by Lori Qian
Well, he failed. I continue to marvel at his chivalry and never cease to be impressed by his genuine kindness and humility. He worried about me being warm enough and having enough to eat. He always asked about my sleep, whether I was getting enough. He genuinely listened as I explained the differences among the myriad of little bottles that sat on our bathroom shelf, showing me his patience and interest. He knew I needed to have my pressed powder and ChapStick available if we were going anywhere. He didn’t know why, but he knew it was important to me, so he was always careful to remind me with, “Sweetheart, do you have your ChapStick? Do you have that other thing?”
He did this not because he particularly cared whether or not I used it. He noticed no magical difference in my face after I’d applied pressed powder. He just knew I felt better having those things, and that made him happy.
One day we were walking along in Siqao, a little city near our home, and I was shocked to see a bottle of Clinique moisturizer in the display window.
“Oh my gosh!” I exclaimed. “They actually sell Clinique here. I thought they only had it in Hong Kong.”
“They sell what?” he asked, wanting to share my excitement but not knowing what it was for yet.
“It’s a really good brand of makeup and facial cleansers.”
He gently led me into the store, saying, “Oh, let’s take a look.”
We looked at this bottle and that and of course he couldn’t believe the prices, but he remained calm as I told him a bottle of moisturizer was 250 yuan (about thirty dollars).
He is very concerned about the quality of things, so he examined the bottles and the store itself very carefully. I hadn’t planned on buying anything—which is a good thing, because the quality didn’t seem quite up to par. I couldn’t help but notice that the boxes looked very tattered and the print on the bottles was a bit irregular. These were just throwaway versions of the real product. However, the prices were significantly cheaper than what I usually paid in Hong Kong.
As we walked away he said, “But sweetheart, I’m not so sure about the quality. Maybe those aren’t really from America.”
I had, of course, thought the same thing.
“If those are important things,” he said, “you should have better quality. You can’t buy those bad ones because it could hurt your skin. You can buy it in Hong Kong, not Siqao.”
I knew that he meant this sincerely and I also know that he appreciated the value of money. He wasn’t cheap, just careful. I was just beginning to understand this. He wasn’t opposed to us spending money—he was opposed to us wasting money.
I soon learned that William would study his receipt and change after buying ten yuan worth of anything, yet he would also encourage me to buy the best. When I asked him about this, I learned even more about him.
“Why is it that sometimes you are so careful about money, trying to get a bargain whenever you can, and yet you encourage me to go to Hong Kong to buy moisturizer or to get my hair done?” I asked him one day.
“Sweetie, some things don’t matter as much as others. I do think we need to save money and be careful with our spending. We don’t have to buy the most expensive broom or light bulbs or milk or bread—most of these are just as good as others. If we do this, then when you need to buy your . . . what is that stuff again?”
“Moisturizer.”
“Yeah, that mois . . . tur . . .” He furrowed his brow. “Moisturizer,” I said with a smile.
“Moisturizer,” he said, smiling back. “We will have money for that, or your hair, or to buy pizza . . . we will have that money because we saved it at other times.”
“Really? It doesn’t seem weird to you that we’re careful about how much we pay for noodles, yet we pay a thousand kuai to get my hair done?”
“Not weird,” he said smiling because of his extra enunciation to the “r,” which he usually had trouble pronouncing. “Not weird, just . . . okay.’”
“You are my sweetheart,” I said, hugging him. “How did I get so lucky?”
“I am lucky,” he said. “God did that.”
I hadn’t heard William talk a lot about God, and I felt comforted to hear him begin to make such references. I never expected he would believe exactly what I believed, but I hoped we would always be able to talk about matters of faith and spirituality. If I were being really truthful with myself, yes, I hoped he would see the beauty in my faith enough to want to share it with me, but it wasn’t an expectation. I was just happy to hear him acknowledge God’s existence. I was beginning to acknowledge God more, as well, and to recognize that my reasons for coming to China were about faith, personal growth, and William.
One Monday morning, Kassie stopped me on my way to my office.
“I need to talk to you,” she said.
Wow, her face looked serious. I wondered what was wrong. “Sure,” I said, opening the door to my office. “Come on in.”
She was breathing quickly and speaking even more quickly.
“Look, I’ll just come out with it. Mr. Yuen asked me to ask you and William not to hold hands on school grounds.”
My heart sank. My gut tightened. I felt sick. “What?”
“I know, I know. It’s not fair, but this is what he said. He doesn’t want there to be too much talk about this.”
What on earth is happening? I wondered. I knew Mr. Yuan. He’d been nothing but kind to me. He’d even come to our wedding reception and given me a dozen roses. I pointed out the hypocrisy to Kassie, and noted as well that married couples who were both Westerners held hands. “Yes,” I said, “we wouldn’t want the children to get the wrong idea and think that love between cultures was a good thing.”
