency declared in all but three states.” No sound bite – just the smooth, unadulterated catch-phrase flow of any line that flashes across the bottom of your screen. “Nasdaq’s down. Bulls rout Pacers. Couple wins the lottery. Muslims self-immolate. Communist Indians commit collective suicide.”

It was a spectacular sight to behold, especially given the fact that only rarely does any news outfit outside rural India cover the Nexalite movement (call it what you will). Of course, we all engage in selective amnesia: I’d rather spending my Sunday afternoon reading about organic pet spas than forced population transfers – but this was flipping that logic on its Orwellian head (forgive me the latter adjective).

Most of us recoil at the sight of bad or depressing news that the self-righteous constantly try to force upon a hard-working and sated public. Not in Singapore. Rather like their Soviet counterparts at the height of the Cold War, Singapore’s media outlets – draped in a backdrop of pious consumerism – are also there to remind you that the world is a living, breathing, stinking shit-hole beyond the moat of our Platonic realm. (Think Pravda’s portrayals of Americans brutally resisting the civil rights movement in the mid-1950s). Yet after 48-hours there I was ready to agree! As the beaming screens issue reminders of Maoist terror in India, the top-right corner of the morrow’s tabloids shows the gruesome prelude to an elevator malfunction in Mainland China (I will not go into detail but it involves a beheading). The message is very clear: the rest of the world doesn’t know what the fuck they’re doing. Judging from events, perhaps they don’t. But what’s fascinating about Singapore is the extent to which they’re convinced they do.

The first morning in town I decided to go for a stroll. Five minutes out of Little India I stumble upon the striking new campus of Singapore Management University, where said friend of mine had gone to school. There is a cute little cappuccino truck parked in the outdoor quad some 20 meters from the sidewalk. Before I get any closer, a public advertisement catches my attention. A young, good-looking bachelor with a buzz-cut (odd for the affluent and educated though fitting for the weather) is making an apologetic puppy-face, shoulders shrugged and palms turned toward the heavens as if to say, “I’d rather not share a cell with the mustachioed one from Jersey.” It seems he has been caught smoking (outside) on campus. “Bros don’t let bros get caught smoking in unauthorized parts of campus,” reads the six-foot sign in bold. It then urges you to visit their website online, broshelpingbros.gov.

Ten minutes later I am at Cunningham Fort (or some Englishman’s name I cannot recall), a choice hilltop park with views of the old colonial quarter and financial district just beyond. There are no other tourists but the grounds are immaculately kept and littered with catchy, antiquated cannons (even for the 19^th century) and poorly crafted sculptures from local ‘artists’. It is a delightful getaway in the middle of city’s choicest real estate.

As I descend the hill, I cannot help but notice the ‘Muslim Marriage Center’ at the southern end of the park. A public entity, it seemed to have been established in the same fashion as the Parks and Recreation Department or the Bureau of Cryptography. “What an endearing sight! They’ve reserved the choicest public park to for native Malays’ to get married in.” I thought it was merely the marriage license bureau for those of said religious persusion. It was not.

Several feet later one sees the massive poster appealing to the newly wed. “You’ve got the ring and booked rooms for the in-laws. Your mates are flying in from London for the after-party. Now you have do is figure out how to cohabitate for the next half-century – and that’s where we come in.” The message was simple. “Marriage is a nasty bit of work – a grueling, perpetual project of grief and restraint, boredom and anxiety. Don’t think that because you’re fresh today you’ll get booty in five years’ time. But come chat with one of our experts, collect these brochures and we’ll see to it you only beat your wife at Ramadan.”

So I exaggerate. For all I know there are state-run Buddhist and Pentecostal marriage advisory centers scattered about the city, dolling out cooking tips and how to please your man without taking off your bonnet. The point is that the state so magnanimously takes it upon itself to do so. But then again, it’s far more impressive than Bloomberg’s Nanny State. At its worse, the latter tried to wean New Yorkers off the Big Gulp. At its best, it is constantly reminding you to keep an eye out abandoned suitcases in the subway (more to do with 9/11 than the Nanny State though the two are not unrelated). Singapore, on the other hand, the sweetest, safest city on Earth, not only addresses you as ‘bro’ when reminding you not to smoke, but encourages you to alert the authorities or press the emergency button in the metro the moment you see a suspicious character. It’s really quite spectacular – a combination of the Arizona driving law on methamphetamines with the tit-for-tat denunciations that plagued every totalitarian attempt in the 20^th century (“Why’d you press the button, young man?” “He was jocking my style.”)

So we’ve reason to be enraged, do we not? Like the Yale faculty that got its panties in a bunch after Yale built a sister campus in Singapore, we must remember that this is a scaremongering, undemocratic regime with little time for freedom of expression or human rights. One that gives public lashes to naughty expat adolescents and forces domestic workers to labor seven days a week. “Capitalism with an Asian Face,” as Zizek has it, the kind that acts with as much alacrity toward slave wages and unfettered markets in the 21^st century as it did to reeducation camps in the 1970s. But is this truly the entire story?

In the very short period I was in Singapore I saw zero Officers of the Law. I jaywalked with an elderly man and smoked wherever I saw fit. In Little India, men sat beneath the vaulted archways of crumbling arcades, mashing roti between their fingers and sipping cold Tigers all the night long. Putrid music blasted from various locales. Like the all-too-common marketing admonition to “Work hard and party harder”, Singapore just wants to make sure you’re living well. That they’re living well. That the government’s living well. Setting targets and meeting them. Saving for a dishwasher and buying it. Studying for an exam and passing it. Let us not forget there is a great underlying satisfaction to meeting what are commonly derided as simple bourgeois desires. Personally, I love nothing more than scarfing dirty Swedish meatballs after a grueling afternoon amongst the moneyed plebs at Ikea.

Herein lies the moral of the story. Singapore is very successful. And wealthy. And beautiful and clean. And prosperous and optimistic, law abiding and forward thinking. Multicultural and quadrilingual. Its schools are the best in the world, its food second to none. It has the most striking botanical gardens of any I’ve ever seen. Granted, the beer is rather expensive and ‘culture’ as such is lacking, but who amongst needs galleries to appreciate a good picture? With this here Canon I just close my eyes and shoot. Expats famously claim its staid and boring: these are the illiterate, unimaginative types.

A philosopher once said that the only things that mattered to man were love of soccer and sex. Not partaking in either activity, per se, but thinking about them, watching them, talking about them. This seems a misogynistic portrait; alas, I do not allude to the human condition but rather the aims of most people. To satisfy their (increasingly sophisticated) needs. To prosper. To provide for their children and posterity. To enjoy a nice sandwich from time to time. At the end of the day we are uncomplicated beasts. Not that the village pub will anymore suffice: it won’t – but now we’ve the smart phone to keep us busy. (What did urbanites do with their gaze before this? I cannot recall).

Like all gated communities both literal and metaphorical, I have always wondered what people talk about behind the curtains. Portfolios? New shoes? Shitty new Hollywood releases? The blister on your pinky toe? Probably the same things we do in Peoria. With that in mind, I tip my hat to Singapore, scion of 21^st century achievement that you are. Kaleidoscopic Ferris wheel of social wealth and harmony. Place where mandarins go to die.

Losing Face in Beijing, p.III

On to the actual story, which has only taken us six months to recount. I suppose I have been delaying the inevitable for fear of associating my name with such a risqué and disreputable occurrence; we are beginning to verge upon the point when reputations and careers must be taken into account! As such, consider this a second-hand portrayal, an observation penned on behalf of an acquaintance not fit to feign innocence for much longer.  

It was a late Sunday afternoon and our protagonist was returning from a day atop the Great Wall, the portion of which they climbed being some 2.5 hours north of the city by combination of train, bus and taxi. He and his friends were tired but contented, having encountered the Sino Wonder of the Early Modern World on an uncharacteristically spectacular autumn day. Southern Manchuria not being a climate known for its kindness, they’d had the good fortune to stumble about the crumbling parapet under a sky of beaming rays and forgiving breezes. By any account it had been a very good day – the kind you forget too easily after a satisfying meal and a good night’s rest.

