by Li, Veronica
Sometime during our stay, Brother Kin begged Mother to move the entire family to Thailand. He’d been listening to the alarming news from China. The Japanese military had become an emboldened tiger since its conquest of Nanking several years earlier. They’d pushed the seat of the Nationalist Chinese government all the way to Chungking in the far-western province of Szechuan. The country was an unguarded piece of pork dangling before the tiger. Every day the radio crackled with reports on Japanese troop movements and speculations on what their next target would be. Hong Kong was just across the border, a small but juicy prey.
It was a difficult decision. Mother wanted to stay, but she also understood that Ngai and I couldn’t give up our education for the sake of something that might or might not happen. Ngai was to begin his studies at Hong KongUniversity, and on full scholarship too. He’d adjusted his ambition of becoming commander in chief of the three armed forces to economic minister of China. He, too, had picked economics as his major.
Mother agonized over letting Ngai and me return to Hong Kong on our own. She was worried that there would be nobody to look after us. Our other brother, Yung, was working as a seaman on a ship and was gone most of the time. Again, it was Brother Kin who solved the problem. He offered to pay for Ngai and me to move into the university dorm, where our meals and other basic needs would be taken care of. Mother held out for a while, questioning how strangers could replace a mother’s care. But she no longer said "No," which was the closest she could come to saying "Yes" to us.
I was sad to leave Mother, though not too sad, for I knew I would see her again the next summer. Once on the boat, my tears dried quickly, and I turned my thoughts toward the future. At long last I would be moving out of the squalid one-room home I grew up in. It was a miserable place to start with, and time had only made it worse. Memories of beatings and poverty haunted it. I couldn’t wait to close the door on it forever. My new home would be Saint Stephen’s Hall, the women’s dorm famous for its scenery and parties. I’d always envied the girls who lived there. I’d never thought I would have the chance to be one of them; yet here it was, a present from my brother. I wished a strong gust of wind would blow me home.
*
The bedtime socials with my dorm mates were as much fun as I’d imagined. There were four rooms to a floor, and two girls to a room. When the day’s work was done, we opened wide our doors so we could be within each other’s earshot. While curling our hair in front of our respective mirrors, we shouted back and forth about the silliest trivia.
My roommate was called Renee. She was a tiny person, reaching only up to my ear. Her face was plain and horsey, but whenever she smiled, her face could light up the whole room. Her father was a prominent industrialist who owned a chain of dye factories. When I first heard about her affluent background, I got worried that she would behave like a princess. But she turned out to be easy-going and considerate, and we became good friends.
Now, I’m going to talk about something I haven’t mentioned to anyone in a long, long time. Shortly after I moved into Saint Stephen’s, the headaches and fevers of my childhood returned. I tried to ignore them at first, dragging myself to classes and pretending to be well in front of Renee. Nighttime was when the fever burned most fiercely. I sweated so much that my pillow and bed sheet were soaked. Something was very wrong with me, and I couldn’t hide my illness much longer.
There was only one person I could turn to. While sitting on the edge of her bed, I told Sam-Koo my symptoms.
"Stop crying, you bag of tears!" she chided, handing me the handkerchief that was always tucked between the buttons of her cheongsam. "I’ll find you a good doctor. There’s no illness that modern medicine can’t cure. Take, for example, the mother of a student of mine. She’d been sick for a while when I went to visit her. Her face was yellow and bony and her eyes gave out a green light. I thought her days were numbered. Several months later I ran into her on the street. She was not only alive, but plumper and fairer than ever before." Sam-Koo went on with her usual babble about her students and their parents. I was only half-listening when she mentioned the American-educated doctor who was trained in the latest treatment for TB. What was she implying—that I had TB?
"There’s only one problem," Sam-Koo went on. "This doctor is an American graduate and doesn’t have a license to practice in Hong Kong. He has to go around his patients like a thief tiptoeing in a chicken coop. Let me look into it. Come back to see me next weekend."
The following Saturday, after another week of agonizing headaches, I set off for Sam-Koo’s dorm. She was standing at the school gate waiting for me. I followed her to the tram stop without any idea of where we were going. All that she told me was that the American-trained doctor had agreed to see me.
We got off at HappyValley. Sam-Koo hustled me into an apartment building. She knocked on a door and a man let us in. He looked young, but I knew he couldn’t be if he’d had all that training behind him. His hair was wavy, which made me wonder whether it had come from drinking foreign water. We followed him into a room that looked like an office. Diplomas plastered the wall, and my heart relaxed somewhat.
Sam-Koo did all the talking. I sat stone still while the doctor probed and prodded me with instruments. As this was my first time at a western doctor’s, everything was novel. His instructions were simple enough, and I did my best to cooperate. When he put a stick in my mouth, I opened wide and said "Aah." When he put a piece of cold metal on my back, I took a deep breath and held it. But when he told me to take off my clothes and put on a flimsy gown, I hesitated. It seems foolish in hindsight, but at the time I felt very uncomfortable standing half-naked in front of a stranger. Fortunately, Sam-Koo was there, and the X-ray didn’t cause the least pain. The doctor disappeared for a while and returned with several large films. He raised one against a bright light. My lungs lit up. They looked like a pair of giant leaves with wormholes in an upper corner.
I heard him say "TB." Then Sam-Koo’s voice entered. Back and forth the two carried on like an operatic duet. I sat as quietly as a spirit who’d wandered into the room.
I floated around as if in a dream—walking out of the doctor’s apartment, boarding the tram, looking out the window and seeing nothing. I kept waiting to wake up, so that I could tell myself it was just a nightmare. But the moment never came, for I was already awake. My nightmare was my reality. I had TB. The dreaded disease was eating holes in my lungs. Very soon I would be spitting blood like Fei-Chi. My friends at the dorm would shun me and the university would cross me off its registry. Even my family would be afraid to be near me. People would call me a lazy good-for-nothing, as they’d called Fei-Chi. Death would be a relief compared with the shame.
Back in Sam-Koo’s room, I buried my face in her lap and cried. How could my life be so tragic! After the years of hard bitter work, I was just beginning to taste the sweetness of reward. I thought of my heroine in Dream of the Red Chamber and wept over our common fate. Just because we were orphans, must we die before we could live out our lives and fulfill our dreams? It was all Fei-Chi’s fault. Why did he stay with us when he knew he had the terrible disease? We ate and slept in the same cubicle, breathing the same air twenty-four hours a day. The doctor believed the germ had been dormant in me for years. The flu-like symptoms of my childhood were an indication of the primary stage of infection. The disease had gone into remission for a period, but it was taking advantage of my moment of weakness to pounce on me again.
Had Sam-Koo not taken charge, I wouldn’t be here to tell the story today. She scolded me and made me write Brother Kin to ask for money for treatment. She cleaned my face with a wet towel and told me to go back to the dorm and continue my studies as if nothing were happening. The doctor had said that the moment the treatment began, I would no longer be contagious. The first session would require a hospital stay of several days, but subsequent treatments—once a month for two years—would be outpatient visits. Spring break was coming up. I could disappear for a week wi
thout raising suspicion.
In the meantime, I carried on as usual—classes, homework, and bedtime socials. The only difference was that the moment I entered my room, I opened all the windows to let in the fresh air. I would never forgive myself if Renee were to get infected.
Spring break finally came. We packed our bags and bid each other a good holiday, although we all knew the break was only an excuse to study for exams. My first stop was Sam-Koo’s dorm. From there we rode along several bus routes and arrived at a private Catholic hospital tucked away in the woods. The sisters registered me, and soon I was lying on the operating table.
The doctor performed "pneumothorax" on me. It was a procedure to pump air out of the infected lung. In this collapsed state, the bacteria’s growth would be thwarted. It could no longer spread within the patient or to others. After a long enough period of time, the germ would die off altogether and the affected area would heal. It was therefore vital that the procedure be repeated every month to keep my lung collapsed. I was told that during the first treatment the doctor had stuck a huge syringe into my left lung. Thank goodness I didn’t know.
