Out of the Gobi
Page 22
We decided to send representatives to the leaders to see if they would run the movie again for us. We knew that the chances were slim, but we did not want to leave without having tried. Three of us, including Cui and myself, went in to talk with the company leaders. We told them how many hours we had walked to see the movie. We would have to travel at least two hours back, even if we did not get lost. We would be very grateful if they could do us this great favor.
Finally, the leaders of the Tenth Company took pity on us. The Tenth Company was located closer to the center of things, near the regiment headquarters and the town of Urat Qianqi. They knew that we were much more culturally starved than they. Moved by our determination, or perhaps afraid that we would refuse to leave without seeing the movie, and thus that any delay would mean an even later bedtime for them, they agreed.
When we made our announcement, the group cheered. I felt happy not only about the prospect of seeing the movie but also because I had helped in the negotiations.
We sat down on the ground in front of a raised white canvas that served as the movie screen. We all had good views. I found a brick to sit on, so I even had a seat. Gobi summers were dreadful less because of the heat than because of the mosquitoes. They were less of a problem when you were walking, but once you sat down, they swarmed all over you. If you clapped your hands at random, you would kill quite a few. I now had to move my hands constantly around my head and slap myself on the legs and arms.
The movie was indeed old, and the picture was no longer clear. The film must have been shown thousands of times. But the quality didn’t really bother me, and I was soon absorbed in the plot. It was about how the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, had won the 1917 October Revolution.
One unusual scene showed some people meeting to plot political intrigues on the balcony of a theater. On stage was the ballet Swan Lake. A group of small swans, young women, were dancing to the beautiful music. These women were scantily clad, with their figures fully shown. I had never seen the body of a woman so exposed. It embarrassed and excited me at the same time, I must admit. And I was certain that the others around me were feeling the same way. The morality of our time was such that it was deemed risque if any woman so much as rolled up her sleeves or pants when working, or if she wore anything that showed the curves of her body. In fact, all the young women dressed in the same oversized baggy uniforms. Anything that might suggest their gender was regarded as nonrevolutionary and bourgeois.
Cui told me afterward that young people in Beijing would go to this movie just for this 30-second “pornographic part” from Swan Lake. For days afterward, Baoquan said that he would surrender to the Soviets if they should invade. “Russian girls are beautiful,” he marveled.
The conclusion was quite touching. There was a shortage of food in Russia right after the October Revolution. Lenin’s former bodyguard, whose name was Vasily, I think, was sent to supervise the transportation of grain to what was then St. Petersburg to feed the workers. He completed his task and was reporting to Lenin when he collapsed onto the floor. The doctor found that he had fainted because he was weak from starvation. I had great sympathy for this man. Like him, we were handling grain daily; like him, we were hungry and teetering at the edge of starvation most of the time ourselves.
At the end of the movie, Vasily was saying good-bye to his wife. She secretly put a piece of bread into his pocket. He hugged her, and secretly took the bread out of his pocket and put it back onto the table, whispering, “There will be grain. There will be bread.”
From that day on, whenever there was a shortage of food or we were hungry, someone would say, “There will be grain. There will be bread.”
It was past midnight when the movie was over. We thanked the projectionist and set out for home. The way back was much easier, and we did not get lost. We talked about the movie on our return journey the whole time. When we got into bed, there were only three or four hours left to sleep before another workday began.
The long night was certainly worth it. Who knew when we would experience such a rare cinematic treat again?
Chapter 12
Barefoot Doctor
In 1950, the year after the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the average life expectancy in China was 41.6 years. In 1960, during the Great Famine, it dropped to 31.6 years. Creating a health care system for a poor, sprawling country with more than half a billion people was a daunting task for China’s new rulers. The country suffered from a severe lack of medicine and a shortage of medical professionals. Medicine was almost absent in the rural areas, except for the scant coverage provided by traditional medicine men. The government thus attempted to improve access to health care by creating a new public health system designed to give priority to prevention over treatment.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the Rural Cooperative Medical Scheme (RCMS) established a three-tier system for rural health care access. The RCMS functioned on a prepayment plan that drew funds from individual contributions, a village collective welfare fund, and subsidies from the government.
The first tier consisted of village doctors, who were trained in basic hygiene and medicine, including Western and traditional Chinese medicine. Not every village had a doctor, but where they did exist, they provided the most basic form of health care. For any illnesses a village doctor could not treat, patients were sent to township health centers, the second tier of the RCMS, which consisted of small outpatient clinics staffed by government medical professionals. The third tier of the RCMS, the county or provincial hospitals, handled the most serious cases.
The rural areas were “lacking in doctors and short of medicine,” as a popular saying had it. Mao strongly pushed to bring medicine to the countryside by providing basic health care training to peasants and medicine men, thus promoting what became known as the “barefoot doctor” system. The name was derived from the need for these doctors to work in the paddy fields barefoot during planting season in the southern part of China. When the educated youth were sent down to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, a number of them were given basic training to become barefoot doctors.
