by Rob Schmitz
Isolated giggles rippled through the room. It had been half an hour, and the Buddhist master had yet to speak to someone in a compassionate tone. I began to fear the master would call on me, too, but he had ignored me since we had entered the room. Before we arrived, CK had warned the master a foreign journalist would be present—maybe he was avoiding me.
A woman at the opposite end of the table spoke up. “Master, I’ve brought my daughter back,” she said, motioning to a girl who looked to be around ten years old.
I had noticed her when I boarded the bus in Shanghai. The girl was tall, skinny, and had striking, wild eyes that focused to the side of whoever spoke to her. She had trouble sitting still and would break the silence with bursts of nonsensical words as she danced up and down the aisle to a soundtrack inside her head. She didn’t smile. The other children kept their distance from her.
The master turned his gaze to the girl, who was quietly talking to herself, staring out the window. “There is still hope for her,” he said. “Don’t make her take random medicine. There will be bad side effects. You just need to stay calm.”
The woman nodded her head. “Whenever she goes through a bad spell, I don’t say anything. I just quietly say a prayer to the pusa.”
“Good,” nodded the master. “The more of a fuss you make over her, the worse she’ll get. After a while, she’ll get better.”
The woman nodded. She was tall and she sat up straight. Her long hair was pulled back. She had the same eyes as her daughter. “Once when I was shopping along the street, we passed a temple with a statue of Guanyin pusa,” she said. “She kept hitting me, trying to force her way in. I eventually let her go inside.”
“Not bad, not bad,” said the master.
“Last year, I brought her to see a local witch doctor,” she continued. “She told me my girl was crazy and that when she reaches sixteen years, she’ll be normal.”
The master sat up straight. “What?” he asked.
“I thought this woman might be talking nonsense,” said the woman. “She prescribed some tea for her to drink. She said she was a nun, too. I didn’t believe her. She said my girl is being followed by Guanyin.”
The master’s face turned serious. “No,” he said curtly. “That’s not it. It’s that your girl follows Guanyin. She was a disciple of Guanyin in a past life. She was known as the daughter of the dragon. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” answered the woman; the master had told her this before.
I glanced at CK with raised eyebrows. CK lifted his head a little with a motion that said: We’ll discuss this later. Keep paying attention. I turned my attention back to the girl and her mother.
The mother glanced at her daughter. “I feel terrible when she has her fits,” she told the master. “She cries so hard. Sometimes she even throws bowls and plates at me. I don’t know what to do.”
“As long as she’s not putting herself in danger, you should let her be when she’s like that.”
“This morning she woke up early,” she said. “I asked her, ‘Where are you going?’ She said, ‘I’m going to see the master!’ She was so excited.”
This seemed to please the master, who smiled warmly at the girl. The girl could feel the master’s gaze. She knew the room’s attention was focused on her. She glanced at the master briefly and then looked at the ceiling and screamed, “Bye-bye! Bye-bye! Bye-bye!”
“Bye-bye?” asked the master, amused. “You just got here. Where are you going?”
The girl ignored him, turned her head to resume staring out the window. The sun had sunk closer to the horizon, its rays lighting up the conference room. The girl watched the silhouette of a shirtless farmer in the distance struggling to pull a long bamboo pole four times his size out of the water, the parachute-shaped fishnet slowly rising from the murky river. The woman put her hand on her daughter’s leg. “The doctors say she has zibizheng,” she said quietly.
When strung together, the words meant “self-obstruction illness.” I quietly withdrew my phone from my pocket and checked my Chinese dictionary: “autism.”
“Autism doesn’t work this way,” the master said. “Tell me: which hospitals told you she was autistic?”
“The Children’s Hospital in Beijing and Xinhua Hospital. They both told me that,” she replied nervously.
These were the best hospitals in China and it was a costly decision for a woman of her means to go to the expense of traveling from Shanghai to Beijing to consult the country’s best doctors.