When I woke up from the anesthesia, my body was simmering with fever. The nurses were constantly in and out, sticking a thermometer into my mouth, feeling my pulse, and forcing medicines down my throat. My temperature reached one hundred four degrees and persisted for days on end. I was exhausted, and at the same time worried sick about my homework. Already I was missing precious study time, and if my temperature didn’t come down soon, I would have to miss classes as well.
Rest, rest, rest, was the prescription. I slept most of the time, read some light novels, and got up only to go to the bathroom. After a week my body temperature dropped to normal. Without wasting a breath, I rushed back to the dorm to resume my life at the university.
I’d had the figure of a bamboo pole to begin with, and now the treatment was putting more stress on my body. My weight went down to ninety-two pounds, which made me as light as a kite when stretched over a height of five feet, two inches. Also, the least exertion winded me. The pneumothorax had deflated my left lung, leaving me only my right to live on. I became notorious for being a slow walker. Fortunately, I was a girl. A boy would be laughed at for moving about like a soft-legged crab, but a girl who minced her steps was lady-like.
In order to get as much rest as possible, I stopped going to Saturday night dances. My escort, Ngai, was one of the few who understood the reason. When he learned of my condition, he took to going on long walks every morning. Fresh air and exercise became his passion, and he vowed that Fei-Chi’s germs would never get him.
On the twenty-second of every month, I checked into the hospital in the morning and was back in the dorm in the evening. The follow-up treatments were nowhere as traumatic as the first. Aside from the breathlessness, there was no noticeable side effect. I was able to carry out my therapy in secrecy, in addition to maintaining my school grades throughout the year. My only regret was that my treatments prevented me from going to Thailand that summer.
*
I went on to third year, a crucial time in the four-year program. Normally, if a student were to flunk a course, she would be allowed to take a makeup exam. A junior, however, wasn’t entitled to this option. If she flunked one course, she would have to repeat all the courses of that entire year. Sensible or not, such was the university rule.
My major exam, economics, was to take place a day after the pneumothorax treatment. To minimize the loss of valuable study time, I brought along my books to study on the bus. This course had been the most difficult I’d ever taken. A large part of the problem could be attributed to the professor, Miss Archer from Britain. She was a dreadful teacher who knew only how to dictate notes to the class. She hardly even looked up to see whether we understood what she was reading. We nicknamed her "Machine gun" because she spat out the definitions so fast that we could hardly get them down on paper, let alone have time to think about them. Everyone in the class was dissatisfied with her teaching method, but we would never dream of protesting to a professor.
As soon as the doctor finished deflating my lung, I rushed back to the dorm. Renee was in the same position in which I’d left her in the morning—hunched over her desk, her nose buried in books. Had she asked, I would have told her that I’d been at the library. But she never even looked up. There was only one thing on her mind—study, study, study. Even if the dorm were to catch on fire, she’d be carried out with her bottom glued to her chair. Such was life during finals.
Without so much as getting a sip of water, I went straight to my desk. The whistling in my lungs and throbbing in my heart were just the usual side effects of the pneumothorax, and therefore not worth a second thought. Miss Archer’s definitions were much more worrisome. It wasn’t that I was slack during the semester and left my studying to the last minute. I’d reviewed the concepts many times, but my brain just couldn’t absorb them. Learning by rote had always come easily to me, and my teachers had praised me for being able to recite pages and pages of poetry. Miss Archer’s definitions, however, were like verses written in a nonsensical language. For instance, "Marginal Utility: the additional benefit received from each incremental unit of the good." Without any explanation or illustration, it was just a string of indigestible words.
