Becoming Inspector Chen

by Qiu Xiaolong

  According to the hospital regulations, the patients could tell the nurse in the second-floor waiting room about their choice of doctors. Doctor Zhang was popular, having studied in Europe, and wore a pair of gold-rimmed glasses and smoked an indispensable cigar. Usually there was a long waiting period for him, and Chen balked at the thought of it. But it was worth it, his mother declared, as his cough seemed to be much better the night after his first visit to Doctor Zhang.

  For the follow-up visit, however, Chen was surprised to witness a group of red-armbanded strangers occupying Doctor Zhang’s office, smashing the framed awards and gilded prizes on the desk. They turned out to be members of a Red Guard organization that had taken over the power at the hospital in response to Chairman Mao’s highest and latest instruction: ‘It is right and justified to make revolution and come up in rebellion.’ As a result, intellectuals like the doctors there, having immersed themselves in Western ideologies and knowledge, were denounced as ‘black monsters’, to be mercilessly persecuted and punished.

  The leader of the Red Guard organization was a high school graduate surnamed Jia, with no college education or medical knowledge whatsoever, who had just been assigned to the hospital as an apprentice to the retiring electrician. That morning, Jia staged a revolutionary mass criticism with a group of ‘black intellectuals’ gathered as the targets underneath a red-cloth-and-white-paper banner stretched overhead: ‘Exposure of the Paper Tigers’. The scene reminded Chen of his father standing under a similar banner in another hospital six months earlier.

  Doctor Zhang, trembling, with a blackboard hung around his neck, was given a simple test to take his own temperature, and he grabbed a thermometer pushed over to him and put it into his mouth without realizing it as one for anal use. So Jia gave a dramatic speech there and then:

  ‘Zhang, a so-called authority at the hospital, could not even tell the difference between the oral and the anal thermometer. It most eloquently proves Mao’s maxim: “The intellectuals are the most stupid compared with workers, farmers and soldiers.” Shame on those bourgeois intellectuals who are capable of nothing except engaging themselves in counter-revolutionary activities and capitalist restoration.’

  Chen nodded to the audience before he left the hospital without seeing Doctor Zhang, who, like other ‘black monsters’, was now deprived of the right to treat patients.

  Chen coughed harder that night. When his mother heard of the things happening at the hospital, she said with her brows knitted, ‘Chairman Mao is of course absolutely right, but temperature-taking is the job of a nurse. For an experienced doctor like Zhang, what if he failed to tell the difference between the thermometers? Besides, his head was bent down by the blackboard, so dizzy …’

  She did not finish her comment, frowning as she added, ‘Observe, but don’t speak. If you see anything there you don’t understand, keep it to yourself, Chen. Remember, trouble comes out of your mouth.’

  The last sentence was an echo of an old proverb. It probably popped up in reference to his father as well, who had gotten into trouble because of his speeches and publications long before the Cultural Revolution. He decided to observe it as closely as possible.

  What had happened at the hospital was celebrated the next morning in the Liberation Daily as a ‘revolutionary initiative’ of the Red Guards, who were portrayed as utterly justified in humiliating the bourgeois intellectual.

  Whatever the interpretation, Chen had to revisit the hospital a few days later, still coughing. There he saw Zhang shuffling out of the restroom in janitor uniform – thus going through an ‘ideological transformation through hard labor’ – with smudges on his face, his glasses broken and bandage-fixed on his nose. The old doctor carried in his hands a dripping mop, out of which a lizard was seen shooting like a flash of lightning. A slip of a girl seated beside Chen on the bench in the waiting room shrieked at the bizarre sight. Chen reached out to cover her mouth in haste. It could have served as more evidence of Zhang’s incompetence even at the janitor job.

  With experienced doctors like Zhang gone, the remaining ones were overwhelmed with the large number of patients. A young nurse surnamed Han suggested that Chen take whichever doctor was available there. She was busy filling out the basic information on his record while waving down a thermometer in her left hand. He followed her mischievous glance to Jia sitting at Zhang’s desk, wearing a red armband over the hospital uniform.

