In early 2025, a man from Queens arranged to pick up a passenger in New York’s North Country. He’s been in jail upstate ever since.
By Jennifer Gonnerman
Illustration by Anson Chan
At 2:30 A.M. on January 22, 2025, Wenjian Zhuo left his home in Queens, climbed into his Toyota Sienna, and began heading north to pick up a passenger almost four hundred miles away. Zhuo, who was thirty-one, had emigrated from China several years earlier and tried a few different jobs—at one point, he was a sales assistant in a pharmacy—before becoming a driver in the spring of 2024. At first he drove for Uber, but then he saw other Chinese drivers building their own businesses by advertising on RedNote, the Chinese social-media app. Zhuo followed their lead, setting up his own RedNote page.
Chinese tourist agencies also began sending him customers, and soon he was busy every day. He picked up international students at the Taft School, in Connecticut, took tourists to Niagara Falls, and chauffeured an executive’s family through Boston and Washington, D.C. In the fall of 2024, when the Chinese rapper Vinida Weng arrived in New York to perform in Central Park, he picked her up at the airport. “I’ve met people from all over the world, and listened to all kinds of stories,” he posted in Mandarin on RedNote. “It’s also made me look at my own city with fresh eyes.”
His latest job had come in the night before, in the usual way—a potential customer had sent him a message in Mandarin on WeChat.
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