They returned to the city at dusk in search of suckling pig. Whether they found it or not the author cannot recall. It being the protagonist’s last night in town, the three of them decided to go for a drink in the center of Wudaokou, a rambling ten-block strip in the student district lined with bars and Tex-Mex joints catering to youngish Yanks, Koreans and Euros of every stripe. Though somewhat contrived, the neighborhood wasn’t without its charms. The three of them – our protagonist, his friend and the latter’s Manchurian belle – went for shisha and a quiet beer at the Lebanese joint run by a markedly pro-PLO proprietor (the details that reemerge when pen is put to paper). All rather exhausted, after a short hour they paid their bill and made for the intersection to hail an oncoming cab.

It being a holiday – the commemoration the founding of the People’s Republic no less! – the streets were awash in scholastic revelers. Bad tunes here, worse music there: there is a cosmopolitan solidarity for tasteless ditties that knows less boundaries than the Internationale at the height of the Purges. This being Beijing, our protagonist’s friend would still have to make himself scarce while his girlfriend tried to hail a ride back to the northern district where she lives: no self-respecting man would pick up a ‘local’ suspected of cavorting with a gweilo.

One rejection leads to two and after a while they are left stranded. Nay, not a single taxi would take the young maiden back to her distant apartment in district ____. In some sense it was very understandable: who would take a passenger to an airport with no incoming flights? We stood at the corner and twiddled our thumbs.

At this point I should mention a bad habit our protagonist had mentioned to his friend earlier that week. The former, whenever violently cut off by a motorized vehicle in which the pedestrian normally had right of way, had adopted the courtesy of giving said car a little tap on the back hood as he ignominiously walked behind it. It reminded the motorist, he’d convinced himself, that pedestrians also throw down from time to time. This, however, was not the placid South, the land of moist skin and marble skirts, pleated pants and buffered shirts. It was the northern plain, where Mongols rode and peasants were tamed. Some tricks don’t translate that readily.   

In his anguish to put his girl in a cab back home, the protagonist’s friend was on edge. After a delightful, if exhausting, day hiking the continent’s most celebrated relic, the combination of blaring music, drunken students and ill-natured cabbies did less than evoke a midsummer night’s dream. They would rather have been fishing, or wrapped up with a book of Welsh grammar drinking Earl Grey.

Suddenly a ricer came careening down the street. (While the author has been notified that this is an offensive term, he begs to differ: never had he heard the term used in association with any particular race or creed, other than that of poor taste). Since they were 20 meters from a red light, it didn’t seem to matter: surely the motorist would break before coming within striking distance of our protagonists? He nearly ran the girlfriend over.  

The reader is now invited to predict the outcome of the next few minutes. We have already mentioned that our friend living up north is a sensitive man: it goes without saying he defends both the honor and safety of his companion with equal vigor. Given the events of the previous week – the crazed cabbie, the constant harassment, the anguished stares and passing utterances – the protagonist’s host was in no rosy mood. Hence he did what seemed sensible at the time and gave the rushing ricer a nice little tap on the back trunk.

This, you may have surmised, is where hell breaks loose. Immediately, the car comes screeching to a halt; two youngish goons hop out. Though making quite a droll entrance, they turned out to be rather serious. Your protagonist, for his part, was entirely caught off guard. A reformist of sorts, he was also lugging around a messenger bag awash with cameras and heavy tomes: hardly the kit with which to beat back intruders. That being said, the moment forced itself upon him like a congressman from Queens. As each goon simultaneously lunged for his friend, he found himself throwing a right hook quicker than you can reject a boat of Haitians approaching Fort Lauderdale. The rest is (not quite) history.  

For those who’ve chanced upon such occasions, the ensuing action is somewhat predictable – even anticlimactic. The receiver of the first strike, a very clean blow to the ocular region, spent the next 30-40 seconds dutifully doing his best: alas, to no avail. Such are the risks of bringing about the first punch. At one point all he could do was grab our protagonist’s messenger bag and twist it round him – the latter doing his utmost to wind things down before any uninvited guests joined the melée (more of that in a moment).

The second scrapper to emerge from the car – the one who’d been in the passenger seat when poo decided to hit the fan – continued to pursue the protagonist’s friend with zeal. Alas, he too took something of a spanking, so much so that by the end of the scuffle each character from the car was in a rather sorry state. (The author has yet to divulge the discrepancy in each camp’s size: rather large). Though nothing daytime television-worthy, the brouhaha was something of a one-sided affair. Tant mieux? Not quite. 