  Jia was said to be pushing the ‘revolutionary initiative’ to a higher level in the Cultural Revolution. Red Guards were supposed to take power everywhere, and that meant at the hospital too. So Jia took the lead in treating patients as well. It was actually a move in line with Mao’s approval of the ‘barefoot doctors’ – the farmers, while working barefoot in the rice paddy, were also helping their sick class sisters and brothers with traditional Chinese herbs and acupuncture rather than ‘Western medicine’, and achieved far more miraculous results. That being the case for the farmers in the countryside, then why not for the Red Guards at a hospital in the big city?

  Before Chen could say anything in response to Nurse Han, his medical record was placed beside a copy of Barefoot Doctor Reader on the desk in front of Jia. Touching the red armband on the white uniform, Jia checked the record and leafed through the book for a minute or two before dashing off a prescription, similar to the one given by Doctor Zhang, but not forgetting to add a Chinese herb as he declared in a serious manner: ‘As our great leader Chairman Mao says, “Chinese medicine is a great treasure.” So this will make the real difference.’

  For the following weeks, Chen came to find his medical record sent, invariably, to Jia’s desk. Maybe the nurse had no choice. It would be too much of a political face loss for a Red Guard ‘doctor’ to sit there for hours without seeing a patient. Chen was too young to protest against the arrangement.

  Then he noticed something. In the office, Jia hardly looked at him across the desk, but stole glances instead toward Nurse Han in the waiting room.

  An attractive, well-built girl in her early twenties, she wore her white uniform barelegged and barefoot in crystal-like plastic sandals. What she wore – or didn’t – beneath her uniform was easy for Jia to imagine, considering the unbearable summer heat with patients milling around, and with the one and only ancient ceiling fan revolving half-heartedly overhead. She had to fan herself with a manila folder, wiping the sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand, and beating her feet on the floor in a languorous rhythm as if to an inaudible song.

  The realization hit home for Chen. That was why Jia wanted to occupy Dr Zhang’s desk. An excuse for more contact between the ‘doctor’ and nurse. Those years, romantic passion was condemned as politically incorrect. The only passion permissible was the passion for Chairman Mao and the Cultural Revolution. How much more so for the head of a Red Guard organization?

  As for her, she seemed not to look into the office much. Chen could not help thinking of a proverb: ‘An ugly toad’s mouth waters in vain at the sight of a beautiful swan.’ Han was such a vivacious girl, glowing with youth and energy.

  Another proverb, however, declared that persistence may wear an iron rod out into a thin needle. And before too long Jia was seen touching her hand when taking the medical record across the desk. She did not really push it away, Chen detected.

  Then another morning, Chen was surprised to see in the waiting room an elderly nurse temporarily replacing Han, who was said to have an urgent family situation. That same morning, Jia was seen striding out of the office, taking off his white uniform and saying he had to go to a political meeting. The replacement nurse seemed to be rather clumsy, repeatedly misplacing information and records, which added to the workload of the other doctors there. The patients had to wait even longer outside.

  ‘It’s more than two hours,’ one of them complained petulantly.

  ‘With Nurse Han gone,’ another observed, ‘Jia disappears too.’

  ‘Now I see why,’ the third one joined
in. ‘That dirty bastard!’

  ‘Well, it’s human to be attracted to a beauty,’ an elderly patient said rather bookishly. ‘Confucius says, “Such a slender, sweet girl she is, / a gentleman is eager seeking her hand.”’

  It became a heated, though whispered, topic for their discussion and speculation that morning, spreading out like ripples. Chen started working on a more elaborate scenario. Jia could have metamorphosed into the commander of the Red Guard organization because of Han. An electrician apprentice was a nobody at a hospital, definitely not in a position to approach a beauty like Han. Chen was intrigued with the idea of himself turning into something of a private investigator, though he knew better than to discuss the case with others. He had been too traumatized as ‘a black puppy’. Still, he had nothing better to do in the waiting room. So he just observed.

