Chinese Buses

As a foreigner who had a minimal grasp of the language, to me, China was often a country of surfaces.

It was difficult to penetrate past the surface, whether it was with people or places. Unless I had the secondary medium of English, I mostly dealt with surfaces. I was disabled in China. I couldn’t understand. I dealt with surfaces.

But sometimes, the surfaces were so beautiful.

One of my favorite activities was to ride the buses. On a Saturday or Sunday, with a friend or alone, I would pick a random bus and ride till the end of the line.

Boarding the bus, I would clank my coins into the slot. One or two Yuan would usually do it. After some initial stares from the rest of the riders, I would sink into anonymity.

The bus would muscle down the street, blaring its angry horn at unsuspecting drivers and pedestrians. At stop lights it would turn off its engine to save on gas.

The bus is a place where you usually interact on surfaces, no matter where it is. Rarely will people strike up a conversation. In this way, riding the bus made me feel at home. I was just another person on his way to somewhere.

Sometimes, I would interact with children. I remember one particular little girl, sitting across from me. Her mother looked ahead but the girl stared up at me with huge oval eyes. She looked for a long time and then she looked at her mother, as if asking for cues on how to handle this new thing.

She wore an orange puffy-coat and matching orange mittens. Her hair was in black strands of pig tails, her nose slightly snotted. When she glanced back, I stuck out my tongue and her head snapped forward.

But then I saw the pink flesh of her tongue flash and she looked straight again. I had about 20 more years of face-making experience, so the girl was clearly outmatched.

I made my best scrunched face but the girl countered with bottom teeth exposure. I inside-outed my bottom lip and rolled my eyes but the girl countered with a classic display of tongue out and hand-antlers. At this point, the girl’s mother looked down and lightly smacked her on the head. I made my best “nothing” face.

When they rose and walked down the aisle for their stop, the little girl turned and flashed her tongue one last time in a Parthian shot.

I must have taken the bus dozens of times. My aim was to get outside the city, to see a neighborhood without Western advertising or Western money; that was more old China than new.

From my vantage back in America, the rides blend together in a series of pictures. Tall buildings gave way to dingy shops and little caves of industry. The road became narrower. Among the rows of white-tiled apartments, I saw the occasional house, with its old-timey black- tiled Chinese roof, the top in a slightly curved crescent moon.

The bus stopped at a traffic light near one of Shaoxing’s many canals. I looked down onto its coffee-colored water. Off to the side, women dressed in pink puffy-coats scrubbed their clothes, mashing them against concrete slabs in the water.

Downstream, I saw similar slabs with similar women scrubbing on each side, about 30 feet apart. Each woman knelt over her her rock, emanating ripple after ripple in the water. Each rippled wave reached out across the canal to meet another, the women’s energies coming together and overlapping in the middle, like a synchronized water show performed for no one and everyone.

As the bus drove farther from the city, smoke spewed from little factories, their thin pipes cutting whisps in the grey sky, like flag poles with ephemeral cloth. Among the grey factories, farms and green patches suddenly appeared, like puzzle pieces from two different pictures jammed into one another’s edges.

We passed residential neighborhoods, with their old grey houses and huddled shops. One house opened up into a pond with hundreds of downy baby ducks swimming in the murky water. Others had lilly-padded ponds with algae blooms and buoys; a network of nets for raising fish.

Sometimes, I could see the mountains. They seemed positioned against the city’s neon lights, like sound barriers against car horns on a highway. They were spectacularly green compared with everything else, the elevated terrain unusable for quilt-patch farms and slap-dash factories.

When I would ride, perhaps three or four in the afternoon, my fellow riders were usually young teens returning from schools in the city. Boys in the back would flick each others’ ears, their hair purposefully messy, as if they had waged war with weed-wackers; their hair the only casualty. Or they’d be middle-aged men and women returning from work, haggard with huge plastic rucksacks sitting beside them.

And then there were the old. In China, old people seemed particularly jolly, keeping active with Mah-jongg, Tai Chi and grandchildren. Sometimes I’d hear a hacking cough and an old man would rise to hawk loogies out the window. No heads would turn.

I remember one old lady. Her hands were cracked from winter or washing, like clay baked too long. She had a paper bag with red apples sitting at her feet. She wore a Mao suit, woolen and drab-blue. She had big brown eyes, calm and serene. She sat so still, like she was part of the seat. She looked to be about 80.

Sometimes, watching people on the bus was like viewing part of a movie without context. I would look at someone’s surface and in my negative space, I would try to infer their story. For this woman, in those at-least-80-years, she had 10 years of civil war in the 40’s, a couple years of starvation in the 50’s, mass madness in the 60’s and 70’s, opening in the 80’s and 90’s and textile factories in the aughts. That was the rough outline of her country’s history, events that were sure to affect her life.

Then, there were the all the smaller events that effect every life. Childhood. Marriage. Children. A husband? Rough hands for a good farm? What did the world do to her?

I wanted to know what she thought when the bus hugged the road’s edge for a passing BMW; what she thought when she boarded a bus for home and found a foreigner. I wanted to know how she kept streaks of black in her grey pigtails.

When the bus slowed to a stop, the old woman rose. She smiled and muttered something, shaking her head, before waddling off the bus. I had the impossible urge to talk to her, to know her story.

But we both dealt in surfaces. We didn’t have the language to penetrate past our skin, our clothes and expressions.

Like the washerwomen’s ripples, we could only touch the surface. Never down beyond the surface, into water who knew how deep.

Sometimes I’d get out and walk around. But other times, I’d stay on until the bus turned around. With my usual late start, the bus would soon stop running. The bus would turn around in a gas station, the driver getting out to sign a sheet of paper.
On the way back, from my new position, I would sometimes see something I missed.

Once, it was a small hill with little mounds rising up equal distances apart, packed earth supported by marble slabs and steels. Some had huge neon pink, yellow and green reefs beside them, on reef blown down to a ditch.

They were graves.

The hill looked ancient and I wondered how many generations were piled atop one another. On the hilltop, a tree arched upwards in every direction, it’s leaves so loose upon its sprawling branches that they seemed to vibrate. The tree seemed to hum, its long roots reaching deep down, deeper down, on my way back to the city; back to the lights.