By 1976 an estimated 1.5 million barefoot doctors served China’s rural areas, covering approximately 85 percent of the total population. Thanks largely to economic reforms and the de-collectivization of rural farms in the 1980s, however, the funding and organizational rationale of the RCMS collapsed; by 1984 barefoot doctors served just 9.6 percent of China’s population. Soon, the name “barefoot doctor” had become passé and replaced with “rural doctor.” Barefoot doctors became history, at least in name.
Today, China’s health care system consists of hospitals, including primarily public hospitals and a growing number of private medical institutions, and insurance programs. About 95 percent of the population has at least basic health insurance coverage. China is scheduled to provide affordable basic health care to all residents by 2020.
* * *
I was sitting on a little folding stool in front of our room reading. It was June 3, 1971. The windy season was over, and the sun felt comfortably warm. Suddenly, I heard someone shouting my name.
It was Little Xie, the messenger from company headquarters. He had been in our squad when he first arrived from Yuyao, a town in Zhejiang Province in the south. He was tall and handsome but introverted; he rarely spoke. Political Instructor Zhang had taken a liking to him and given him the job of messenger. Little Xie didn’t have to go to the fields anymore. Because he was now so close to the leaders, many people tried to curry favor with him. He took advantage of his enhanced status and went from one platoon to another, inviting himself to meals whenever someone returned from home leave with machine-made noodles or canned meat.
But Little Xie didn’t forget his lowly squad mates. He was a frequent visitor, sharing gossip about what was going on at headquarters. Now I greeted him warmly and asked what was new.
He looked at me mysteriously, smiling. “Instructor Zhang wants to see you,” he
informed me.
“What for?” The political instructor had never summoned me before. I thought perhaps I might have done something wrong.
He wouldn’t satisfy my curiosity, or perhaps he didn’t know. “You’ll find out soon enough. He says it’s urgent.”
The company office was right behind our platoon. I stopped reading and hid my book under my pillow before going to the room the political instructor shared with the commander as both office and bedroom.
“Report!” I announced myself loudly outside the door.
“Come in.” Instructor Zhang was sitting on his bed, facing the door. Apparently, he was expecting me.
He didn’t invite me to sit down, and my heart beat nervously as I raked my brain for what offenses I might have committed unintentionally or by accident.
Finally, he spoke. “Little Shan,” he began. I was startled to hear such an intimate greeting, the first ever from the instructor. Usually, he called me by my full name. “Do you like medicine?” he asked. I was even more puzzled and did not know how to respond. I thought perhaps he was questioning my courage.
“I don’t really like medicine, but I am willing to take it when I’m sick. ‘Good medicine is bitter but beneficial to your health.’” I quoted the Chinese proverb and tried to smile.
“Do you know anything about it?” he asked. I didn’t have the foggiest idea what he was driving at, so it was useless to try to avoid trouble. I answered him directly.
“I have read some chapters from the Manual for Barefoot Doctors. I was in poor health when I was small and had all kinds of illnesses. I took a lot of different drugs.”
“Very good,” the instructor said. I still could not figure out where he was going with the conversation. Was it perhaps my knowing something about medicine or my poor health when I was small?
Now his face grew more solemn. He cleared his throat, and I knew he was going to tell me why I was there.
“The Company Branch Committee of the Communist Party has decided to make you a medic or barefoot doctor. This has been determined after lengthy discussion, based on the recommendation by Dr. Yu. You leave tomorrow morning for the regiment hospital in Batou for training for three months.” He paused, staring as if he had made an announcement on behalf of God. “Do you have any objections?”
Objections? I was almost dizzy with joy. I tried to conceal my excitement and replied carefully, reciting a line familiar to everyone from war movies. “No. I obey the decision of the Party.”
“Good. In any case, the matter has been decided.” The instructor fell silent, seemingly waiting for me to speak. But I didn’t want to express my happiness for fear that I would show “petty bourgeois sentiment” or hints of disliking hard labor in the fields. If I had known better, I would have said a few words of gratitude, but I took his words literally. I didn’t think personal thanks would be appropriate for a decision made by the Party, of which he was the physical embodiment.
Apparently disappointed by my silence, Instructor Zhang said something about living up to the trust placed in me by the Party and the leadership. Then he said, “I will expect you to give me acupuncture for my arthritis when you come back.” He lifted the corner of his mouth for the first time and dismissed me.
I was so happy that I wanted to shout and somersault. But there were people everywhere, so I hurried to find my friends to tell them the big news.
Cui Xianchao said that this was the first good decision that the company leadership had ever made. Huang Shurong teasingly asked me not to forget him when I became a man of importance. Li Rongtian was more thoughtful: he told me I should thank Dr. Yu for the nomination.
But someone said that Dr. Yu had gone to regiment headquarters. There was a rumor that he might be transferred permanently. That made sense. That was why they needed a new medic.