  As in another old Chinese proverb, weather changes unpredictably. Four or five days later, Jia was caught in the act of pinning Han down on the office desk in the late evening, her uniform unbuttoned and her sandals fallen to the floor. It was Zhen, the associate head of the hospital Red Guard organization, that made the shocking discovery. Zhen showed no mercy to ‘a renegade succumbing to the evil influence of bourgeois decadence’. Jia pleaded guilty, shouldering all the responsibility for himself, with Han sobbing in the emergency political meeting.

  Zhen then became the Red Guard leader, with Jia removed from his powerful position. There seemed to be different stories about Zhen’s raid. According to one version, he had happened to gather information from the whispered gossip among the patients in the waiting room, but according to another, he had eyed Jia’s position for months, watching over him like the surveillance cameras seen only in Western movies at the time. Chen observed without offering his scenario.

  Whatever the scenario, Jia was demoted to doing odd jobs at the hospital. Han was transferred to the pharmacy room. In the meantime, lingering in the waiting room became more unbearable to Chen, and his bronchitis turned into something like asthma, wheezing and coughing for hours at night.

  During his following visits to the hospital, he caught occasional glimpses of Han through the pharmacy window, flitting among the rows of medicine bottles in a yellow summer dress, like a butterfly blazing in bright light streaming in from the window.

  That was why Jia kept moving back and forth in front of the pharmacy window, Chen observed, grasping a small package of pills tight in his hand.

  A couple of weeks later, Chen was shocked again. This time at the scene of Jia working as a janitor, carrying a dripping mop and a pail of dirty water, the very job once assigned to Doctor Zhang.

  So Chen started canvassing in secret. Waiting in hospital could be so boring.

  As it turned out, Jia did stumble anew because of his obsession with Han. Those days, whenever one of ‘the latest and highest quotes of Chairman Mao’ was announced on the radio, people had to do something in celebration. This time, it happened to be Mao’s reiteration that ‘the traditional Chinese medicine is a great treasure’, so for the neighborhood hospital, the response was supposed to come in the form of propaganda material on acupuncture for mass education.

  Jia was given the job of cutting the stencil overnight. To illustrate the needle positions, he drew an unclad human body. Around midnight, he fell asleep, dreaming of Han again. In the first gray light struggling through the curtained window, he woke up with the lingering images of the dream, still so enthrallingly vivid, before he suddenly saw the body on the stencil staring back with neither charm nor curve – as if in accusation of his being so inattentive. He added touches in a hurry, still sleepy-eyed.

  The next afternoon, in the middle of his janitor round, he was summoned to the Red Guard office. Zhen pushed the printed material across the desk to him.

  ‘Take a damned good look. The new evidence of your crime against Chairman Mao.’

  The print-out showed a female figure with two dots on her bosom, and a line between her thighs, all of which Jia had added as a result of the muddled fantasies of the fleeing night, thus making the naked figure almost as erotically desirable as Han in the dream.

  The same afternoon witnessed another revolutionary mass criticism, like the one organized by Jia the first day of the Red Guards taking power at the hospital, except that this time it was presided over by Zhen, with Jia standing under a portrait of Chairman Mao, head low.

  ‘Comrades, the material is meant for the broad masses of people to further understand Chairman Mao’s profound teaching about Chinese medicine being a great treasure. But what has this bastard done about it? He presents a nude female body in the text. Consequently, people reading the material could be lost in obscene association. It’s a deliberate, diabolic sabotage.’

  The accusation was far more serious than before. Nurse Han joined in, making a tearful, indignant denunciation: ‘He is so full of dirty thoughts. This rotten egg simply cannot help himself.’

  There was no possibility of Jia’s remaining in the hospital. It was said he was suspended from work there like a repeatedly defeated cricket thrown out of the cricket-fighting pot.

  In the meantime, Doctor Zhang moved back to the office desk, seeing his patients like before. He appeared to be genuinely concerned while examining Chen’s medical record. Acute bronchitis should not have lingered on like that, unless it had lapsed into asthma. The old doctor dashed off a new prescription, adding something called gejie as an afterthought.

