by Liao Yiwu
Dr. Sun was clearly well known in these parts; he was greeted like a lost brother as we entered the courtyard house of one of his assistants at about nine o’clock, the group sitting around the fire jumping at once to their feet and rushing to surround him. The owner of the house helped unload the bags of donated clothing we had brought with us. It was around midnight by the time the clothing had been distributed, the villagers had left, and we were left to soak our feet in basins of hot water set before the fire. Neither of us was sleepy, so we talked:
Liao Yiwu: It seems so surreal, sitting here with you, in this remote mountain village. It’s so quiet and beautiful. When we first met, you told me you were born in the city of Nanjing. How did you end up in Yunnan province?
Dr. Sun: Both my grandparents and parents were herbal doctors. They used to run one of the oldest and most reputable hospitals in town and made quite a lot of money. They purchased lots of farmland as investments. When the Communists came, the world was turned upside down. My family became the target of persecution—members of the evil exploiting class. Their hospital was confiscated; so was their farmland. But they were well known for their medical skills, so they were considered valuable for local senior Communist officials. As a result, they escaped execution. It was hard being born into a family with such a murky political background. I was constantly taunted in school and banned from participating in many school activities.
In 1975, when I was in junior high school, I signed up as a volunteer and came to Xishuangbanna at the southern tip of Yunnan, about as far south as you can go. I joined a state farm. I was the youngest worker but lied about my age. I wanted to get out of Nanjing, get away from my family, to disappear.
You know, Xishuangbanna has many different ethnic groups. The Dai people form the largest group; then there are the Hani, the Lagu, Bulang, Yao, Yi, Wa, and the Bai. It is easy to disappear here. I was assigned to Jinghong Commune, which was close to the border with Myanmar and Thailand and consisted of many Dai villages.
Living so far from the city, I thought I could get away from Mao’s political campaigns. I was wrong. It was the same everywhere, but about ten years behind the cities. While major cities had shifted their focus of political attack from former landlords to intellectuals and government officials, the leaders in my commune were still holding public condemnation meetings against the landlords. The day I arrived, I met a young fellow, a Dai. He seemed nice. He even climbed trees like a monkey to get fruit for us urbanites. We didn’t know he was the son of a rich landowner until the local militia beat him up. He was beaten up a lot.
My disappointment with society and my doubts about Communism started there, I think. The older I got, the more reactionary I became. I came to realize that all those political slogans—“People are masters of the country,” “The Party is always great, glorious, and correct”—were utter nonsense.
One day in 1976, as I was harvesting bananas, the farm’s loudspeakers began blaring mourning music, and the announcer’s deep voice said our great leader, Chairman Mao, had passed away. I kind of laughed and thought how we used to chant “long live, long live” every day, and then he dropped dead, just like everyone else. What great news! Of course, I didn’t share these feelings with any of the others.
Later, I was assigned to work at the farm’s clinic. In 1977, when China resumed the university entrance exam system, I passed all the tests and was enrolled in Beijing Medical University. Five years later, after I obtained my MD, I got a job at a hospital affiliated with the Suzhou Medical College, close to Shanghai. I became a surgeon, working in the ER department. I handled all sorts of terrible cases—ruptured livers, disembowelments, severe head injuries, severed limbs. That was where I honed my surgical skills. By 1988 I was promoted to be an administrator, and in 1995 I became the deputy dean of the medical school.
Liao: You were young and had a bright future.
Sun: A critical skill of an ER surgeon is to diagnose fast and accurately, and then act. You can’t play games. But as an administrator, none of the skills I had acquired applied. They played by a different set of rules. In my leadership position, I initiated some reform measures. The school assigned me a Santana car, but I asked the authorities to sell it and spend the money on the hospital. I rode my bike to work every day. I abolished the traditional big staff banquets during holidays and banned the use of public money for eating and drinking. I also tightened up on reimbursing expenses. All of those measures hurt the interests of other leaders; they hated my guts and conspired against me. It was very frustrating and depressing. In early 1990 our college invited some foreign teachers and students to teach and study there. It was through them that I got hold of a Bible. I was examining my life at that time. I felt extremely frustrated with my work as a deputy dean. The Bible taught me to be in awe of God and to love, two important qualities that the Chinese people lacked. Too many Chinese will do anything for trivial material gains and have no regard for morality, ethics, or the law. How do we change that? Can we rely on the Communist Party? Can we rely on government rules and regulations? Apparently not.
