A Single Swallow

by Ling Zhang

  Though kerosene lamps were hung at each corner of the table, the light wasn’t sufficient, so we needed a flashlight as well. I asked one of the men to hold the flashlight for me, but when I made the first incision, he fainted. I asked the other man to take over. He didn’t faint, but after a few minutes, he ran outside, retching. I didn’t know what to do, until Stella walked over and said, “Pastor Billy, let me do it.” This was the second time she’d taken the initiative. The first had been when she copied the psalm. I never imagined that I’d allow a young girl with no medical training to see this gore, but I couldn’t worry about that then. The patient could wake from the anesthesia at any moment, so I had no choice but to allow Stella to hold the light for me.

  “If you don’t want to look, just close your eyes,” I said. “I just need you to hold the flashlight steady, without moving your wrist.”

  But she kept her eyes open the whole time, and the flashlight beam was firm as it followed my scalpel right up until I made the last stitch. She didn’t utter the slightest groan of horror. When I finally finished and sat down, covered in sweat, the cock’s first crow had already sounded in the yard. Stella wrung out a damp towel for me.

  “Will he survive?” she asked me.

  This was the first time in a long time that she had initiated a conversation with me.

  “There’s a strong chance he will. The risk of infection is lower in winter than in summer, and we have some medicine.”

  A few days earlier, I had received medicine from the parent organization in America and from several other channels too. My medicine cabinet was much fuller than usual. I felt like a wealthy man. The muscles in Stella’s face moved oddly. It took me a moment to realize that she was smiling. It had been so long since I’d seen her smile, I couldn’t immediately recognize it. All at once, I saw both her fragility and her bravery. She’d been wounded so severely that she couldn’t even face the name in a book, but she was braver than any man, even at the sight of blood and blade. I finally found the way to heal Stella. She didn’t need comfort, and she didn’t need to forget. She needed to save herself by saving others.

  My greatest concern was alleviated. The patient only ran a low-grade fever for half a day after the surgery, then his temperature stabilized. After three days of observation, I sent him home to recuperate. On the morning of the fifth day of the first month of the lunar year, a dozen men and women from the patient’s village came with drums and gongs, presenting me with half a slaughtered pig, three hens, and a basket of eggs. They also dug a path in the snow to the door of the church, sweeping it clean. For the next month, our contented burps were filled with the pungent taste of preserved meat.

  On the day of the Lantern Festival, I called Stella to my room. I wanted to talk to her about an idea I’d been considering since the surgery.

  “Last year, we swore to one another before God that we wouldn’t lie to each other again. Do you remember that?” I asked.

  This was the first time I had mentioned our prior acquaintance. I didn’t want to conceal the truth anymore. I wanted to lance it open, and perhaps after the blood and pus had flowed out, healing would be possible.

  She nodded.

  “You have been devastated in recent months and have endured immense suffering. There are many men who wouldn’t be able to endure what you have withstood.” It was the first stroke of the knife.

  Her mouth twitched. She had reached the edge of an emotional cliff. But an inch away from the edge, she stopped and tightened all the lines in her face.

  “You’ve survived, but have you thought about what you want for the future?”

  She lowered her head and stared at the toes of her shoes.

  “Do you want a good man to marry you and give you a family? What if that man never comes, but another villain like Scabby comes instead? Will you allow yourself to be mistreated by others, one after another?”

  My blade hit its mark with precision. The tightly wrapped boil was lanced, and the emotion that had accumulated for so long finally overflowed the banks, and she began to weep bitterly. Stella’s sobs that day can only be described as earth-shattering. They were so dark, they blotted out the sun and so deep they made the mountains tremble. But I was ruthless. My previous error was that I was too softhearted. I had been treating the injury of the heart with medication, forgetting that I was a surgeon. Some injuries had to be healed through surgery, even if there was no anesthesia. I let her finish crying. She took out her handkerchief and wiped her nose.

  “I can teach you a skill, and when you have learned it, you won’t have to rely on any man ever again. No one will hold your life in their hands anymore. Instead, you will hold their lives in your hand,” I said.

  “Where could I find such a skill?” she said in a low, muffled voice.

  “I can teach you to practice medicine,” I said.

  She looked at me in amazement, as if I said I were going to teach her to fly over the rooftops, walk on walls, or pluck a star from the sky.

  “The closest Western doctor in this region is more than one hundred miles away. You can see patients from the village here, first treating their headaches, fever, and minor wounds. In the future, you can even deliver the women’s babies. Once you learn this, who would dare to mistreat you? Their need for you would be far greater than your need for them.”

  I added, “In the past, you’ve done things according to my wishes. Now I want you to make your own decision. You don’t need to answer right away. Think about it, then tell me your decision.”

  Silently, Stella turned and haltingly walked away. