Christ at the Bus Stop
At eleven o’clock, Beijing is already quiet, most buses have stopped running and all but the most persistent of eateries have closed down for the night. Pedestrians tend to be purposeful and the night strollers have long since gone home. The figure sitting on the low wall by the bus stop looked out of place, even from first sight. Passing near her, I heard sobbing and the pitiful sound invited a second glance. In the weak light from the nearby buildings, her bowed head suggested an elderly person. The only other individual near by, a young man, seemed uninvolved.
The unusualness of the situation demanded my unwilling attention. I would have preferred to walk on. “It is late”, “I’ve had a long day” and “I cannot wipe away every tear in China”, those reasonable excuses that usually keep me safely about my own business seemed heartless somehow. Lenten images of the Good Samaritan dented my resolve to keep on walking. The clincher was the unwelcome thought that, were my own mother in similar circumstances I would be glad that someone at least tried to help. I went back to the bus stop and, from what I hope was a non-threatening distance, asked her what was wrong. She merely looked up and nodded me away. The better view this allowed made it clear that she was much younger than I had guessed. I had, in fact, stumbled into a lovers’ quarrel, and the loud sobbing was for the nearby young man’s benefit only. Realising my mistake I backed off, mumbled a silent prayer for the poor girl and went about my business.
These public dramas are common here. One often hears about the new openness among educated young people for affectionate displays in public, but we hear less about these more stormy productions. They seem, to this observer at least, to be more common among the less well educated. My own surmise is that the reason lies in the lowly place assigned to women in rural China. Public displays are one of the ways used to redress the balance. They are often successful in particular cases, but, statistics suggest that, in general, the stratagem doesn’t work. China has the highest rates of female suicide in the world and young rural women are twice as likely as the national average to commit suicide. The rather mild drama which was unfolding at the bus-stop was only a mild version these rather more grim realities.
I felt rather foolish about my attempted grand gesture and vowed to “just walk on by” in the future. More mature reflection invites a different take on the experience. By temperament, I am given to the systemic approach or the sensible long term view, but increasingly am wondering if that is not a convenient excuse. Christ is present in the now, in the individual whom providence has sent my way and it is in my attempts to reach out to the person who is present to me that the encounter with Him takes place. I got it wrong on this occasion but I must not let go of the impulse which caused me to act in this way. Why? This time I was an intruder in a lovers’ quarrel, and long term I can do little to correct the realities of women in China on a systemic level. However, in the brief moment between my question and her nodded dismissal, it was Christ that I met, sobbing on a low wall by a dimly lit Beijing bus-stop and that makes all the difference.