INTERVIEW: Ruyan Meng by Claire Hopple, ‘It’s Terrible to Be Yourself’

Putting memory into language—telling stories, naming what happened, giving the vanished a voice—turns private pain into public memory.

Welcome to a novel where citizens are captives of their own government and the dead are more alive than the living.

In Ruyan Meng’s The Morgue Keeper (7.13 Books, October 2025), an employee at a hospital morgue grapples with the mystery of an unknown body so utterly mutilated it’s almost unrecognizable as human. Through exacting depictions of Communist China, Meng poignantly illustrates that you can never prepare for grief—no matter how many times you’ve already experienced it.

And Meng would know, having fled her native China after the Tiananmen Square Massacre. I “sat down” with Ruyan via Google Docs in the hopes that she would share more about her novel and her life.

Claire Hopple: What was it like for you living in China—before, during, and immediately after Tiananmen Square? If you don’t mind sharing, how did you flee the country?

Ruyan Meng: China began to open to the Western world in the early 1980s, after Mao’s death. That was when I first read not only the classics of Western literature—writers like Shakespeare and Dante—but also more contemporary voices such as Faulkner, Miłosz, Borges, and Márquez. The political and living conditions had changed very little, but the academic environment opened slightly, enough that through books I could catch a glimpse of what the Western world looked like. Among young people, we began—carefully and secretly—to talk about freedom, democracy, and the future of China. I first visited the United States in 1986 and could have stayed, but I chose to return. I was young and still full of hope for my country. I believed that one day, through the efforts of our own people, we might finally win the freedom and democracy that had been denied to us for so long. Then came the Tiananmen Square movement. So many people died or were imprisoned for their belief in freedom and democracy, for a brighter future for China. That tragedy shattered my hopes completely and left me with no choice but to flee. As for how I fled, I can only say that it was dangerous—something that felt more like a Hollywood movie than real life.

CH: Have you been able to process any of the trauma that you’ve experienced? If so, how?

RM: I have been able to process some of the trauma, though I can’t say it’s fully “resolved.” Trauma isn’t a problem you simply erase—it becomes something you learn to live with and at times to understand and transform. For me the work has been gradual. Writing has been crucial. Putting memory into language—telling stories, naming what happened, giving the vanished a voice—turns private pain into public memory. The Morgue Keeper was a form of this work: a way to listen to the dead, to restore dignity to lives that were silenced. Meditation and yoga have helped me carry the weight, as well. Meditation opened a space where painful images and feelings could appear without overwhelming me and helped me reconnect with my body and soul after years of living in a state of alert. These practices don’t remove the memories, but they have changed my relationship to them. Sometimes the simple and ordinary routines of life in a safe place are a slow balm, too. But processing is ongoing: there are still triggers, sudden recollections, nights when the past presses hard. What I feel now is a steadier presence. I can hold the pain and still move forward. I write, and I act. That, to me, is progress.

CH: How long did it take to feel like the US was your home? Or does it feel like home?

RM: The United States is the greatest country in the world, and I feel very fortunate to live here. I am eternally grateful for the opportunities this country has given me. Even today, whenever I return from an overseas trip and hear a customs officer say, “Welcome home,” I am deeply moved. Those two simple words carry such power—they touch my heart every time. For me, the U.S. is unquestionably my home. And yet leaving China was far from easy. It’s the place where my ancestors are buried, where I first heard Tang and Song poetry recited by my parents under flickering lamplight, where I walked beneath ancient roofs and along rivers that hold thousands of years’ worth of stories. China’s rich history, vast landscapes, profound cultural traditions, literature, philosophy, and ancient wisdom are all woven into my being. To leave it felt like tearing myself away from my identity. Only when you leave the land you love most do you fully understand the depth of that love, and the depth of your longing for it.

CH: The main character in your novel, Qing Yuan, our titular morgue keeper, is longing to commune with dead souls. Is this something you can relate to? What does that mean to you?

RM: Qing Yuan’s longing to commune with the dead is something I deeply relate to. For me, it is not about speaking to spirits in a literal sense, but about carrying the voices of those who came before us—the silenced ones, the ones erased by history. Growing up in China, I often felt surrounded by the unspoken presence of the dead: famine victims, the neighbors who vanished overnight, the millions disappeared during the Cultural Revolution. Their absence is a silence that demands being heard. When I write, I feel I am in dialogue with them. Literature becomes a form of communion with the dead. It’s how I recover memory, how I restore dignity. It’s a way to give voice to those who had none. In Chinese culture, we honor our ancestors, but for me it goes beyond family. It is about communing with the collective dead souls of history. It’s critical that I hear their wisdom, that I refuse to let them be forgotten. So when Qing Yuan longs for that communion, it’s not only because of his own loneliness in the morgue. He has real longing for connection and for truth. He craves continuity with the human spirit across time. It’s critical that I remain continuously aware that, as Faulkner says, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” The dead are always shaping us. To listen to them is a way of remaining human. When I meditate with closed eyes, I do not see darkness but a vast, luminous universe—boundless and bright. I am infused with ancient wisdom, the wisdom of countless souls gathered across thousands of years of history. There is no language, no sound, only the coexistence of yin and yang—death and life as interchangeable states. In this sense, the dead are not dead. They’re simply living in another realm. This is why I wrote in The Morgue Keeper: “The morgue is the entry to the cosmos.”

