The April Fool’s Award for Too-Determined Trucking
By Advance Business Capital

Sing Li – Indomitable Idiot
Highway patrol duty was routine an afternoon last December on the Jinggang'ao Highway in the Chinese province of Henan. That is, it was until alert officers noticed a green delivery truck proceeding south with cardboard where the windshield should be. 

Henan is roughly on the same latitude as Kentucky. When the vehicle was pulled over, officers pulled out half-frozen driver Sing Li, who explained the cardboard was a purely temporary measure. He intended to get the glass, shattered in an accident in Hubei province, replaced when he dropped off his delivery. 

The police curtly informed him that he couldn’t drive the highway with a cardboard windshield. Just how far did he think he could get driving blind?

So far, Li explained, he had managed 600 miles. Anyway, he wasn’t driving blind. He steered with his head out the window. “I would drive like that until my neck got too sore and numb, then I would pull it in and look through the little holes in the cardboard.”

That wasn’t entirely satisfactory, since he was forced to drive slower. As soon as his face defrosted, he would poke his head out the window again and pick up speed. At the time he was stopped, Li’s left eye had frozen shut and his face had progressed across the color spectrum from its normal tone to mild blue to dark purple.

Police escorted Li and his truck to a service station and ordered him to have it fixed before returning to the road. We wish we could report a happy ending to this story, but Li has since lost his commercial driver’s license. (Communist tolerance for capitalist enterprise goes only so far in modern China.) Li still has his truck, however, and is supposed to be doing odd jobs for money to replace the windshield.

Distance gives Sing Li’s lamentable story humor. Had he the task of “getting the life-saving serum to Nome,” he would be a hero, but because he’s only a Chinese trucker trying to make a freight delivery, he’s a joke. Surely, though, he could have improvised a better solution?

Although Li is apparently no McGyver; his solution had the rigidly daffy logic of a Charlie Chaplin silent, showing he also has the Little Tramp’s heroic spirit.

We’re sure that in due time Sing Li will be back on the highway—“head bloody but unbowed”—hopefully with a windshield he can see through.

Sing Li article drawn from The Truckers Report and RoadTransport.com.

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