ABSTRACT

Once in Stockholm, my family and I held a long conversation with a taxi driver. We were travelling from the ferry terminal to the railroad station where we would separate and take different trains to the airport and to Uppsala. On the way the driver, who spoke perfect English, asked about our plans and then began to figure: he soon explained that it would be less expensive if he drove all of us to the airport where my wife and I could take a bus to Uppsala. The far larger taxi fare he would earn would be more than balanced by our saving on the train fares less the cost of the two bus tickets. None of us knew the exact fares, but the driver was persuasive and enthusiastic in his figuring. He said that he tried to be rational and calculate everything, except “you can’t be rational with family.” During the drive to the airport, he explained that he was an ethnic Chinese from Malaysia who lived in Russia where he operated an “import” business; he was currently driving a taxi in Stockholm to earn needed capital for his trade. He spoke three Chinese dialects, Malaysian, Russian, and Swedish in addition to English. Living in a global, borderless world, he seemed to be a ‘postmodern person,’ except for his proud claim about the dominance of rational thinking in his life. Did his preoccupation with calculated decisions make him a modern or a postmodern man? How should we locate his divided subjectivity?