I knew my tone was anything but humble, but this was ridiculous. Were the other Western couples given the same reproach? I wanted to know.
Kassie didn’t answer that question. She did say she agreed it wasn’t fair, but she emphasized that this was Mr. Yuen’s request.
Where was this insulting, random instruction coming from?
I asked Kassie that very question.
“I honestly don’t know,” she admitted. “I’m just the messenger.”
“Well, you can tell Mr. Yuenthat I reject his request,” I said hotly. “If he feels this way, he can come and say it to my face, and he’d better have an explanation as to why I’m not allowed to hold my husband’s hand at school.”
He never said a thing, of course.
This was hard on William, because he wasn’t used to going against authority, especially at work. He hadn’t had the option before. Now, as for Mr. Yuen—I do believe he was a nice man overall, but perhaps he was used to flexing his power. Now people knew they could not mess with Qian Zhi Ming in the ways they had before, or they would be facing us both.
Again, not so humble, but I did sort of enjoy standing up for both of us in this way.
chapter 38
In May we had a week off, during which time William and I were planning to go back to Huang Mei. I was excited about it because this time we wouldn’t be running all over trying to get documents or plan a wedding—we would simply get to visit.
Well, there was one more thing we needed to do in order to get William’s passport, but we didn’t anticipate that being a big problem. I planned to take my journal and a good book and just relax with William’s family.
The trouble started with the day we were supposed to leave. William had been incredibly sick, and on this particular day he had left his afternoon classes and was sleeping on the floor of my office. He had been throwing up and was running a fever—all of which, according to his doctor, were normal side effects of the medication he was on. This didn’t make it any easier to watch him, though.
It was Tuesday afternoon, and I was in a curriculum meeting with the Kassie and Shelly. As I tried to participate in the conversation about English proficiency exams for the students and other administrative details, I just lost it. I was trying so hard to hold it in but as I sat there, I could no longer
contain my emotion. I had never been so scared and worried in my entire life. I had mostly been keeping William’s health issue quiet because I didn’t want people to begin asking questions about his condition. I didn’t want to give too much information for fear of how people would react when they heard the word “tuberculosis.” It was private, after all. It was our business.
As I sat there sobbing, though, it became their business.
Shelly put her arms around me and held me like the baby I felt I was at that moment. It felt good to cry about it, but when the questions came I wasn’t ready. I just said that William preferred to keep it private and not to worry, it was nothing contagious. That was true, although at some point in the past he actually would have been contagious (not that we knew that at the time). Neither of them pushed. They just sat and cried with me. I was really grateful for them at that moment—especially Shelly, with whom I’d never before felt particularly close. She really came through when I literally needed a shoulder to cry on.
I finally left them sitting in Kassie’s office and went up to the ELC to check on William. We were scheduled to leave that day, and by this point I was questioning whether we should even go.
He was feeling a little stronger and said he still wanted to go, that a week of rest and relaxation at home would do him good. I didn’t feel right about it, but I couldn’t necessarily sort out why, so I went along with it. Maybe I hoped that if I didn’t question him, his words about feeling stronger would actually come true.
On the bus ride to the train station, I asked him if he would consider getting a special blessing from someone from my church. I had faith and hope that a blessing would help him, even if only just a little—but he kindly said no, he didn’t think that would help.
Of course, I understood why he thought that. There was certainly nothing logical about participating in a special prayer, or having someone lay their hands on your head and give you a blessing. It was a foreign concept to him, I knew, and even to many other Westerners. And I knew it seemed illogical to him. But I also knew that it couldn’t hurt and would likely help. I also knew by now, however, that William had a very stubborn streak, and if he said no he meant no. He didn’t see the need for it, so I let it go.
I prayed my heart out throughout the entire journey. William slept almost the entire twelve hours and ate nothing except a few bites of bread, and that was with me almost forcing it down him. Without my pushing, he’d have eaten nothing.
The days we spent in Huang Mei were relaxing in some ways, stressful in others. We thought we had completed all the necessary steps to get William’s passport, but of course we’d forgotten to expect the unexpected. When we originally visited the security bureau to get the information, we were not exactly given the friendliest of greetings. The officer wanted to know what William wanted a passport for and where did he intend to go and why?
As the words “She has no right to ask you that” were coming out of my mouth, I realized that I was once again operating under an American mindset. In fact, in China a person does not have the inherent right to have a passport. They need to demonstrate where and why they want to travel. And there were, of course, a series of steps and paperwork to be completed. On the final step, we needed to pay a little extra money to get the officers moving. I didn’t mind, though, because William absolutely had to have his passport. That was the first step toward us traveling to the States and even eventually immigrating, if we decided on that.
The first couple of days home William’s health wasn’t too bad but later in the week, his whole demeanor took a different turn. His already thin face became gaunt, his skin looked translucent, and he couldn’t eat. I thought I was watching the end of his life. He hadn’t had the energy to move all day and he had missed more than three meals—very unusual. In a Chinese household, particularly his mother’s, this was a major scare.
