Factory Girls_ From Village to City in a Changing China - Chang, Leslie T_ [15]
Bus stops were unmarked, and there were never signs showing the routes. You had to ask: Information was conveyed by word of mouth, as if we lived in ancient times before the invention of writing. Twice I bought city maps with bus schedules but both times the routes were already out of date; things were happening too quickly to be written down. The other passengers were as confused as I was, often calling out the names of stops that had already passed and making panicked departures. Wherever I went, I was asked directions. One afternoon, I puzzled over routes with a migrant woman, who asked me after a while, “Are you from Hubei?” Was that an insult or a compliment? I just wanted to get home.
At night the buses stopped running early, an injustice to everyone who could afford no other form of transportation. After eight o’clock, people arranged to spend the night in friends’ dorms, even though most factories banned overnight visitors and getting caught would mean a large fine.
I never saw old people on the bus.
ONE NIGHT I caught a bus from Shenzhen back to Dongguan. About halfway to our destination, the bus stopped and the driver yelled at the passengers to switch to another vehicle. This was common, though illegal: Late at night, half-empty buses preferred to pool their passengers rather than continue on money-losing journeys alone. The driver of one bus would pay another a set price for each passenger taken off his hands.
After the second bus was on the highway, the new ticket seller announced that we weren’t going to Dongguan after all. This was common, too: Once the second bus had been paid for taking passengers, its sole purpose was to get rid of them as soon as possible.
The bus stopped. “All passengers for Houjie get off here.” The ticket seller was a skinny Cantonese man who yelled everything in a nasal voice. He walked down the aisle, pointing at certain people and ordering them off. He pointed at me.
A passenger ahead of me got off the bus and disappeared into the night. I walked to the front of the bus and leaned out from the bottom step. We were on a pitch-black highway beside a deserted construction site.
“There are no taxis here,” I said to the ticket seller. “I’m not getting off.”
“There are taxis,” he yelled in snarling Cantonese.
“I’m not getting off.”
He came up behind me and put his hand on my shoulder.
“Don’t touch me!” I climbed back up the stairs and sat in a front-row seat. None of the other passengers had budged.
And then the bus started driving again. It had failed to dispose of its cargo, so it kept going. Passengers continued to get off at their stops as if nothing had happened. “These buses are very black,” said a young woman with a slender dark face who was sitting next to me. “You should only take buses where the driver is wearing a uniform.” Yet she was on this bus, just like me.
“The people who work on this bus are evil,” she said loudly, “and every word out of their mouths is an obscenity.” I felt safe just being next to her, but then she got off too.
The bus pulled to the side of the road and stopped again. “Okay, everyone off,” the ticket seller yelled. This time he walked up and down the aisle, giving two yuan to each person.
I walked down the aisle to where he was. “I paid twenty-five yuan to get to Dongguan, and I want my money back.”
He turned around to face me. Of course, he was taller than I was, and he was a man. At that moment, I realized how powerless I truly was.
“If you paid a hundred, should I give you a hundred?” he yelled. “If I take my pants off, will you give me a hundred?”
It didn’t make sense and it wasn’t funny, but he liked the sound of it and he said it again. “If I take my pants off, will you give me a hundred?”
“Fuck you,” I said in English.