  Chen was puzzled by the prescription, part of which he had to fill out at the herbal medicine store outside of the hospital. Gejie turned out to be a pair of ghastly-looking dried lizards with long, thick tails. How could they have anything to do with bronchitis? He hurried back with the lizards and the question for Doctor Zhang.

  ‘During the recent political re-education, I studied Chinese medicine in response to our great leader Chairman Mao’s teaching,’ the doctor said reverently. In spite of his major in Western medicine, that seemed to be the one and only politically correct thing for him to do. He then pulled out a time-yellowed Chinese medicine book from the desk drawer, adjusting the newly fixed gold-rimmed glasses on his nose.

  ‘Gejie is a sort of large lizard, proper name being gekko gecko. So its name probably comes from the sound it makes, the male-sounding “ge” and the female, “jie”. The lizards always have to move in a pair – male and female. They are inseparable, engaging their indivisible selves in sex with inexhaustible production of hormones, yet with the perfect balance of yin and yang. So the most potent medical element is believed to be in their long tails, which look supersized for the pair in your hand. So it will work out wonderfully for your ailment. Indeed, Chairman Mao’s teaching is so profound, we have to study and re-study.’

  Chen remained confounded, blinking. Of course Chairman Mao could never be wrong, but the doctor talked in such a bookish way, throwing in all the unnecessary details about the dried lizards.

  ‘Are they so horny?’ he finally asked.

  ‘In the traditional Chinese medical theory,’ Doctor Zhang said, adjusting his glasses again, ‘asthma comes from the lack of yang in the human system, but in some cases, also possibly from the lack of yin. What can help more than the natural, balanced exuberance of yin / yang in a pair of gejie?’

  It might not hurt to try, Chen thought, leaving and clutching the pair of gejie in bewilderment.

  When properly brewed at home, the gejie tasted like smelly salt fish soup. His mother had to prepare honey water in a hurry to revive his tastebuds afterward. She forgot to ask how Doctor Zhang had got back into the office.

  In less than a week Chen began to recover, miraculously, and he could not help wondering whether it was truly because of the dried lizards.

  During the follow-up visit to Doctor Zhang, Chen did not see Nurse Han in the pharmacy. There was no prescription for him that day. The old doctor proudly proclaimed that he had been cured.

  As he left the hospital, he thought he detected someone sulking stealthi
ly outside. He hurried over, and sure enough it was Jia sneaking glances toward a drop-out window of the pharmacy room, scurrying away at the sight of him like a criminal, and casting a shadow behind like a long tail.

  Perhaps like gejie, Chen thought, coughing again unexpectedly.

  TWO

  Again, Chen woke from a puzzling dream, which seemed to be somehow sequential to the earlier one.

  He must have drifted into another disturbed doze while recollecting those traumatic childhood experiences. It was probably for no more than ten or fifteen minutes. The contents of the dream were already becoming elusive, though informed with the same ominous sensation, and with the same iron chain trailing along the corridor, rattling for a second or two, just like earlier.

  But the chain is tearing across in a flash to another location, somewhere more somber and sinister. Instead of the headless figure prowling up from behind, it is a bull-headed one squatting on the black marble steps of a magnificent black-painted hall. In accordance with the Chinese folklore, the bull-headed figure is a constable of Hell who is keeping himself busy with disassembling and assembling the colored links of the long chain, as if totally engaged in a game of absurdity. With each of those links marked yin or yang, the proper color pattern of the chain should be alternately white and black, but the bull-headed constable, having had a cup too much, connects the links in random – two black pieces, three white ones, and then just one other black piece before one falls to the ground with a clang.

  Chen was having a hard time interpreting the dream. The bull-headed constable is supposed to be in charge of marching the doomed souls from the human world to Hell. But instead of being a constable of real responsibility, he is more of a yamen runner who simply runs around at the Hell King’s bidding, incapable of carrying out any investigation on his own.