Mamdani and the Bus Rider

Memories of public transporation

When I went back to Taipei on a Fulbright in the early 2000s with my toddler son, I would stay at my grandmother’s on the weekends and when one of my aunts stayed for dinner, I would walk her down to the bus stop. Once, late at night, I saw my aunt on the bus, her face unguarded. When she got on the bus, she smiled and waved at me from the window, but her face lit by the fluorescent lights of public transportation, once she thought I wasn’t looking, was suffused with the weariness and sadness of the low wage worker. She was and still is beautiful. But at that moment, I saw her as another city dweller, another bus riding commuter. My memory of her as a teenager was so vivid: she was so high spirited, hopeful, gorgeous, greedy for life. That was the person I knew when she took care of me in this very city when I was my son’s age.

A lifetime of low wage work does something to your dreams and your face. My aunt was a proud woman. She put on a good face for us, but she was fading into the night, into the bright lights of public transportation and the darkness of the streets. I wanted to jump on the bus with her, but it heaved itself from the curb and disappeared.

During the last year of high school, I worked three part time jobs and took the bus up and down Central Avenue from White Plains to our damp home in Edgemont. I rode the bus with Haitian immigrants, Jamaican busboys, working class African Americans, going home to Yonkers or the north Bronx after working a long day in the Galleria. Later in graduate school, I took the bus to Queens College from the subway station when I taught as an adjunct there in the composition department that Robert Scholes made famous.

When my parents were ill last year in New York City, I took a lot of different kinds of transportation between Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. Driving a car was the most aggravating, but most hygienic experience. I could yell at potholes and tailgaters. I could talk on the phone. I could listen to the radio. Car services were expensive and also aggravating: the best moment was when I was late for an appointment and my Uber driver got a ticket for running a red light. Taxi cabs were better, more human, but it was riding the subway day and night that made me feel a part of life in the city. On the subway, I felt myself part of the struggle of the city I loved and left thoughtlessly. The noise and dirt were unbearable, but the people, immigrant, blue collar New Yorkers, I loved seeing them. They were a balm to my soul.

My parents immigrated to the US through Queens, following white flight into Westchester County. My father passed away in a hospital in Flushing. Most of his caretakers were from the Caribbean, immigrants themselves.

When I was riding the bus at sixteen, seventeen, I had a job as a cashier at a toy store that paid $3.20 an hour. I was earning pocket money, not having to pay rent, but I was struggling to find my way in a world where my family’s rapid rise in socioeconomic status made us all lost in an arid landscape of white collar consumerism. My father declared himself a yuppie and resented any family expenditures. I rode the bus because it gave me a sense of safety from parental judgment. Once, on the bus I gave my number to a Haitian man with whom I spoke French. When he called my house, my mother told him never to call again.

Mamdani makes us see and think about the bus rider. Some of you have never ridden the bus to work and home. Some of you have never taked public transportation or are proud to never have to take it again. Some of you are arguing about Leninism vs. Maoism and Mamdani’s significance to the struggle against global capitalism. I am thinking about the bus riders. And I am thankful that even if it just for a season that we think about them and use their experiences as our guiding political light, this is a moment to celebrate. The bus rider is always on my mind. That woman, late at night, riding the bus in some dark city, somewhere in the world, under those harsh lights, dreaming dreams about beauty and freedom, but worried about bills, debts and breakfast. Let her be for moment wreckers and naysayers. Let her smile to imagine that some of us want to shoulder her cares.