This being a very public place, the other chief concern was that men of similar ethnic persuasion might decide to jump in. Though doubtful, I’ve been told by various ‘experts’ that in cases of foreigner-v-local this is a very real threat (think Boxer Rebellion, anti-Japanese demonstrations of last fall); no matter how peaceable things may seem between nationals and foreigners, the local mood can ‘shift’ as quickly as it takes the Fed to print a $17 trillion dollar note: damned fast, if dubiously so. The only other cause of worry, the most typical of these sorts of situations, was that of the Law. This being 1am on a holiday in a rambunctious student quarter given to BBQ joints and thunderously bad music, the Man was surprisingly nowhere to be seen.

So our boys prove rather lucky, do they not? They had forgotten one very crucial factor, perhaps the most important of all: losing face. Here they stood, in what might as well be considered broad daylight, two dirty gweilos effortlessly victorious over their local brethren who, might I remind the reader, had blatantly begun this whole affair. Their counterparts, visibly blemished, were not going to wait to dispense of their lost face in the morning. Hence the old Christian adage: if not in this life, justice in the next. In this case that would be ten minutes later and five blocks up the road.

Smelling the sour skittle for what it was, they tried to flee the scene. Their new friends were already frantically on their cell phones, calling Kevorkian knows whom: imagining the possible scenarios was less than edifying. The catch? The girlfriend was in no state to run. Not that she couldn’t – just that these things aren’t done. When was the last time you saw an elegant Chinese girl in a hurry? Q.E.D. Or, as a sagacious Frog once said, “Why would anyone run unless someone were chasing them?” In this case, however, they were.

So there you have it. Two 6’2, 200-pound lads trotting down a back alleyway as their five-foot-nothing nemesis scurries after them, screaming directions into his phone and promising all hell to pay. They couldn’t go fast enough to lose him because of the girlfriend, though they certainly couldn’t leave her behind, either. The other option, of course, was to finish what they’d begun 10 minutes earlier – thereby avoiding brothers, cousins, police, prisons, the whole lot – or at a very minimum rid the gentleman of his cellular device. Knowing very well that (at least) the former wouldn’t do, they continued the charade a few blocks longer, trotting at half-speed while making vague appeals and apologies to the little man they’d just routinely attended to (in self-defense, mind you). Having lost the battle, the Corsican troll was out to win the war. After all it was his country, and he was perfectly well aware of it.

Our protagonist’s friend finally takes a stand. “Comrade, go with my girlfriend and find somewhere to hide. I’ll stall them as long as possible and find you later.” The first two dash across a darkened alleyway and emerge at the nearest sign of life, a modernist complex of 12-story apartment blocks set against a tree-lined courtyard. They scamper into the first door that’s open and plunge down the stairs into the car garage.

Fear has an interesting way of blowing things out of proportion. Like the icicle gathering snowflakes as it meanders down the hill, terror, when seasoned, is granted entirely too much license. In the case of our protagonist, it wasn’t until he was three-stories underground and hiding from an angry phone-clutching midget who’d just gotten his ass whooped that fear gripped him like pneumonia on a midsummer’s day in Minsk. He could already see the show trial, stilted press reports and paucity of judicial review: if not sold into public relations bondage (we all remember the defectors from the Korean War), he would surely face time in one of the famed black prisons or, if he were really lucky, the Political Reeducation camp itself. After 2-3 minutes in terrifying limbo, he told the girlfriend to wait there while he went upstairs to check on his friend.  

Back outside there reigned a terrifying calm. No screaming urchin, no sidekick, no car, no police, no phone, no dogs, no friend. Something terribly amiss had just happened. Only a coward abandons a friend in need! – and now the latter was wasting away in some basement on the outskirts of the Gobi Desert, being force-fed pickled boar’s penis and obliged to consult his captors on their Second Life strategies. He went back inside to find the girlfriend and ponder a plan of action. She too was nowhere to be found.

