Out of the Gobi

by Weijian Shan

  The doctors there could not find anything wrong either, but they hospitalized Wang for further observation. The next day the doctors found that his bed had been moved from next to the door to a more comfortable place by the wall. Wang claimed he did not know how the bed had moved. He said that he had woken up to find it in its new position. The doctors had no evidence to prove anything else. And there was no question that his left leg was much smaller than his right one now.

  Wang stayed in the division hospital for a whole month, where he limped around on a pair of crutches. His case had all the doctors puzzled. Finally, they concluded that he had better seek help in his hometown, Tianjin, and issued him permanent home leave. He came back to the company to collect his belongings.

  On the day of his departure, many of us went out to see him off. He was comfortably seated in the driver’s cabin of the truck. There were handshakes and farewell exchanges. Finally, when the truck pulled off, Wang threw his crutches out the window. “Enough of this!” he shouted. Only then did we realize that he had been feigning it all along. You have to admire him for his discipline and the extraordinary suffering he had to go through to pull this off.

  I had not been sleeping well since coming back from the medical training course. I was suffering from neurasthenia, I believed, and my major symptom was insomnia. Despite my exhaustion, I continued to go to work without taking time off. I wanted to contribute enough to be worth the few wotou I ate every day. Moreover, I wanted to be with the people of the platoon, so nobody would think that I was any different now that I was a barefoot doctor.

  I sought a remedy for my problem. I read in some medical books that neurasthenia generally occurred after tension caused by higher nervous system activity when mental activity reached a state of exhaustion. There was no question that I had been studying hard, and I had always liked to read. But I strongly believed that the real cause of the problem was malnutrition.

  The package of food my father had sent me was long exhausted. I began to spend all my monthly wages, five yuan, on food. When the shelves in the small shop were empty, I would go with friends like Cui Xianchao and Liu Xiaotong to a village quite far away to buy a chicken or two. When we pooled our wages, we could get a couple of chickens at a time. We always shared everything among whoever came into the room when the chicken was being cooked. So one person could only have a few bites of chicken meat once in a long while. But our meager monthly pay was only enough to buy one chicken apiece and there was not much I could do to improve my nutrition intake.

  Then I learned that vitamin B complex was supposed to nourish the nervous system and to improve my sleep. For some reason, our clinic was stocked with injectable vials of vitamin B complex. I started to give myself an injection of vitamin B complex every day. It was an awkward exercise, putting a needle into my own behind. It was painful to begin with, and it was even worse when I was pushing the liquid into the muscle. But the practice of doing self-injection at my medical training now proved useful. I don’t know if this had an actual or psychological effect, but I began to sleep better after several shots.

  I stole a rooster once, but not for the meat. Since I didn’t sleep well, I woke up at the slightest noise. For a long while, a rooster’s crowing awakened me before the sun rose. It was so annoying and painful. I decided to act. One night, I caught the rooster in his coop while he was asleep and I twisted off his head with my bare hands. I had to walk a long way to dump the body in a ditch. I knew there was no other way to silence him, so I had to murder him, as he literally was driving me to the edge of sanity.

  I doubt that a farmer laborer has sleep problems, as the day’s hard work tires him out and drains his energy, inducing him to sleep. But a combination of hard labor, not enough to eat, and intensive reading whenever possible would fray your nerves, no matter how physically exhausted you are.

  I eventually recovered from my frequent insomnia, once I was able to get enough nutrition in my diet years later. But to this day, I don’t sleep well, a reminder of my days in the Gobi.

  * * *

  One of the tasks of being a medic was to administer vaccines to protect against epidemics. The first one I helped with nearly got the entire company killed.

  It was a vaccine against the bubonic plague—in sparsely populated Inner Mongolia, there were field rats. Plague was endemic in this area of China during my time in the Gobi. The last time the Fifth Company had been vaccinated had been shortly before we arrived about two years earlier. There was thus the need to vaccinate those of us who came after.