In September 1990 I participated in a prayer session at a foreign student’s dorm. It was the first time I ever prayed. I saw several Chinese students there. I began to attend Sunday Mass at private homes and gradually formed the habit of praying before bed every night, reflecting on what I had done that day and how I might do better. In the winter of 1991 I went on vacation to Xishuangbanna. It happened to be Christmas. While I was attending a Christmas celebration at a Christian’s home, my heart was touched in a way it had never been touched before. With the help of a missionary from Germany, I was baptized.
Liao: Could you be both a Christian and a government official?
Sun: I felt I had to make a choice, but that choice was largely made for me. One of the students at my first private prayer session ratted on me. In 1997, my boss came to me with an application form for membership in the Communist Party. He told me that by joining the Party, I would be able to dispel the “rumors” about my association with the Christian movement, that I had been in the system for many years and had established myself in the medical field, and that it was a minor concession that would open a lot of doors for me.
I told him I could not fill out the application form. I said, “What you heard are not rumors. It is true.” My boss was shocked and pretended not to have heard what I said. “I believe in Jesus Christ,” I said. “I have already made my choice, and this is the only choice.”
He was tremendously upset. “You are a Communist official. You enjoy the salary and the benefits of a Communist official, yet you believe in Jesus Christ. What can you do with Jesus? Can he provide you with food and clothing?”
I looked him in the eye and said, quite deliberately: “I am quitting now. I need to save my soul.”
The hospital relieved me of all my duties, and I had to leave the medical school. Soon after, Jinghong Hospital in Xishuangbanna hired me, but it didn’t work out. I tried the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone and eventually landed in Thailand where I traveled to the beautiful northern city of Chiang Mai. I was recruited as a volunteer by a hospital sponsored by an international humanitarian organization and went to a poor mountain region in Myanmar, which was ravaged by war, epidemic diseases, and poverty. There were poppy plants everywhere and gun-toting guerrillas, who looked more like bandits. I heard shooting sometimes. The “hospital” was several sheds with thatched roofs in the middle of a forest, but it had some highly skilled doctors, many of them from the West, who came on rotation.
Liao: How did you communicate with patients and fellow medical staff?
Sun: Many of the patients spoke Chinese. I also knew some Dai and English. The conditions there were rough, but we had amazingly amicable working relations. We all took our jobs very seriously, and it was not unusual to work for days without a break. I learned a lot working there.
I returned to China in 1999. I had confidence, but not much else. My nephew helped ge
t me a job as an adjunct professor in the medical school of the University of Yunnan.
Liao: With your experience, why not a big government-run hospital?
Sun: I’m a Christian. I found it impossible.
Liao: How could faith be an obstacle to your career?
Sun: It’s not that. I couldn’t work there out of conscience. Say a patient, tortured by illness, sits in front of you, staring at you, hoping you can find a cure for him. What kind of medicine should you prescribe? Many meds do the same thing, but their prices can vary sharply. I would prescribe the cheapest and most effective. But if I continued to do that, the pharmacy and the hospital would be upset because I have undermined their profits, disrupting the cozy deal between pharmaceutical companies and hospitals. When you break hidden rules and harm the collective interests of hospitals and doctors, you find yourself very alienated.
Liao: There is a saying in China now: “Doctors are like robbers, corrupt and unconscionable.”
Sun: You are right. Doctors should be able to diagnose many types of illness with ease and treat them with the right kind of medicine. It should be easy, like pushing a stranded boat back into the flowing water. The reward is in helping the patient. But the reality is quite different in China. It now costs hundreds of yuan to see a doctor for even a minor ailment. Instead of a course of antibiotics or traditional herbs that costs ten or twenty yuan, and that includes a decent profit, hospitals want doctors to charge ten times that. It’s greed. As a Christian, I have to tell my patients the truth. I cannot lie to get more money out of them.
