A Christmas Story in three parts. Part 1: Putting the fun in Fung Wah

I took the Fung Wah, aka the Chinatown bus, to Massa chusetts for a proper New England Christmas with my friend who lent me her family for the holidays. Luckily they were worth it, because the Fung Wah tested my tenacity. Any bus that will take you to Boston for $15 cuts corners somewhere, and in the case of the Fung Wah, that comes at the expense of English-speaking bus drivers, overhead bins with doors and the requiste pointing-out-of-the-exits routine. (There was no announcement at any point before departure, they simply took off when the bus was full. How refreshing that they treated us like adults who can figure out the obvious, I thought, until I realized all the emergency signs were in Chinese.)

On the plus side, they are liberal with their passenger lists, so although I had tickets for the 10 a.m. bus, they encouraged me to hop on the "9:15." It wasn't until I got to Boston that we discovered that there was no 9:15. How delightfully horror movie! Also, there was a small, pale little girl running up and down the asiles who looked like a little girl who died 30 years ago that day. Wonder what that was about.

Before the bus even leaves, the woman in the row next to me starts going to town on some yogurt. My first thought was "Oh, lovely! That's perfect bus food. Quiet and unsmelly." That was before I looked over to see her licking the spoon. The lid. The inside of the container. Like she was Alanis Morissette in the back row of the theater. This exercise was repeated twice more.

Because you only seem to hear about the Fung Wah in conjunction with phrases like "drove off the overpass" or "flipped three times" or see it with photos of dazed Chinese senior citizens wandering the highway, jokes flew about me wearing a precatutionary Special Olympics helmet. At one point we crossed a bridge in total fog, zero visibility, and I figured I should help out the beat reporter who draws the assignment and just go ahead and write the accident story lede and pin it to myself.

Red calls with about a half hour left in the trip. "Are you surviving? Use your helmet yet?" she asked, and for her touble got me screaming "Christ! Ouch! The fuck?" as at that exact moment a binder fell directly on my head from the overhead bin. I like to think it's a metaphor for the whole Fung Wah.

Coming (at some point):
Part 2: A Hector Flores Christmas, and Part 3: My Triumphant Return.