Dr. Yu liked people who read books. He must have seen the barefoot doctors’ manual on my bed. I could not get over the fact that although I had never exchanged more than a few words with him, he had chosen me.
The next morning, I packed my clothes and quilt. Most of my good friends took the day off from the fields to see me off. It was exciting for everyone that one of us had been chosen to become a doctor.
As it turned out, the delivery truck that I was supposed to get a ride with would not arrive until after 5 o’clock, and we had to go to the Third Company to catch it.
So off we went. I felt happy surrounded by so many friends, who were carrying my belongings and cheering me on. We had to pass through the compound on our way, and the people who had just returned from a day of hard work were hanging about waiting for the dinner whistle. I felt as if we made a parade.
When we arrived at the Third Company, the driver was off having dinner. Despite my urgings, my friends refused to go back to eat. When we finally got under way, I waved goodbye to the crowd. The driver marveled at what a friendly place my company seemed to be.
It was well after dark when we arrived in Batou. Through the headlights, I could see rows of houses just like the barracks in our company. Someone helped me with my belongings, guided me to my room, and then disappeared. I was given a room all by myself, apparently vacated when a squad was dispatched to work somewhere else. It wasn’t until after I was in bed that I realized I hadn’t had dinner. I went to sleep on an empty stomach.
At breakfast, I saw that there was much stricter rationing here, presumably because people here weren’t engaged in any types of hard labor. I was only given one piece of wotou, one bowl of corn-flour porridge, and some salty vegetables. Usually, I could eat four or five pieces of wotou, but there was no more. Well, I thought, now that I didn’t have to work in the fields, one piece was probably enough to last the morning.
I would be trained in basic medicine and taught how to treat common illnesses. The training sessions were held in a large warehouse. Most of the 20-odd students were medical workers from the regiment hospital. The rest were, like myself, from different companies. Most of them had considerable medical experience already and were here to improve their skills. I was one of the very few who had never been exposed to medicine, other than taking it.
The instructors were from the regiment hospital. Unlike barefoot doctors, who received only the most rudimentary training, these were real doctors who had had formal medical education in military medical schools.
In the first days, an instructor went over the anatomy and all the systems of a human body with the aid of a large picture. The last part of his lecture was on the reproductive system. He went through this rather perfunctorily. The vast majority of our patients, the Army Corps soldiers, would be teenagers too young to worry about reproduction. Besides, the leadership of the Nineteenth Regiment had issued an order that soldiers were “forbidden to develop a love or marital relationship” for at least three years. If we dealt with local peasants, the instructor said, it would be our duty to reduce their rate of reproduction by educating them in population control and by dispensing birth control devices.
After the “Western analysis of anatomy” class, another instructor talked about how Chinese medicine viewed the body. Instead of talking about different “systems,” Chinese medicine was based on the study of the five zang and six fu. To me, Chinese medical theory seemed much more complicated and philosophical than Western medicine. The doctor used terms similar to those in Western medicine, but they had different meanings. For example, one of the five zang of the human body was the heart. But the symptoms of “heart problems” in Chinese medicine included insomnia, mental disturbances, nosebleeds, and premature ejaculation. The concept of high blood pressure did not exist.
The anatomy classes were followed by study sessions on Chairman Mao’s works. The instructor told us that if we were armed with the theory behind Mao Zedong Thought, we would better serve our patients.
To dispel any doubt about the connection between Chairman Mao’s teachings and medicine, he related a story about “capturing the principal contradiction.”
The instructor said, on a hot summer day in a big city, a pedestrian suffered a heart failure and collapsed. A doctor happened to walk by, and he went over to find the man unconscious. He felt for a pulse but there was none. The situation called for immediate action. He started to apply pressure to the man’s chest but was unable to restart the heart. The only hope was direct hand massage to the heart. But that would require open-heart surgery.
Well, the instructor continued, the doctor happened to have an old pocketknife. On the spot, in front of the crowd, he used it to cut open the man’s chest. Then he applied direct massage. When the ambulance arrived, the heart was beating. In the hospital, the man was given large doses of antibiotics, for the pocketknife operation would almost surely lead to a bad infection.
“Assuming you were a trained surgeon with years of experience, would you have dared to open the chest of a patient with a pocketknife amid a crowd on the street?” the instructor asked.
We all looked at one another. Everyone knew that open-heart surgery was a major operation. It was hard to believe that someone had done it with a pocketknife on a street. Of course, none of us had ever seen that type of surgery. But even for those few who had some idea, the scene was hard to imagine. We all shook our heads in disbelief.
“Why not?” the instructor pressed us.
Someone raised his hand hesitantly. He said that first, it would be impossible to tell if a direct massage would revive the person; second, how could he stop the bleeding without any help; and third, there would be a good chance that the infection would kill the patient anyway. The risk of failure was too great.