IS THE BUS HERE YET?
For novelist Ruyan Meng one image represented the freedom to write
At some point in the process of writing The Morgue Keeper, an image appeared to me: amidst a horde of exhausted workers, a blind couple trudging through the dirty blue dawn, all en route to yet another round of seemingly timeless drudgery. I don’t know whether the image was an ancient memory resurfacing after decades of repression, or whether I was imagining it after having immersed myself so long in the days of China’s Cultural Revolution.
Whatever its origin, in my mind the couple stood out in terrible relief, their ragged clothes, their grimy gray textile-worker’s caps, their battered shoes, the heavy bag on her shoulder, his bamboo stick tapping and sweeping. I saw their broken steps, their pale flitting eyes. Over and over I heard the woman shouting her desperate refrain: “Is the bus here yet?”
Her words began to haunt me. It became clear that this was a scene I had to write, though for a time I couldn’t say why. But then I understood. For the blind couple themselves, and for many others, that bus was a small but extraordinarily powerful symbol of the freedom that no one in the country had, but which we all longed for every moment of every day. We were all of us waiting for the bus of freedom to come. We were all of us waiting for the bus that would deliver us to a place where we could live our truths without fear.
In the end the scene as I wrote it is rather too brief and can for the casual reader be easily overlooked. Yet somehow, I think, given its meaning and significance, especially in the context of the historical moment, this is appropriate.
Right after my mother gave birth to my older brother, the Great Famine began. He suffered severe malnutrition and nearly died. To feed him, my mother sold her wedding ring on the black market for one and a half kilos of rice and ten eggs.
“It was the rice porridge and eggs that saved his life,” she said more than once.
As for my mother and father, they survived for three years almost entirely on rationed bowls of soy sauce water. My father contracted severe edema, which he grappled with until his death. My mother lapsed into profound depression. For years she remained silent and withdrawn, refusing even to leave the house, much less a short trip to the grocery store.
“The stench of moldy pickled vegetables and soy sauce,” she told me years later, “made me sick, and those empty shelves broke me.”
My father once said that my mother never fully recovered from that time. It was only after I learned this that I understood that recovery was likely impossible not just for my mother but for millions and millions of my fellows, as well. How could any of us “recover”? The trauma had infected our very blood.
When the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, my mother’s condition deteriorated so badly she had to travel to the home of her younger sister, who had been assigned by the State to work in the desert of the Great Northwest. On the thousand-mile journey by train, my mother witnessed fanatical Red Guards destroying nearly every village and town they passed through.
“The only humanity I saw in those people was when one of them gave me a cup of water.” And that was all she ever said about it.
My father made the mistake of speaking a few cautious words to some radicals during a “struggle session”—the ubiquitous public “rallies” in which people accused of crimes against the state were accused, tortured, and sometimes killed. By the time my mother had come home, he had been demoted from his managerial position to a warehouse inventory clerk. His salary had been cut in half.
Poverty and hunger continued to define our lives. Bit by bit we sold our valuables for eggs or bits of meat. There was never enough food, never enough wood and coal in winter. We often went months with nothing but frozen cabbage.
Whenever my father returned from a “struggle session,” faintly sighing, his expression disturbed, we knew something bad had happened. A friend had been denounced. A coworker had been persecuted. A neighbor had been sent to a labor camp or prison. Disappearances became common. Neighbors vanished, and no one dared ask why. Soon, the rooms of those who’d gone missing were filled with new families. No one spoke out. It was as if nothing had happened.
“There’s no escape,” my mother used to say.
“Why escape?” my father would say. “We just live through it—together.”
Neither my mother nor my father ever explained what “it” was. I don’t believe they could have if they tried. “It” was never one thing, as I grew to learn. “It” was everything, all things—this, that, and any conceivable other. There was nothing that was not the it we were every one of us obsessed with escaping.
I wanted to escape the endless queues in which we festered with our ration stamps, waiting for rotting vegetables or a shred of dubious meat.
I wanted to escape my single pair of broken shoes.
I wanted to escape the endless cold.
I wanted to escape the mealy cabbage I detested so much but without which I couldn’t survive.
I wanted to escape the daily sight of my fellows being beaten and dragged away by brutal youths in green caps and red armbands.
I wanted to escape my fear of growing up to suffer as my parents had suffered.
I wanted to escape my bludgeoned thoughts, the weariness of pretending not to see, the paralysis of my voice.
I wanted to escape the hopelessness that nothing would ever change.
I can’t say the time or day when I was stricken with the clarity that in my world freedom did not exist. What I can say is that one day I felt like a person who’d been imprisoned without knowing why, and that another day, though no one had ever said, I did know why.
We—no one, not even my parents to us, their children—could not speak the truth. We—no one, not one of us—could choose our own path.
It wasn’t simply that we couldn’t trust authorities and strangers. We couldn’t trust our neighbors, and many of us couldn’t trust even our own families. The enemy was everywhere and nowhere. It lived in our walls and our mirrors.
Like the blind couple in my book, like the thousands of people bumping and knocking them around in their own terrible exhaustion, like my protagonist, Qing Yuan, and like, in fact, every character in the story that is The Morgue Keeper, I was outwardly helpless.
In time, however, I began to see that like them all, inwardly I did have my secret freedom.
I saw what I saw.
I felt what I felt.
I knew what I knew.
No one could tell me these things weren’t the truth. And this truth—which amounted to something being very, very wrong—became the source of my hope and a new way of seeing and thinking. There was another way. There had to be another way. Of course I had no freedom to say as much. But I knew it just the same. That was the truth, and for years that truth was my freedom.
China didn’t begin to open to the West until the early 1980s, a few years after Mao had finally died. The political and living conditions had changed very little, but the academic environment had opened slightly, enough that through the books I’d begun to read I saw the glimmerings of another world—the other world I had begun to believe must exist. And we began very cautiously to talk about things like freedom and democracy.
I first visited the U.S. in 1986. At a convenience store in JFK Airport, I bought my mother a small pack of red-shelled pistachios. When I presented it to her, she opened the package and slowly ate one.
“It’s divine,” she said.
We exchanged smiles but said nothing more. Yet I understood her. That single pistachio was the taste of freedom from far away, and that taste carried power and hope.
I could have stayed in the U.S. then, but I chose to return. The Tiananmen Square tragedy followed soon after, and so many people died or were imprisoned that, with my shattered hopes, I had no choice but to flee.
In the China of my youth, where every gesture was monitored, and every word was censored, to remember, to desire, and to refuse to forget were themselves to step outside the prison of silence. Had we not all been obsessed with escaping it, it’s quite likely that many more of us—most of us, I’m sure—would have succumbed to despair. Our longing to escape, our inescapable obsession, was the very thing, I believe, that kept us alive.
But longing, as many of us know, is very often all too fragile. It, too, can be distorted and crushed. It, too, can spoil. It, too, can be forsaken. And it can most definitely be usurped by resignation.
Even now, having lived in the United States, a free woman for years, I still obsess over freedom, and I am still waiting for that bus. The bus I wrote about was in my youth a vehicle for escape. It represented the possibility of something beyond our endless drudgery.
Today, this bus carries another meaning. It has become a symbol not only of what I waited for, but also of what I continue to build with my testimony.
I have insisted to remember.
I have refused to forget.
I saw what I saw.
I knew what I knew.
I see now, also, that the bus does not come on its own. It comes only when we remember that it exists, that it is here to come, that it comes according to a schedule that has been created through our remembering, and especially through our sharing and our writing. For myself, I no longer wait for the bus passively, but quite actively. The memories must be kept alive. The stories must be told.
“Is the bus here yet?”