The master wasn’t impressed. “Go tell the doctors in Beijing to check their own heads,” he said. “It sounds like they’re the ones with the problem. You can keep analyzing her brain, but I’m telling you she isn’t autistic!”
The woman suddenly looked sad. “She used to be normal…” she began to say.
“That’s because you kept feeding her Western medicine!” the master snapped. “Those drugs made her dumb.”
“I didn’t give her many drugs,” the woman protested quietly. “I stopped after a month because her energy level was low.”
“Okay, then. Here’s what you need to do,” interrupted the master, pointing at the woman. “Go to Mount Putuo. Pray to the Guanyin pusa at the temple there. Do you understand? Bring your daughter. That’ll work. Pray to Guanyin multiple times.”
“How often should we go there?” asked the woman.
“The more you go, the better your girl will be. Just go to Mount Putuo and we’ll observe the results later. But don’t feed her any more medicine.”
Chinese Buddhists consider Mount Putuo to be one of the country’s four sacred mountains. Its hundred-foot-tall golden statue of Guanyin is a site of pilgrimage for millions of worshippers each year. It wasn’t unusual for a Buddhist monk to suggest their pupils make a pilgrimage to the mountain. The manner in which CK’s master had done so, though, made me feel uncomfortable. It was likely the girl was autistic; pediatricians at two of China’s best hospitals had diagnosed her as such. The master’s condescending refusal of the diagnosis made it seem like he was testing the woman’s loyalty—not to her faith, but to him. He had given the woman what she wanted to hear: the reason for her daughter’s behavior wasn’t a mental disorder, rather a miraculous twist of fate concerning who she had been in a previous life. Her daughter was a special being, assured the master, and the woman would only have to look as far as him to confirm this. I kept quiet and scanned the faces of others around the room to gauge their reactions, but nobody seemed to share my discomfort.
“How about you?” the monk said, motioning his head to a middle-aged man in glasses sitting near the window. “You seem like you’ve got something to say.”
The man nodded and sat on the edge of his seat. “My baby daughter has a high fever every two weeks or so. It usually comes with a rash. We have no idea what’s wrong with her.”
The master thought for a moment. “How do you feed her? Breast milk?”
“We feed her formula and everything else she’s supposed to be eating,” the man replied.
“Did you breast-feed her?” the master asked.
“Yes, until she was seven months old.”
“Then why is this?” asked the master, pausing to think some more, his fingers pulling the beads of his bracelet one by one. “Was she born naturally or by cesarean?”
“My wife wasn’t able to give birth naturally, so we were forced to do a cesarean birth.”
The master shook his head impatiently. “Just say ‘Cesarean’!” he said, turning to the others with a smirk. “He always answers questions in a winding manner!”
Several others in the room snickered along, and the man began to laugh nervously. The master sat up and spoke. “You need to release captive animals. Any animal will do.”
Before the master could turn to another pupil, the man interrupted. “Forgive me, master, but we’ve already released some animals in Shanghai,” he said.
The master looked surprised. “What kind of animal was it?”
“Snakehead fish,” he said.
“You misunderstand the scriptures!” the master said. “Next time release turtles! But remember—you can’t let turtles go in those rivers in Shanghai, because there aren’t any natural banks and they won’t have a place to get out of the water and they’ll drown. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” said the man.
“And be careful about where you release them. Last time we let go of some turtles here, the neighbors caught them and ate them. Find a place away from people with soft mud nearby,” said the master. “Of course, if someone catches the turtles later on, I am not responsible for that.”
“Thank you,” the man replied with a smile and a nod.
The master slouched back in his chair and slowly looked around the room. The girl diagnosed with autism was quietly humming to herself, and now that the room fell silent, she sang louder. When she finished, she asked the master, “Did I sing well? Did I sing well? Okay, bye-bye! Bye-bye!”
The master nodded. “Emeituofo!” he shouted—May Buddha preserve you.
“You, then,” he said, pointing to a woman in her thirties sitting next to the girl. “You came last time with a problem. What was it again?”