CH: Qing Yuan seems haunted by an inhospitable past, his current occupation, and a bleak future. Do you feel haunted by anything in particular?

RM: I was seven years old. It was a hot summer day. After breakfast, I wandered around the Worker Village, just to pass the time. At one end of the Worker Village was a large cesspool connected to the latrine. It was usually covered with big wooden boards, but that morning it was open. The stench hit me from a distance—it was horrific. A few housewives and their children were standing nearby, staring down and yelling. I went over and saw a dead baby boy, barely a year old. The day before, I had seen his mother at the tap, holding him in her arms. Now his tiny body floated in a mire of feces and urine. Even today, I still can’t find the words to describe my feelings at that moment. I walked away and vomited for a long time. I spent the rest of the day walking the streets, not feeling anything—just moving my feet, telling myself that I was still alive.

When I reached a collapsed bridge on the other side of the city, I saw a crew of construction workers pouring cement into a bridge pier. I stopped and watched. That was the first time I thought human life could be so fragile, so worthless. I remember thinking that if I could disappear into the cement, I might be better off—at least cement is cleaner than feces and urine. Then I thought of my parents and how they would feel if they discovered I had vanished.

It was a true “to be or not to be” moment. Death seemed complicated. It carried responsibility and consequences. By the time I returned home at dusk, neighbors were talking about the authorities having put an official red seal on the door of the boy’s home. His parents were nowhere to be found. How and why they disappeared, and how their baby ended up in the cesspool, remained a mystery. But the image of that naked baby boy, dead in the cesspool, has haunted me ever since.

CH: Thank you for sharing that. I can’t even imagine. Qing Yuan vacillates between misanthropy and philanthropy, feeling that tension with every choice he makes. It almost seems like you can’t have one without the other, like you have to feel deeply for people to both reach out in compassion and curl inward with exhaustion. What do you think?

RM: Misanthropy and philanthropy are two contradictory essences of human nature—like yin and yang. Philanthropy is the yang, the light that reaches outward. Misanthropy is the yin, the shadow that turns inward. Under certain circumstances, especially in an oppressed society, the two are inseparable and often interchangeable. Misanthropy isn’t about hatred so much as about despair and fear. The despair comes from realizing there is only so much you can do. Even your small actions may not change anything. They might even make things worse. And the fear that your efforts to help might end up harming others, the fear that speaking out could bring yourself trouble, the fear that compassion itself could become dangerous—this is a terrible thing. In the world I grew up in, every choice carried this weight. Almost every decision was not only difficult but also risky. We all lived with the sense that “Big Brother is watching you.” We didn’t know this phrase from Orwell. We knew it from our own suffering.

CH: In your opinion, what about our current reality contains a “smack of doom” (p. 10)?

RM: Even in open societies, the freedoms we take for granted are fragile—truth can be distorted with alarming ease, and fear can silence voices overnight. Freedom, truth, human connection, even the earth itself: all feel more precarious than we like to admit. We live more digitally connected than ever, yet loneliness and disconnection continue to grow. This paradox carries a sense of doom. We live in a world of abundance that still fails to nourish us. And then there are the signs of nature under unbearable strain—extreme weather, vanishing species, reminders that our way of living may be unsustainable unless we change.

History quite obviously has the ugly tendency to repeat itself. Human forgetfulness makes this possible. When we forget, so do the lessons of past suffering. Once again, there we are, vulnerable to the same tragedies. Who can say that what happened in China in the 1960s could not happen again—in the West, elsewhere, or even in China? This is also why I wrote The Morgue Keeper. That “world” existed barely sixty years ago. Yet doom is never the whole story. Despair and renewal coexist. Where there is doom, there is also resistance, yearning, change. The “smack of doom” is not only a warning but also a call to resist forgetting, to hold fast to what is most human in us.

CH: Qing Yuan says “No one can yearn for the unattainable.” Do you think this is true? How do we know if something is unattainable? What do we call it when we’re desperate for the impossible?

RM: What Qing Yuan says reveals both his despair and his survival instinct—a kind of protective resignation. In an oppressive society, to admit you long for the unattainable is dangerous and often outright destructive. Telling yourself you can’t yearn for it is a way of shielding yourself from hope that is too painful to carry. Qing Yuan’s idea of being unable to yearn for the “unattainable” isn’t an objective truth but a judgment imposed by fear and by oppression. For all of this, human beings, for the most part, do yearn for what seems unattainable. We all want freedom, dignity, love, and justice in impossible circumstances. Sometimes that yearning is what gives life meaning, even when reality crushes it. Sometimes it is the only thing that sustains us. And anyway, how do we know something is unattainable? I think we rarely know with certainty.