Imagine our protagonist’s fear and trembling at this point: alone, abandoned in a Beijing apartment complex, no phone, no Chinese, no contacts, no nada. His friend has been abducted by vindictive lost-face-seeking goons, while the beautiful, street-smart girlfriend with impeccable negotiating skills had similarly disappeared. The end was surely nigh. Is it time to start knocking on doors again? Perhaps. Parading for alms? Seeking out Jehovah’s Witnesses? Anything would have done at that point.

As it turns out, no one was abducted, disfigured or disposed of. In fact, everyone escaped with their dignity intact. The missing girlfriend reemerged five minutes later; she too had been trying to locate her boo. The latter, it shall be said, is the true hero of the evening. After throwing the vigilantes off the scent for long enough to sneak into the same residential building, he climbed to the 6^th floor to evade whatever might come next (incidentally he had a friend who lived in the building: out of town that holiday weekend). From a bird’s eye view he was the only to witness the madness that ensued: within moments of our protagonist descending the stairs to the car garage, a riot unit of 20-odd storm troopers burst into the complex from all sides. Swat cars, dogs, lights, the whole shebang. It must have cost the State a fortune.

Erroneously – though chivalrously – fearing our protagonist might face the Law alone, the friend went downstairs and turned himself in. He was duly escorted to the nearest precinct, obliged to make a statement and forced to pay a due diligence tax of ¥1000 ($160 US), the logic being that he who sustains injuries in an altercation (in this case very minor albeit visible) is to receive compensation, regardless of fault, intention or origin of said dispute. Truth be told, it’s not a terrible approach. Like betting against your favorite team: if your squad loses you still get paid.

What became of our protagonist? After finding the girlfriend, he went back to the same street it all began, found a 24-hour café and sipped coffee next to a friendly Japanese foreign exchange student. The girlfriend, for her part, went to the precinct and waxed lyrical, halving the fine from its original ¥2000 (terms are always negotiable). They reconvened at the scene of the crime, hailed a cab and went back home. 

Losing Face in Beijing, p.II

To pick up where we left off. I nearly forgot to mention the most important aspect of losing face in China. It’s that later – in the immediate, mid-term or even distant future – you can always recoup your losses by making someone else lose theirs (think hot potato or duck-duck-goose with scythes and hammers). If a random pedestrian trips you on Tuesday, you trip someone else on Wednesday, ad infinitum. Like acquiring a fake 100-peso note from a Porteño cabbie: to compensate for getting got, you simply spend it somewhere else – ideally in another cab, but anywhere will do: the shop, the bar, the hotel or the horse-tracks. I pawned mine off on an old German grouch somewhere in the Jesuit ruins of Misiones.

The only difference between getting rid of lost face and fake currency is that one needn’t accept the latter; if presented with a fake note at the store, they can simply refuse your purchase (and call the authorities depending on the country) – making the fake note a trickier bargain. To get rid of lost face, all you have to do is throw it out there and hope your victim takes it in stride. After all, a dirty look, a subway-jab or an unbecoming remark about your mother’s chastity is to be expected in an  über-urbanized world of carbon and envy.   

Hence the likelihood of an unpleasant interaction at some point in time: the higher the aggregate lost face of a given population in a certain place and time, the higher the odds of you being cheated, insulted, spat upon, passed over, made fun of or simply honked at. Oh yes, the possibilities are endless. Like an alcoholic spy in a Graham Greene novel, your lost-faced debtor is around every corner, waiting to avenge that cheeky text his suitor sent him or the wages his foreman’s yet to pay. Such, at least, was my dear friend’s understanding of things: a universe of anyone bound to everyone in a vicious cycle of chagrin, a psychological rat race in which none but the most shameless survive.

                                                ………………………

When a society’s going through the particularly spicy birth pangs of economic development and political decay, some will always be left behind. But you needn’t go to China to meet angry jokers. Your local middle school or post office will suffice. Beijing, however, seemed particularly on edge – a metropolis of brash young bitter ruffians out to get you, this and the next fool, slated on blood or the next best thing. Any different than being white in Harlem or black in Southie? In a sense. The latter reflect internal cultural animosities in which everyone plays their role, though they can also be avoided with ease. On the other hand, the bridge that separates American, European or Japanese from Peking’s finest – not to mention Vietnamese, Korean, Mongolian or any of China’s ethnic minorities – is linguistic, historical and civilizational. That is, a hell of a lot harder to gloss over.