The woman’s long hair was pulled back, revealing a youthful, pretty face. She wore glasses and spoke too softly for anyone to hear, including the master. “Speak up!” he said. “Don’t be shy.”
The woman cleared her throat. “I’m not ovulating,” she said loudly.
The master nodded. “Have you visited the doctor? Did he tell you why?”
The woman nodded silently.
“It’s too embarrassing to say,” guessed the master. “Did you see a Chinese doctor? How could a Chinese doctor fail to tell you the cause?”
A friend of the woman spoke up. “She went to see a Western doctor,” she said.
“Go see a Chinese doctor!” said the master. “How old are you? Don’t keep it secret! There is no secret with your master!”
“Thirty-five,” said the woman.
“Okay, fine,” said the master. “If you haven’t cured this by the time you reach forty, we’ll need to find another way. Let’s think about why this happened to you. Think hard and think in relation to the past,” he said, staring at the woman.
The woman averted her glance toward the floor. The master continued. “At a critical moment, I tried to help you, but you didn’t listen. I told you that you and your husband weren’t a good match. Now look. Do you want it this way, or does he want it? You must figure it out together. I’m telling you seriously now. Once you took a wrong step, everything else went wrong. I don’t know what to tell you now.”
The woman continued to stare at the floor, dejected.
The master moved on. There were a few people who sought advice on business matters—he responded with a promise that they would speak later in private—but for the most part, people had come here needing medical consultation. There were two other women who had problems conceiving children, a woman with an enlarged thyroid, and a man with a bad case of psoriasis that had spread to cover his neck and face. Doctors had diagnosed them and they’d undergone treatment, but for one reason or another their conditions had persisted, medical bills were piling up, and many of them were running out of money. China called its state health insurance program “universal,” but in practice, it covered only the most basic of health problems. Appointments with a specialist were barely covered, and if you didn’t have a Shanghai hukou—the situation that most people in this room found themselves—you’d have to pay even more out-of-pocket costs at city hospitals.
Even if you had saved enough to see a specialist, you’d be fortunate to receive thorough care. Chinese hospitals were typically overcrowded and underfunded. Doctors were considered government employees and were paid an average salary of less than a thousand U.S. dollars a month. It wasn’t unusual for doctors to expect patients to hand over red envelopes stuffed with cash to perform any type of specialized procedure so that they could supplement their meager incomes. Doctors also routinely received kickbacks from pharmaceutical companies in return for prescribing their drugs. The practice was so entrenched in the system that it had coined the popular Chinese phrase Yi Yao Yang Yi: “feeding hospitals by selling drugs.”
This muddled healthcare landscape had left people confused, desperate for solutions. The types of treatment their master had prescribed—a pilgrimage to Mount Putuo to make the signs of autism disappear, releasing turtles in the river to ease a child’s persistent fever, and reevaluating a marriage so that a woman could start ovulating again—seemed just as reasonable to them as the medications their doctors had prescribed and were at price points they could afford.
“People don’t know where to turn for some of their problems,” CK told me later. “They’ve been to so many doctors and they eventually end up coming here to find answers.”
AT DINNER THAT EVENING, the mother of the autistic girl sat next to me. Over a meal of stir-fried eggplant, stewed carrots, and pressed tofu, we talked about her daughter’s behavior. She had come here because she was trying anything to help the girl. “I know she’s autistic,” she whispered with a frown about her master’s afternoon diagnosis. “She was only three years old when we figured it out. She began talking and acting strangely. It’s lucky we live in Shanghai. At least there they have special schools for kids like her.”
I asked her if it cost extra money for her to attend a school like that. “No, it’s free, but I pay a little extra to the teacher on the side so that they’ll pay special attention to her,” she said. Doctors weren’t the only professionals who relied on red envelopes.
She told me most of the children at her daughter’s school suffered from cerebral palsy, and she considered her daughter to be the most functional student in class. She asked me how American schools handled children with autism. “My mother’s a primary school teacher,” I said, “and in her school, autistic children go to class with all the other students.”