Liao: So you were forced to become an “itinerant doctor.”
Sun: Nobody forced me to do anything. One day I bumped into a former student of mine at the church. At first, I didn’t recognize him; I taught so many students at the University of Yunnan. He told me he had grown up in the rural areas of Jiaoxi in Luquan County, which is deeper in the mountains, along the Jinsha River. His village is remote, but its people welcome outsiders. All the villages had converted to Christianity. My student told me that a woman in his village was dying of an unknown illness. He asked if I was interested in taking a trip there. I was noncommittal, but he showed up at my door the next day, so I went with him. It took us the whole day to get there by long-distance bus. It was the wife of a local minister who was ill. I examined her. She had breast cancer; the tumor was as big as an egg. She needed surgery right away. The minister explained that he had taken his wife to various hospitals in the provincial capital city of Kunming, but they wanted eight thousand yuan to do the operation. He had gone to relatives and fellow villagers, but all he could raise was two thousand yuan. I told the minister that I would do it for free, that I had done far more complicated surgery than what was required here, and he needed to trust me. He looked at me in disbelief, as did the villagers gathering around us. I’m not sure which of my assertions they had the most trouble believing.
I wanted to take the woman back with me to Kunming so I could use a proper operating room, but she didn’t want to leave her home. That night, I knelt and prayed, and as I was praying, an old American TV show popped into my mind—a team of cheerful doctors doing surgery while cracking jokes, a mobile army hospital, tents in an open field, the war in Korea.
Liao: You must be talking about the TV show M*A*S*H. I’ve seen a couple of episodes.
Sun: Yes. I felt inspired. The next day, I bought some basic surgical instruments to supplement the ones I carried with me, and we did the operation in her bedroom. Her bed was a wooden plank; no table necessary. All we had to do was clean up the room a bit and we could do it there.
Liao: Did anyone assist you?
Sun: Yes, another minister in the village. He was in his sixties, a grandpa figure. The room was very dark; even after we opened all the windows, it was still pretty bad. I tied four flashlights together and had the grandpa hold them as operating lights. That grandpa was strong and in great health. He stood there for hours without moving, holding the light steady. I removed the tumor, which took quite a while, but I didn’t feel tired at all. It was a sweet feeling to be there with the poor villagers and to do God’s work, though I never thought I’d ever have to perform surgery in quite those conditions.
After the surgery, news spread faster than wind, and I was inundated by villagers seeking help. I ended up staying for more than a week, including an eight-hour trek on foot from Jiaoxi to Zhaji in Wuding County. There was no road. I climbed hills, crossed rivers. By the time we got there, my shoes were almost worn out. I was quite a hiker, but that trip was the longest and toughest I had ever done.
Liao: I know the area. Locals use donkeys to carry their goods, and the animals slip and fall into the ravines all the time.
Sun: After the climbing and walking, I slept soundly and did two surgeries, one related to chin cancer and the other skin cancer. Both went smoothly. I had found my path and mission.
Yiliang County in Shaotong region is one of the poorest in Yunnan. The mountaintops have been cut bare of trees and villages are scattered. People live in low thatched houses with doors like cave entrances requiring you to stoop to get in. In one village I visited, people relied on two wells to draw water, one for livestock and the other for humans. When drought hit the region, villagers had to carry water from a river at the foot of a mountain.
I traveled there on several medical missions. Sometimes we had no cleaning water, and I would go days without a shower or even washing my face. But I didn’t mind it.
On one such trip, I encountered a Yi limping around on a rough crutch. One of his pant legs hung empty and one side of his face was twitching. When I inquired about his situation, he said he had lost part of his leg in a traffic accident. I asked if I could see and had him sit. I don’t know what bastard did the amputation, but it looked horrible. Half of his right leg was gone and the bone of his thigh was poking out like a knife; the flesh around it had decayed and the stink was horrible. I told him: “I have to fix this, now, or you will die.”