My buddy’s nerves had also been on edge as of late. He’d spent the past five years of his life devoting himself to learning the People’s Tongue yet was still taken for a naïve foreigner to be routinely ripped off by the average passer-by. If money talks loudly in China, blond hair screams at you from miles away. (Stay in Bali if you want the benefit of the doubt). To make matters worse, he’d been dating a splendid, if sartorially suggestive, Manchurian local – a seeming accomplishment to the naked eye in many parts of the world. That said, consider the 100m+ army of single Chinese men, doomed by self-selecting population control to lives of romantic and sexual penury: when they see one of their ‘own’ strutting the city’s sidewalks with a big, hulking (and dare I say rather dashing) blond boy, they’re not apt to tip their hat.

Hence our predicament as we pranced about the capital, gamboling, giggling and tossing grapes in one another’s mouth. Though I’d arrived in Beijing on a Saturday night, by mid-week we’d nearly lost a limb to a rabid cabbie. After an afternoon strutting about the city’s hutongs, we hailed a cab to head back to my buddy’s neighborhood in the city’s northwest corridor. Ten minutes into our journey, he noticed that the fare was at least two times that which he was accustomed to (after all these years) - though I suppose he broached the topic with less charm than could have been the case. 

(An aside: remember that we are all wont to take offence to personal slights, be they a remark or regard, commission and omission alike – though misunderstandings are invariably exacerbated by expectations. I am perfectly happy to play the meek little helpless lamb in Bed-Stuy; if someone in Williamsburg tries to step we've stumbled upon a very different situation).

In this particular case I cannot say who was more at fault - my companion or the cabbie - only that after two minutes’ harangue the car was swerving back and forth on the highway, seemingly ready to plunge into a barrier or traffic from another lane. Before I could say 'hootenanny we're in a spicy Chinese pickle', the cabbie was screaming and trying to get a better hold of my friend’s collar; mind you we were both sitting in the back seat. Meanwhile, my friend was exercising his vocal and gestural prerogative to somewhat similar effect. It was not at all clear who would win - or what effect that may have on the trajectory of the speeding vehicle. It was the most terrified I had been in years. 

A rough post hoc transliteration might read as follows:

“Sir, why the hell is does the meter already read 90 renminbi? I take this route twice a week and have never paid more than 40 for the whole thing.”

“Because I’ve driven you from _____ to _____ and that’s what the meter has computed. (It is a machine). We’ve got _____ many more miles to go, so shut up and get ready to buy my dinner for the next few nights. After all, you're but a dirty gweilo, whether you speak the language or not.”

“Oh really? You wouldn’t happen to be that pug-faced, pig-intestine-eating peasant I read about in the People’s Daily, would you? The one who lost his plot in _____ province to rapacious government-backed land developers who’s now forced to illegally squat with his morbidly obese and alcoholic uncle in _____ tenements out by the airport? No, of course not.”

“Fucking mother-raping foreigner! Japanese son of a horse-fucking bastard! Monkey-faced-Japanese-feces-eating-foreigner! Japanese fuck your mother! I will kill you and your friend! Every last one of you! On my mother’s grave – desecrated by the Japanese though it may have been!”

Or something along those lines. Indeed, the only upside to the entire experience was learning there’s always someone the Chinese inevitably hate more than gweilos, regardless of the circumstances. That being said, an agreement was eventually reached. Rather than a) crash that instant and deal with injury, death or, at the very least, an interesting debate about car damages or b) be taken on a fun-filled detour to meet the driver’s more sadistic friends, we somehow arrived at c) agree to pay a moderately reduced fare in exchange for getting dropped off at the nearest Metro station. Oddly enough, by the time we reached it my friend and the cabbie had not only resolved their differences but had positively apologized to one another – going so far as to discuss the impact of their psychological states that evening, comment upon the influence of pollution on one's mood and, by jolly, reveal the initial stages of remorse. Provided you forget how close you came to dying an unbecoming death, it was almost touching. 

Oh yes, we’d survived our first scrap with angry young men in Beijing and lived to tell the tale. We were scarcely prepared for the next.