Dinner came too soon. Neither Renee nor I was hungry, but we went down to the cafeteria anyway. The twenty-some residents of the women’s dorm were as quiet as a gathering of nuns on a retreat. Instead of talking and laughing, everyone was shoveling rice into her mouth. I sat down to the standard bowl of rice, soup, and dish of stir-fry. The fare wasn’t bad for cafeteria food, though not as good as over at the men’s dorm, which offered a menu of several choices of meat and vegetables. But that night the kitchen could have served us cow dung and we wouldn’t have noticed. Our bodies might be present but our minds were far, far away in the lofty realms of learning and logic—and panic.
I absent-mindedly scratched the back of my ear. A bump met my fingers. "What’s this behind my ear?" I said to Renee.
She lifted a swatch of my hair. "It looks like a rash. Oh, there’s more." My neck felt cool as she flipped up the skirt of my hair. "It’s all over your neck!" she exclaimed.
I finished up quickly and hurried back to my room. The reflection in the mirror startled me—Who’s that leper? I couldn’t believe it was I, and yet it couldn’t be anybody else. The red dots had advanced from behind my neck and merged into pink swollen blobs on my face. New blotches were still appearing and old ones were expanding in front of my very eyes. My face was like a world map, carved into islands and continents with a shrinking sea in between. Renee urged me to see the warden. I shrugged it off, remarking that a few itches couldn’t hurt anyone. The last thing I wanted was to have the warden pry into my health. Although my illness was no longer contagious, the school might not understand.
I sat on my hands to keep from scratching. But how could I resist? A swarm of bees attacking me couldn’t have felt worse. I was twisting and contorting my arms and body to reach all the itchy spots. Six pairs of hands wouldn’t have been enough. The rash was everywhere now—on my belly, back, armpits, even between my toes. I got up to look at myself in the mirror, but before I got there Renee had already told me, "You look like a pig!" Indeed, through the slits of my eyes I could see that the pink blobs had grown into one another to form an enormous pig’s head.
There was no use in pretending to study anymore. I crawled into bed, itching and aching all over. My head felt as if an axe had split it right down the middle. I turned toward the wall, away from the lamp that was still burning at Renee’s desk, and shed silent tears. Sleep was impossible that night. Long after Renee had shut down, my twitching and scratching went on.
The next morning my dorm mates were shocked to see my pig’s head. "What happened to you!" they exclaimed. At Great Hall the same question was thrown at me from left and right. To each I replied that I’d eaten something that didn’t agr
ee with me. My classmates didn’t probe further, for they had their own skins to save. The ordeal ahead would tax their mental and physical capacity to the maximum.
We filed into Great Hall. I daresay there was no place in this world as solemn as this examination hall. Every detail was designed to remind us of the gravity of the occasion—the shiny waxed floor that dared anyone to scuff it, the desks and chairs lined up like headstones in a cemetery, and the high breezy ceiling that cast a chill in the air. No matter what season it was, you shivered the moment you stepped into Great Hall. And you would shiver even more when you saw Miss Archer licking her index finger and placing the test papers face down on each desk. The morning session was devoted to Part I: economic theory. Two others were to follow in the afternoon—economic history and economic policy. Each portion was to last three hours. The marathon began at eight in the morning and would go on till seven in the evening. It was as much a test in stamina as in knowledge.
When I took my place, my body was still itching and my head hurting. But the minute Miss Archer announced, "You may start now," all my discomforts were forgotten. I grasped the pen and scribbled away. Miss Archer’s definitions poured out of me. Much to my surprise, I’d retained more than I thought. There was only one problem—my fingers couldn’t move fast enough. The pen kept slipping out of my swollen fingers. My script looked like the slow, clumsy scrawl of a child learning to write. When the bell rang, I’d finished only three of the four questions.
After a short lunch break, we sat down for the second paper. Economic history was my forte, and therefore my hope for salvaging the morning’s damage. There were six essay questions. I browsed them over and found that there were no surprises. But the problem of my fingers remained. Getting them to hold a pen was as frustrating as trying to manipulate a bunch of bananas. The effort was so painstaking that my hand cramped up after two essays. Pausing to rest, I listened helplessly to the frenzied scratching of my classmates’ pens.