A familiar shame set in: “Forget your dream, you’re not going to make it.” So, he says, “I left.”ĭuring a trip to Beijing in 2013, Fang encountered a more welcome complication. Still, the grind-his money woes, college politicking, the side job-started pulling down his grades. He was lucky once more: His parents let him move into one of their investment homes, rent-free. His house wasn’t worth what he owed on it, and in 2013 he was pushed into the ranks of the 10 million Americans whose homes were put into foreclosure during the Great Recession. In 2010, with only a part-time gig at a pet shop, he was also the guy who often missed his $2,500 monthly house payment. Fang was on his way up, haranguing the community college board to step up their leadership, lobbying the California legislature in the Mao suit made for his high school prom, presiding over graduation on the same stage as Nancy Pelosi. He dove into philosophy, sashayed on the waltz team, and won election to the highest student office, student trustee, hoping to juice a transfer application to his dream schools, Stanford and Berkeley. Now 26, he returned to City College, this time with zeal. His parents pitched in on the down payment.įour years later, scraping along at the bottom of employee performance targets, he quit the bank before he got fired.
He got an adjustable-rate mortgage for a cookie-cutter $638,000 house in a working-class neighborhood. Fang was 22 and earned only $40,000 after bonuses, but it was 2004. She also urged him to borrow for a place of his own. She tried to help Fang get business by having him process one of her loans. His mom, who was splitting her time between Beijing and San Francisco, started buying houses as an investment. The work didn’t come naturally-“You’re pushed to treat people like products,” he says-but it was a job he could do without a college degree. He didn’t know English, but he loved American sci-fi, especially Star Trek: The Next Generation and Captain Jean-Luc Picard-stately, cool-headed, the guy who gets things done. The older son switched his first name from Shao-yu to Jeffrey in order to blend in. His father, who worked for Cummins, the multinational maker of diesel fuel engines, had taken a transfer, moving his wife and two sons from Taiwan to the Maryland suburbs. Maybe in 1994, when at age 12 he reluctantly stepped off a plane outside of Washington, DC. “By all measures, I should be successful, but I’m not.” He got more chances in life than most people do. “The rideshare years were, in some ways, a tragedy of my own making,” Fang says. But to understand how a man could arrive at the point where he abandons his children to chase a phone, you might want to follow him on a journey. He found ways to exploit the ride-hailing apps too. He wants to take blame and dole it where he says it’s due. He got it back, dusted in graphite powder from fingerprinting but functioning. It’s nothing Fang hasn’t said in self-loathing ever since: Why in the world did he leave his kids? Let your judgments pour out the online chorus certainly let theirs. Yet here he is, age 39, in the middle of Jackson Street, screaming and dialing 911.
#GIGECONOMY FUCK YEAH DRIVERS#
He was one of the top drivers in the ride-hailing industry’s hometown. Compatriots speak of Fang as a sort of gigging folk hero. He ignored his friends’ and family’s pleas to get out, thinking he could somehow beat the financial odds.įor a long time, he did.
Each offer sliding on the screen was an enticing gamble it might bring 18 bucks, 24 bucks, or, if he played it extremely well, 100 bucks. His phone lured him like a blackjack table.
As people locked down, he found work driving for delivery apps like DoorDash, Instacart, and Uber Eats. He signed on first with Lyft, and as the app tweaked fares and incentives and his income declined, he added Uber, then Amazon Flex and Kango. But each stride is taking him farther from his unlocked Honda Odyssey minivan, parked illegally, engine humming, in a driveway where he was making a delivery, with precious cargo in the back seat.įang has worked in the gig economy full-time for seven years. The phone, you see, is his “moneymaking tool” it’s how he feeds his family. He sees the thief dive into the back seat of a silver sedan, and as the car accelerates Fang keeps running alongside and grabs the passenger door handle-less DoorDash Dad than some kind of bespectacled Jason Bourne. But right now, on the night of February 6, he’s not thinking clearly, and you’ll have to excuse him as he sprints pell-mell down a promenade of swank homes after the thief who just stole his phone. He’ll explain that bringing his kids along on his Saturday night shift “made sense, until it didn’t,” and that in hindsight, he understands that it really, really didn’t. Jeffrey Fang, DoorDash delivery guy, knows you judge his parenting skills, and he’ll join in your condemnation in a moment. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
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