“They’d never do that in China,” she said. “They’d see that as too much of a distraction to the other children, and parents would definitely complain.”
I told her the autistic children in my mom’s school were typically assigned aides who escorted them from class to class to help them through their days. “Wah!” she shouted, elbowing her friend. “Did you hear that? In America, my daughter would get her own personal teacher!”
“Meiguo hao,” said her friend—America’s good—and she stuck her thumb up. “Pingdeng.” Equal.
“Not China!” complained the mom. “China would never do that for a disabled child. Hey—I heard the U.S. government gives all children free milk. Is that true?”
I told her there were some federal assistance programs that did that, but if the U.S. government gave free milk to all American children, it’d likely go bankrupt. America may seem like a nice place, I said, but it had a lot of problems, just like China. The woman shook her head, correcting me. “Meiguo hao,” she said again. “Meiguo hao.”
THE CEREMONY BEGAN at nine o’clock the next morning. Overnight, the winds had shifted, and a cold, steady rain began, soaking the countryside. The temperature had plummeted, and worshippers in sweaters and jackets silently ate breakfast huddled around the coal briquette fire inside the temple’s kitchen. A few of them cracked smiles when they heard the shouts of the autistic girl next door in the canteen going through a school morning exercise routine: “One-two-three-four! Two-two-three-four!” she yelled, waving her hands wildly and pacing in circles around the table where Jackie, Laurel, and Hardy sat, too busy staring into their phones to notice.
CK told me the master had held a special prayer ceremony for the girl the previous evening in the presence of a pusa statue. It ended when the girl began screaming loudly, kicked her mother, and ran out of the temple, sobbing. CK said the ceremony was meant to give the girl positive energy.
Before the morning’s ceremony commenced, the congregati
on was split into two groups: those who believed, and those who didn’t. We nonbelievers filed into the temple’s main hall first, seating ourselves on leather cushions lined up against the sliding doors to each side of the entrance.
There were ten of us. As we waited for the believers to enter, we gazed up at a twelve-foot-tall bronze statue of Buddha. He sat in the lotus position, his hands resting on his lap in prayer, with two forefingers rising up to touch each other. His eyes were barely open and he was smiling. To his right, a stoic-looking guardian stood atop a white elephant holding a lotus stem. On Buddha’s left, another guardian stood upon a blue tiger, raising a sword up in the air with his left hand. I took out my phone to snap a picture, but a young woman sitting next to me whispered that phones were forbidden inside the temple. On my other side, Jackie, Laurel, and Hardy sat on their cushions looking miserable. It would be an hour before they were allowed to look at their phones again.
While we waited, I asked the woman what she thought of the place. “It’s my first time here,” she whispered. “My friend brought me. It’s nice. But I don’t think I’ll come back.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t believe in these kinds of things,” she answered.
The master’s four apprentice monks filed into the hall and took their positions to the side of the altar. They wore yellow robes and slippers and their heads were shaved. The ceremony began when one of them softly hit a bell with a mallet, letting the tone reverberate through the cold, empty hall. Another monk smashed a pair of cymbals together, while the third monk swung a curved stick and hit a large drum hanging by a rope tied to a beam above. The fourth monk led the others into a chant while the master stood inside the doorway, prostrating toward the statue of Buddha three times. CK was directly behind him, following his motions along with seven others. The rest of the believers stood behind this elite group, outside in the rain.
One by one, they entered the hallway, taking incense sticks and raising them above their heads with both hands before sticking them into a pot full of sand in front of the Buddha. The fragrant smoke swirled to the ceiling of the temple. Below, worshippers chanted, bowing in unison before filing out of the temple. The rest of us followed, walking single file under the eaves of the temple to protect ourselves from the rain, circumambulating the temple grounds before heading back to the main hall. I looked behind me and noticed Jackie using Hardy’s massive body as a barrier from the cold, wet wind.