  Dr. Yin was away from the camp so all three of us medics were involved. The vaccine came in powder form. Wang Xinquan, Gao Xiaorong, and I diluted it with normal saline according to the instructions given to us by the regiment hospital. It took an entire day to vaccinate the whole company. Li Baoquan had avoided it the last time, and I was jeering at him for being so chicken-hearted as to be afraid of a small shot in the arm. But he replied that if everyone became immune to the plague, there would be no way for him to get the terrible disease either.

  I would not listen to this nonsense. Since I was closer to Baoquan than anyone else, I got Yan Chongjie and two others to help me hold him down. We vaccinated him by force, as if he were a pig. Baoquan was strange. He didn’t mind being used as a guinea pig for me to practice acupuncture, but he would not submit to a shot that was supposed to be good for him.

  The next day was a day off because of the expected side effects from the vaccination.

  There were side effects—but they were entirely unexpected. Overnight the arm in which I took the shot became red and swollen. I thought it was normal. But by afternoon I felt all the symptoms of a bad case of influenza. Everyone else was faring the same. We were all in bed. Few of us wanted to eat that evening.

  The second day was awful. My whole body alternately burned and felt very cold. I knew I was running a fever. I had never expected a vaccine would have such severe effects. Could I be allergic?

  I was not alone, though. No one who had been vaccinated could get up. I checked all our temperatures to discover we all had fevers. Baoquan was complaining that I had brought him suffering. I had a splitting headache and could hardly keep my eyes open. I felt so weak that it took great effort just to go to the outhouse and back.

  I knew something was wrong. I staggered to my feet and went around the camp. I checked several rooms and other platoons and found the same situation everywhere. As I was going around, I felt as if I were walking on a cloud. The veins in my forehead were pounding so loudly and rapidly that I thought my head would explode.

  I finally found my way to the clinic. Gao Xiaorong was on duty. She did not take the vaccine because she had done it before. I told her I was afraid that the high fever was damaging my brain and asked her to give me an injection. After some discussion, we decided to give pain and fever relief medicine to anyone who needed it.

  It occurred to me to check the vaccine. No vaccine should have had such a powerful effect. I looked at the label of the vaccine bottle and at the instruction sheet that came from the regiment hospital. What I saw made me tremble with fear. The instructions from the regiment said that each bottle should be diluted to use for two adults. The tiny print instructions on the label said that each bottle should be used for 20 adults. Each of us had been given 10 times the normal dose. We were exhibiting the exact symptoms of bubonic plague. I had no idea if we would survive our self-inflicted epidemic.

  I showed my discovery to Gao Xiaorong and staggered back to my platoon with a medical kit. I knew that there was nothing I could do but wait and hope that the effects of the vaccine would pass. But I gave medicine to everyone just to relieve the fever and pain a bit. I trembled as I did my job. Then I went back to my room, climbed onto the kang, and collapsed.

  Gao Xiaorong made an emergency call to the regiment hospital. The company leadership alerted headquarters that there had been a “medical accident.” A rescue team headed by Dr. Yu arrived the same day.


  They stayed until everyone was fully recovered a few days later. It was fortunate that there was no permanent damage to anyone. Later, I heard that we were not alone. The doctor who wrote the instructions for us sent them to several companies. If he had missed by another decimal point, he would have wiped out maybe hundreds of us with one stroke of his pen.

  * * *

  It gave me great pleasure to serve as a barefoot doctor, although it meant much more work for me. I liked interacting with people and I enjoyed bringing them back to health. I was learning a great deal. But in spite of my hard work, I knew the political instructor and the company commander had begun to dislike me more and more. The instructor’s attitude toward me changed drastically after I found out that he did not really have arthritis. Soon, I offended Commander Zhang as well.

  The commander often came to the clinic for cough pills. One day Gao Xiaorong told me the commander didn’t have a coughing problem; he wanted those cough pills because they were sugarcoated. He would put the tablet in his mouth, suck the sugar off, and spit out the rest.

