By wonder_j via Wikimedia Commons
As the author of a novella that features their services, I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least post briefly that the Fung-Wah has been ordered to take its fleet off the road. By the feds. Which might not be a bad plot element for a third novella.
According to my old employer The Boston Herald (actually, one of my former fellow editorial assistants penned the piece), the very last Fung-Wah bus left South Station last night.
Fung-Wah was told to take its buses off the roads Monday, but the company chartered other buses so that it could keep shuttling passengers between the Chinatowns of Boston and New York.
Which means that there were unmarked Fung-Wahs on the road, which made me wary of every bus I passed on my way to and from work yesterday. (Usually I’m all “Ooh, a charter bus! I bet there’s a touring rock star in there.” Last night I gave them all a wide berth.) But there was no need for worry. The MBTA shut the Fung-Wah party down last night.
(UPDATE: I’m told by someone who knows that it was actually MDOT that shut down the party.)
I’ve got mixed feelings about this. On one hand, I’m a little bummed. I used the Fung-Wah in Beware the Hawk because I felt that generations of readers from the Northeast would get the joke. On the other hand it’s nice not to worry when a Fung-Wah passes me a little too closely and a little too quickly on the highway.
I feel the same way about the Fung-Wah bus departure from our highways. While going to college in Boston many friends were always taking the bus for cheap transportation. But these days when I am on the road I see their driver’s texting and swerving in lanes and in general going too fast. Often times I wondered how well those buses were maintained and always hoped their breaks were checked regularly. Its probably best that the Fung-Wah is now just a fond memory.
Probably, but there was a part of me that was always perversely pleased that a bus line like Fung-Wah could even exist here. I remember hearing from a friend that he was on the Fung-Wah with livestock once. I don’t envy him the experience, though.
I often changed lanes on I95 when I saw a bus with Chinese characters on the side. They always were speeding, it seemed. I wouldn’t worry about people not reading Beware the Hawk. The story is more than that bus.