One of the principal teachings of the I Ching, one of the oldest Chinese classics, is change. This is why the I Ching is often titled in the West, The Book of Changes. What looks impossible in one moment may become possible in another. Again, history shows this repeatedly. Societies couldn’t believe that freedom, equality, even survival itself, were possible until something shifted. And then sometimes the reverse is true. So what do we call it when we’re desperate for the impossible? In an oppressed society, to burn with longing for things we believe can’t be realized, to yearn for what you’re told you can’t have, are in themselves acts of defiance and resistance.

CH: “Her grief had become her power, he realized. Her tragedy had made her stronger.” (p. 62) Can you talk a bit more about grief transforming into power and strength?

RM: Grief, in its rawest form, feels like pure destruction. It empties you. It breaks you. It steals the ground you thought you stood on. But grief also exposes something essential: what matters most, what cannot be replaced. In this sense, grief is a strangely wonderful power that becomes a source of strength. Both my parents lost their parents in 1949, when Mao took over the country. My mother was sixteen, with two younger sisters, ten and five. My father was barely nineteen. They never recovered from losing not only the wealth their parents had built over a lifetime, but their parents themselves. They lived with and through grief their entire lives. Yet I witnessed how that grief quietly became their strength—how they carried it with them as they raised my mother’s sisters and their own three children. They shaped our lives with resilience born of sorrow. For millions of us who lived in that darkness, grief was inescapable. Some people were broken by it. Others, people like my characters Feng Ge and Qing Yuan, found in it a fierce kind of ability to endure. Their pain sharpened their clarity, their refusal to be crushed.

And of course for me grief is inseparable from memory. We grieve because we remember. But we must remember, because remembering in a society that wants you to forget is an act of power. So when Qing Yuan sees that Feng Ge’s “grief had become her power,” readers can see through him that tragedy, unwanted as it always is, can become a reservoir of strength. This isn’t to say that suffering is noble. It’s that those who endure their suffering with this perspective can learn resilience and depth. People can disappear, but the truth cannot.

CH: One of the other morgue keepers says, “Fear might also be hope.” (p.106) What does that mean to you?

RM: When there was a loud knock on someone’s door late at night, my father would say, “It’s them again.” I knew what he meant. It was nearly always the State—the Red Guards, some revolutionaries, the police—anyone with the power to ransack your home or drag someone away. We never spoke of them. Our curtains were tightly closed while the lights were on. I could see the fear in my parents’ eyes. My father also said, “Fear is good—at least we can still feel something.” There was hope in that. I grew up with constant fear, the fear of hunger, of sickness, of arrest, of persecution, of disappearance, of death. “Fear might also be hope” speaks to the strange duality inherent to survival. Fear signals that something is at stake. In this sense, fear and hope are not opposites but reflections of each other. The hope is in the fear. We hope that one day things will be different, if we can endure long enough to experience the change. “Fear might also be hope” is the recognition that however tremblingly anxious we are, we are also still committed to this life. “Fear might also be hope” means we have not given up.

CH: Why do you think Qing Yuan refuses to give up on the world?

RM: In a society like the one we see in The Morgue Keeper, the will to endure also becomes an act of defiance. For Qing Yuan, preserving a secret space for hope allows him to witness and honor those who cannot speak, and those who still struggle. With and through his hope, he refuses to let the things that matter, human dignity most of all, be erased.

CH: This line, along with many others, stuck with me: “Once again, for a time, he could tell himself the lie that he was free.” (p. 19) What does freedom look like to you?

RM: Freedom, to me, always has two faces. In the society I grew up in, freedom didn’t exist. We couldn’t speak the truth. We couldn’t choose our own path. Certainly we couldn’t trust anything, not even our neighbors. And yet, inwardly, there remained our secret freedom, the freedom to think our own thoughts and to remember honestly. Sometimes telling yourself the “lie” that you were free was the only way to survive another day. There is a scene in the book where a blind woman in the street shouts, “Is the bus here yet?” For me, and for Qing Yuan, for that woman and her husband, for millions of Chinese people, that bus was “freedom.” We were all just as helpless as that woman, but inwardly, each with our own inner freedom, we were all waiting for “the bus” to come.

Today, with my life here in America, freedom means something different. It isn’t just the absence of chains and the constant burden of pretending, but the presence of dignity. I can speak the truth without fear, to be treated as fully human. My memory can breathe in daylight. I can write a book like The Morgue Keeper. For all of this, I must also incessantly remember that freedom is far from absolute. It is so fragile, in fact, and can be taken away very, very quickly, even when it feels quite secure.

CH: Thanks for your willingness to do this, and for your courage to write this incredibly important book. It was eye-opening, to say the least. Here’s hoping stories like these can remain in the realms of history and fiction.

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Claire Hopple is the author of six books. Her stories have appeared in Southwest Review, Forever Mag, Wigleaf, Cleveland Review of Books, and others. More at clairehopple.com.