Qing Yuan works in a morgue, cleaning bodies. He grew up in a cultured family before 1949, studying art and literature in university. Qing Yuan’s father owned a jewelry shop and got into trouble with the new government after he tried to hide a small amount of gold during the early days of nationalization. Qing Yuan was punished for his father’s capitalist ways and when Ruyan Meng’s novel opens in 1966, he’s been the morgue keeper of the title for sixteen years.
The story is chilling for its setting, the terror of the Cultural Revolution, and Meng’s melancholy prose. In the early pages, she writes about Qing Yuan’s fall from grace:
He had long since given up on the city. Nothing stirred any connection to his past. In fact, he realized, he was wrong to say he had given up on the city. The city had given up on him, discarded like a dead baby from the hospital the moment he’d been conscripted to the morgue. He existed now in a liminal zone, between a past to which he could never return and a future that would never come. The eternal present, what many a sage declared the one true refuge, had seized him like a spider in its web. He had become a shadow whose life had been bent to a single purpose, the cleaning of humans, dead, on their way to becoming shadows themselves.
As the story develops, it becomes obvious that Qing Yuan has not lost his humanity despite the havoc. One night a female corpse arrives at the morgue without identification or clothes and is only known as #19. Qing Yuan assumes her family will show up at the morgue the next morning with clothes to dress her before she’s buried or cremated. But no one shows up and Qing Yuan takes it upon himself to find out what happened to her. After all she’d been through in her horrific final moments, he is determined to bring her some dignity.
Qing Yuan is ultimately arrested and imprisoned with a number of physicians and scientists who hold jobs deemed “counterrevolutionary”.
The book’s cover is plain with just one small drawing of a mosquito. By the middle of the story, mosquitoes show up in the cell where Qing Yuan and the others are being held. Suddenly his work in the morgue doesn’t seem so bad.
Qing Yuan hadn’t realized until now that a swarm of mosquitoes had enveloped him. He’d been slapping at them all this time. When he had first returned to consciousness and understood where he was, he could feel nothing. His entire body was numb, and one of his ears was deaf. Only now had he begun to feel again. His whole body seemed to be roasting in flames. Everyone else was slapping at themselves, as well. The shrill whine of the mosquitoes had been so incessant as to seem the silence itself.
The book only covers one year; as bleak as the story reads, people familiar with this history will know that there were nine more years of the same. Qing Yuan knows all he can do is hold out for a more hopeful future. And as difficult as it is for him, he tries to keep his humanity and recognize the humanity in others.