Ruyan Meng’s debut novel, The Morgue Keeper, opens with Qing Yuan tending to the corpse of a mother recently delivered:
Thirty-seven, Qing Yuan thought when a cleaner wheeled the corpse of a woman into the morgue. The woman’s husband, a scrawny man in a shabby work uniform, smelling of sewage, drooped behind the gurney. The cleaner pushed a form to Qing Yuan and fled. He glanced at it: Dystocia with stillborn boy.
The morgue was windowless, with just two low-wattage bulbs on the ceiling. The air lay heavy with antiseptic, cigarette smoke, rotting flesh, and blood. He looked at his watch—5:30 a.m. Another thirty minutes, he thought, and he’d be in the sun, breathing the morning air.
The husband stood numbly by, watching Qing Yuan complete the form, then shuffled out to squat against the wall to smoke. After a time Qing Yuan called him back and asked for his signature. The man scribbled what looked to Qing Yuan like a chicken’s clawprint in the sand.
He filled a bowl with water and placed it on a bench near the gurney. The woman was naked under her bloody sheet. Her hair was tucked behind her ears. Her purplish hands remained clenched on her chest. She could have still been cradling her baby, Qing Yuan thought. Her pale face with its vague smile expressed neither suffering nor struggle. But as he drew back her sheet, he was sure he heard her whisper. I have tried. I have tried so hard….
In the opening chapter, Meng offers elegant prose and a brutal world where deceased babies are “pathological waste,” corpses are numbers and characters cling as much to their routines as they do to what glimpses of intimacy and warmth they can find. It all has a rather dystopian feel and Meng invites her readers to snuggle into this dystopia, this understated horror she has crafted for us. And this reader accepts the invitation. And highly recommends that you do the same.
About The Morgue Keeper
Born into a family devastated by the rise of Mao Zedong, the author Ruyan Meng came of age amid famine, persecution, and fear. The Cultural Revolution of the 1960s branded innocents as enemies. Friends and relatives vanished overnight—sent to labor camps or lost to madness. For years, silence was a means of survival. But after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, Meng’s last hopes for change were extinguished. She fled China, leaving behind everything she knew, and began a new life in the United States.
Today, the rapid rise of authoritarianism around the world, with its threats of state control and political persecution, gives plenty of reason for concern here in the United States, and plenty of reason to speculate on what is soon to come. The future that Meng ventures in The Morgue Keeper, her relentless, scintillating debut novel, is unique, one drawn from historical precedent, and from experience itself. Based on true events, it offers a rare and urgently needed perspective on a society controlled by a tyrannical despot. Most powerful of all is the quiet bravery of her hero in the face of unspeakable persecution, a journey of the body and soul that is as stunning as it is shattering. Read more at 7.13 Books. Purchase The Morgue Keeper.
About Ruyan Meng
Ruyan Meng was born and educated in China. She defied her country after the Tiananmen Square Protest and Massacre and fled to the United States in 1990. Read an interview with Ruyan Meng by Claire Hopple at Zona Motel.
