the lower body 323Shen HaoboShen Haobo’s drive finds more felicitous expression in his poems than
in his expository prose. In «Fucking Cabdriver» (Ҫཛྷⱘߎ音ৌᴎ,
2000), the speaker is behind the wheel of one of the seventy thousand
taxis that were operating in Beijing at the turn of the century:^24
«Fucking Cabdriver»
“all this fucking traffic from liulichang to majiapu
on yangqiao i was stuck for a full fucking hour it’s fucking stop-n-start today”
“the lady i just dropped off she’s got herself a fucking lover
that old girl i know her she’s at the fucking trade center”
“at night they’re fucking everywhere see those big trucks driving so fucking fast
you going somewhere stay in shijiazhuang what the fuck you in beijing for”
“now what you standing in the road for you shouldn’t fucking stand anywhere
this time of night why the fuck you causing trouble”
“it’s really fucking fucked a shitty bridge like that nine months it ain’t done yet
they fucking fleecing me and you the ringroad fly-over just took six fucking months”
“see that tree with the dirty great dent a fucking toyota hit it just the other day
you get sleepy you take a break right it’s like he wanted to fucking die ain’t it”
“but if he’d really fucking died he wouldna had to worry about the car
broke the fucking axle that fella’s gonna have to spend a lot of money”
“said they were gonna fix this road but nothing’s happening
it’s a real fucking pain now that’s a job in hand eh”
“you live in fucking majiapu man you’ve found yourself some place
right out in the sticks how’d you fucking find it”Taxi drivers rave and rant everywhere, in taxi driver language: politi-
cally incorrect, riddled with expletives, in monologues that are some-
thing of a natural genre in other solitary yet interactive professions
too—hairdressers, shopkeepers and so on. Something very close to a
Duchampian ready-made, Shen Haobo’s taxi driver is no exception.
Most of Shen’s other poems also require little knowledge of China
from the reader. His thematics include a hatred of teachers and edu-
(^24) Shen Haobo 2001a: 93-94.