MANILA – This book is the guaranteed runaway gift of the season. For anyone who has suffered the indignities of hiring a cabbie in Manila, these taxi tales will assure you that yes, you are not alone, and yes, there are crazy cab drivers out there. But there are nice ones too, if you know where to look.
Unfortunately, this isn’t the sort of book you should read during a society dinner, or else you may run the risk of turning blue from the effort of holding in your laughter. Or worse, whatever beverage you’re drinking at the time may shoot out of your nose while reading a passage from Kwentaxi, possibly dampening the rest of the pages (and you’ll have to wait for them to dry before you finish the humor-laden book, what a dilemma).
The lovely thing about Kwentaxi: you can hide it in your bag and read it under the table during a boring blind date. Or use it as the litmus test of whether your new acquaintance is the type to love print or scoff at it (after all, these stories originally saw life in Coconuts Manila). But you’ll be hard-pressed to find someone who hasn’t got a horror story of their own involving a cabbie—and even rarer than that, the person who encountered a saint behind the wheel. Mae Paner, the activist and artist behind Juana Change or Juana C, recounts these incidents as truthfully as possible, laced with her brand of humor, evidenced in the narration and transcript.
Verdict: Get a copy for your friends and family, but more importantly, get a copy for yourself, because you’ll need something to while away those moments stuck in traffic without mobile internet and a sleepy (or cranky) cab driver. We all need to laugh some time, might as well do it in a cab.