  I didn’t like what I had heard. Didn’t he know that medicines were expensive and that local peasants didn’t have easy access to them? How could he waste cough pills like that?

  Then one day he came in when I was on duty and asked me for some pills. I told him that he had to get a prescription from Dr. Yin before I could give them to him. His face grew redder than usual, and he said coldly and menacingly, “Why do we need you if you can’t even give us some medicine?” Then he stalked out.

  I feared then that my days as a barefoot doctor were numbered. A few weeks later, I was unceremoniously booted out of the clinic: I was told I would not need to come to the clinic anymore. There was never any announcement. A new full-time medic was appointed to take my place. And I resumed my full-time duties in the fields with the comrades of my squad. My medical career was over.

  Chapter 13

  Brickmaking the Ancient Way

  Who could have imagined that hopping onto the wrong bus could trigger a chain of events that would change the world?

  In the spring of 1971, Glenn Cowan, a 19-year-old American Ping-Pong player, was participating in the World Table Tennis Championships in Nagoya, Japan. After practice one day, Cowan mistakenly got on the wrong shuttle bus. Instead of seeing his American teammates, he was surprised to find himself surrounded by the Chinese national team.

  While most of the Chinese players avoided talking to this gangly American with shoulder-length hair, Zhuang Zedong, China’s best Ping-Pong player, stepped forward to greet him and shake his hand. They chatted through an interpreter, and before Cowan got off the bus, Zhuang gave the American a gift: a silk-screened picture of China’s Huangshan Mountains. The next day Cowan returned the favor with a gift of his own: a T-shirt he’d found in a Nagoya market, emblazoned with a peace symbol and the Beatles’ lyric “Let It Be.” “Photographers caught the incident on film, and the unexpected goodwill between the US and Chinese teams soon became the talk of the tournament,” as one account put it.

  For more than 20 years, there had been no diplomatic relations between China and the United States. Encouraged by this friendly encounter, the American team suggested to the Chinese team that they make a visit to China after the tournament. This was not a decision that a Ping-Pong team could make, and the matter went all the way to the Chinese foreign ministry. After deliberating, the ministry recommended to Premier Zhou Enlai that he not extend an invitation. On April 4, 1971, Zhou passed the ministry’s recommendation to Mao with his own comment that the time did not seem to be ripe to reach out to the Americans. Mao circled his agreement with his pencil on April 6. And that would have been the end of it—except that the chairman was still thinking about it.

  At about 11 o’clock that night, Mao had already taken his sleeping pills and was resting his head on the table in a state of drowsiness. Wu Xujun, Mao’s head nurse, was eating her dinner next to him. Suddenly, Mao, without raising his head, muttered to her to call the foreign ministry and tell them to “invite the American team to visit China.”

  Wu was surprised; this contradicted Mao’s standing instructions. Mao had once told her that whatever he said after taking his sleeping pills did not count. She looked at the chairman, who was sitting on his bed, with his head buried in his arms on the dining table. The nurse did not move or respond.

  After a while, Mao raised his head and struggled to open his eyes. “Xiao Wu, you are still here eating. Why aren’t you doing what I’ve asked you to do?”

  Wu said in a loud voice, “Chairman, what did you say to me just now? I was busy eating and I didn’t hear it clearly. Would you repeat?”

  Mao repeated his instruction. Wu was still unsure and said, “You already circled the document from the foreign ministry during the day to say no invitation. How come now you say to invite? You already took sleeping pills. Do your words count?”

  Mao waved his hand firmly and said, “They count. Hurry or it will be too late.”

  Just as the US team was preparing to leave Nagoya, they received the invitation to visit China. After checking with the US embassy, the team accepted.

  President Richard Nixon had written as early as 1967, “We simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside the family of nations.” But as he later noted wryly in his memoirs, “I had never expected that the China initiative would come to fruition in the form of a Ping-Pong team.”

