Real Encounters

*When a trip to mainland China goes horribly wrong*

This is actually my mother's story, but I’ll be damned if she's let me forget it.

When I was a teenager, my parents were quite wealthy. My dad was a salesman for a high end Chinese tech company and he would regularly take trips overseas.

There was one time that my mother chose to go with him. She had never been to China before, and there was some opportunity to get out of Hong Kong and experience the culture of the mainland. After a luxurious start to the vacation, my parents hopped on a plane and headed over to Shenzhen.

Now, mom is a pretty streetwise lady by US standards (she's managed to survive some pretty intense living conditions and navigate the ghetto well enough), so I think she got incredibly arrogant here. At some point when my dad was speaking with his superiors in a meeting, she asked if she could head out alone to do some shopping. My dad's boss was apprehensive, and told her if she really wanted to, to take down his number in case anything happened.

While shopping, she was lured to a back alley shop that sold a pretty diverse amount of designer knockoffs, bootleg DVD box sets, etc. I am a huge TV fan, and apparently she thought this would be a great opportunity to pick me up the first 5 seasons of Scrubs on DVD) It was nothing crazy- there are places like that all over China, but apparently she chose the wrong back alley shop. When she was finished making her purchase, a legitimate looking cab rolled up and offered her a ride.

The cab ride was quiet, and it didn't take my mom to realize that something was wrong. The man wasn't driving her back where she came from, and I think he expected her not to have remembered the way to her hotel. There was a second man in the passenger seat with a stern look. The men spoke to each other in Chinese and did not acknowledge her when she spoke to them. They just kept driving.

It took her less than a half a mile before she tried to escape the car, but the doors were locked from the inside. The men then began yelling at her in Chinese and threatening her. They took her purse and removed the money inside it and began talking among themselves.

With one last resort, my mom called my dad's boss, who began speaking to them in Chinese via speakerphone. The men were spooked almost immediately. They stopped the car, grabbed my mom, and literally threw her out of the car into the street. They then tossed money at her.

When she got back, she learned a few things.

1 - The money was counterfeit. They kept her real money.

2 - The men were part of the Chinese mafia. According to my dad's boss, people have a tendency to go missing in situations like that all of the time, particularly tourists. He said had she not made that phone call, she would likely be dead/abducted.. The fake cab "scam" was actually quite a common method of these abductions.

3 - My dad's boss has some sort of questionable but scary pull among the criminal underground of mainland China; or at least knew how to put the fear of god into them. She still has no idea what he said to them.

To this day, she gives me a lot of flack. Says "That Scrubs box set nearly cost me my life!"