I was scared. I wanted so badly to help but for the first time in my life, I didn’t have a plan. I had no idea how to help. It scared me that I couldn’t. I was used to being resourceful, figuring things out, but this was beyond me. My head hurt and my heart hurt. His mom and I talked about what we could make for him. I helped her make a tomato and egg soup, one that he usually liked.
“Minga,” as she called him. “Minga, he yi dian tang” She asked him to drink the broth and brought it to his mouth. His eyes didn’t even open all the way and for a second I thought he didn’t recognize her.
She started to cry. “He yi dian,” she said, her voice quivering and forceful at the same time. He simply couldn’t do it. He closed his eyes. She looked at me. I had no answers, no ideas. We spent the next hours just checking on him, putting cool cloths on his head, and sitting by him.
He lay down on the bed and I sat on the chair right next to him. I stared at him, praying he would keep breathing. I watched his chest rise and fall. He was burning up, and every once in awhile he would sit up in a panic and vomit. His mom would get the bin and we would clean him, and within seconds, he would sleep again. Even though he was right in front of me, his weakness made me miss him. It felt like he wasn’t even there. He could hardly even talk. My first instinct was to take him to a doctor, but there really wasn’t a doctor in this small town. Perhaps we could see one in Wuhan, but it was too late at night for any buses to go. I just started sobbing, again, to which his mother didn’t know how to react. I think the fact that I was crying added to her hurt. She started crying too, and sat next to him on the bed, holding his hand, holding mine. She was crying for her son, and for me because she knew. She knew that I loved him with all of me. At that moment, all I could think was that I was going to lose William—in this tiny town, in the middle of nowhere, where nobody could help us.
Without thinking too much about it, I grabbed my mobile phone and called Kassie. I couldn’t even get the words out. I just cried into the phone. She kept asking what was wrong. Finally, she asked the right question: “Is it William? Is he sick?”
I cried harder and she knew the answer. When I calmed down a little, I asked her to call the people from church and ask them to please pray for William, and maybe even to fast for him. In our faith, it is not uncommon for the members of a congregation to join together in a special fast when someone’s health is at stake.
Although William was weak and sick, I lay next to him on the bed and told him that Kassie and my friends from church would be fasting for him.
“I know you might not think this will help, but I believe that when people unite in prayer and put special purpose behind not eating, sacrificing their comfort for a chance to draw closer to God, things can happen,” I told him. “Even miracles.”
“Okay, that’s nice,” he said. He was drifting in and out of sleep. He was sweating a lot, yet he felt cold and clammy when I touched his face. His mother and I just stared at him, not knowing how to help.
At some point during all this, William’s mom had left for a short while. When I’d asked her where she’d one, she quietly said she’d gone to pray. Through my basic Huang Mei hua, I came to understand that she had indeed gone to a local temple to pray. It occurred to me that his mother and his wife were both praying simultaneously, pouring our hearts out on his behalf, in whatever way we knew. When she told me this, our eyes locked. And we both understood.
After hanging up with Kassie, I was still worried sick and counting the hours until the next morning when we could get the earliest bus out of there and go home to Guangzhou. He was less feverish the next morning, still incredibly weak, but I knew somehow that William would be okay. We got him to the bus station, and as soon as we found our seats, he laid his head in my lap and slept. Again. I prayed the whole way home. I tried to think of good things, of a future with him. I didn’t want to think any more about losing him.
When we got back to Guangzhou, I called the SOS clinic and made an appointment. William had finally consented to go, more to appease me than because he really thought it necessary. Regardless of the reasons, I was just gratef
ul that he agreed to go.
When we arrived at the office, William asked me to inquire whether or not we could simply talk to a doctor for five minutes without paying and having a formal visit. Luckily, there was a doctor free and she invited us to step into her office. I felt peace and incredible comfort just sitting in her beautiful, spotless office. I took note of everything—the clean, bright walls, the nice waiting room furniture, the neatly pressed nurse’s uniforms, the pleasant doctor who spoke English. I was convinced that this place and the doctors in it would make William better.
Dr. Liu was a Chinese-Australian physician who was probably risking her job by consulting with us like this. We’d sort of politely pushed our way past the front desk so we could see the doctor face to face. We were supposed to register, wait for our turn, and pay, but I assured her I just needed five minutes and begged her to make an exception. She nodded hurriedly and showed us into her office, closing the door behind her.
We showed Dr. Liu the medications William was on and explained the situation. To my shock, she said that the hospital where he was already getting treatment was the best in China and that if he were to come to her, she would be prescribing the same things. She even looked at his X-ray for us and, sadly, confirmed that his case was quite advanced. Then she asked us to wait outside, as she really wasn’t supposed to be giving advice to non-paying patients.