  In July 1971, Nixon sent his national security advisor, Dr. Henry Kissinger, on a secret mission to Beijing where he met with Premier Zhou Enlai. On July 15, the US president shocked the world by announcing on live television that he would visit China the following year. The weeklong visit took place from February 21 to 28, 1972. Nixon hailed it as “the week that changed the world.”

  * * *

  Just as winters came early to the Gobi, spring came late. While Beijing would be warm by May Day, the temperature here still fell below freezing at night. On windless days, the cool temperature felt quite comfortable, especially for working outside at some strenuous task. And when the weather was cool, flies and mosquitoes did not bother us.

  I welcomed spring with mixed feelings. I was always happy when the dreadfully severe winter passed because it meant there would be some green enlivening the otherwise dull landscape of the Gobi. But I hated the inevitable spring sandstorms. Spring also meant that we would again have to return to the fields, and the endless, relentless tasks of plowing and seeding the ground, digging ditches, building ridges, and tending irrigation canals. We repeated this same cycle year after year.

  In the spring of 1972, a rumor went around that one of the platoons would be assigned to serve as masons, building houses for the company. I heard that our platoon had a good chance to be picked, because Platoon Leader Liu had lobbied hard for us, arguing that Third Platoon had always done agricultural work, and it was time for a change. When we asked, Liu just smiled and said that we should wait and see.

  It was true. Our platoon became the designated “barracks construction platoon” and we would learn to be masons. We were all happy and excited, without really knowing what we were in for. At least it was a welcome change from farming. We soon learned we were to build a storage house and a row house for the kitchen squad, made from bricks. We had no bricks and were therefore also responsible for making them—300,000 bricks for various projects, according to the company leadership. At the time, bricks were a luxury. At four cents per brick, 300,000 bricks would be worth about 12,000 yuan, or equal to the total annual pay of 200 of us.

  Squad Eight set to repairing and restoring an old kiln, long abandoned and in disrepair, while our squad prepared the brick-making ground, a large patch of ground near the kiln. This was where raw bricks, after we had shaped them in a mold, would be placed to bake in the sun before firing. We carried soil in two baskets on a shoulder pole. We layered this fine-grained, good-quality soil on top of the ground, and used large brooms to smooth it. Then we carried b
uckets of water to wet its surface. The ground had to be smooth and flat, so we then pulled a heavy stone roller back and forth across it. We repeated the layering and smoothing of the earth until we built a solid flat surface that was some 300 square meters (∼3,300 square feet) in size, about one and a half the size of a tennis court. We started work on the brick field on March 23, 1972, and construction took almost two months. We had to stop from time to time when the weather changed and the temperature plunged below the freezing point because we could not work on frozen ground.

  Our kiln was four or five meters (∼13 to 16 feet) tall and from a distance it looked like a small volcano. Its firing chamber was made of bricks, as an arched tunnel led from the entrance to the mouth of the kiln where coal was to be fed. The brick inner shell of the kiln would be covered with clay for insulation from inside and by layers of earth from outside, with an opening on top to give it the look of a small volcanic hill. I liked to climb on top of it, a vantage point from which one could see quite far.

  About 40 meters (∼130 feet) away from the kiln there was a small shack where the former kiln masters had lived. Squad No. 8 moved into it. Their job was to keep rebuilding the kiln during the day and to safeguard the brick ground at night.

  We began making bricks in mid-May. I was teamed up with HaBai, the Mongolian boy, and Yan Chongjie. Yan was shorter than both HaBai and me, but he was muscular and strong. HaBai often cracked jokes. Yan was a man of few words. I was happy to be in a strong team, and thought that, with our strength, we should probably be able to beat any other team at brick making.

  The problem was, none of us had any real brick-making experience, let alone skill, and nobody was there to teach us. We all thought it was a simple matter of using a mold to turn clay into the shape of a brick. How hard could it be? Well, it was not so simple, as we soon found out. We had to waste many batches of raw bricks before we learned how to do it right.