He looked at me, stunned at first, but he understood me and tears ran down his cheeks. I had to amputate the rest of his leg if I was to save his life. Soon, I found myself surrounded by a crowd. Nobody knew who I was, except that I had come from Kunming. But they were trusting and helped carry the man to his house and laid him flat on his bed. I took my instruments out from my bag, sterilized them and the infected area, injected anesthesia, and removed the gangrenous tissue.
I sorted out the blood vessels, and sewed them up, like a grandma sewing the soles of shoes, and started the amputation. The process is nothing mysterious. It’s very much like carpentry. You need a saw, a file, a chisel, a hammer, and a planer. I carried with me a small saw with sharp teeth. The bone on the thigh of an adult is fairly tough; not as hard as iron, but harder than wood. It’s not easy to cut a man’s leg off. My arms became numb from the vibration of the saw, back and forth, back and forth. Sweat poured down my face. If we had been at a regular hospital, the nurses would have helped, but all I had was untrained villagers, who simply stood there clueless. I smoothed and rounded the cut bone with a hammer and a chisel and sewed up the healthy skin and flesh.
On another occasion, I had gone to the Red River Prefecture, where the famous Red River Cigarette Factory is located. I visited a leprosarium to operate on someone with appendicitis. None of the doctors in the area would treat him. One had some medicine delivered but wouldn’t go there for a diagnosis. Appendix removal is relatively minor surgery, and I thought nothing of stopping by to do the operation, though the patients in the wards there were surprised. “You certainly have guts to visit us here,” they said. The patient was a middle-aged man; his hands and feet appeared deformed because of all the dead and dying skin. He was very calm, never complained about pain. A Catholic girl from Gansu province assisted me with the operation. It went smoothly. It was a straightforward procedure done under local anesthetic. After we stitched him up, the patient nodded his appreciation and slowly walked back to his ward.
Speaking of leprosy, as I was waiting for a bus on the side of a road near Shimenkan one day, I saw in the distance a thatched house half hidden among the trees on a hill. Thinking it might be the residence of a hermit or a scholar, I decided to pay a visit. The guide looked scared and stopped me: “That is the home of two leprosy patients.” Driven by curiosity, I ignored the guide’s warning and went. I saw an old couple dozing off in the sun. When I examined them, I saw that neither displayed any leprosy symptoms. They were quite healthy people.
The old man, Zhang Zhi-en, used to live in a village nearby. In the 1970s, while digging herbs in the mountains, he ran into a snake, which the locals called Ma snake. He killed it with a berry hoe. When he related the story to his fellow villagers, they spread rumors that he had leprosy. According to local folklore, people would contract leprosy if they encountered a Ma snake, the name of which sounded similar to leprosy. He was locked up in a local sanitarium for years. His ex-wife, who had also been accused of having leprosy, was burned to death when she was still alive, bedridden with another illness. The old woman I saw that day was his second wife. Their life was quite miserable. Nobody talked to them. Part of his house had collapsed, but he didn’t have the means to fix it. I contacted the local church and donated two thousand yuan myself to the renovation project. We put tiles on the roof, and it looks really nice now. We even bought some pigs and chickens for him to raise. His life is much improved. He’s now accepted by people in his church.
Liao: Tell me about the young fellow, Little Sun, from the village of Malutang.
Sun: He used to be a temporary worker at a shipyard in the city of Guangzhou, married, with children. Life looked quite good for him until he lost the use of his legs. He sought treatment all over the place. A well-known professor at the Zhongshan Medical University examined him, but just shook his head. As his paralysis progressed, his wife left him. His fellow workers sent him back to his native village, where his parents had to take care of everything for him, from eating to bathroom needs. It was all very tragic. Surgery wasn’t the solution, nor was Western medicine, but it came to me that traditional acupuncture might be the answer. I didn’t have any formal training in acupuncture, so I took lessons from a well-known Chinese herbal doctor, Mr. Liang. It was truly a fun and rewarding experience. Once Mr. Liang signed my certificate, I went to see Little Sun, and he agreed to try the treatment. After my first visit, he said his legs hurt, so he could feel them. We kept up the treatment. At the same time, I prescribed some herbs. Slowly, he was able to stand, and now he can walk without a cane. He is taking medical lessons from me and can take care of common ailments.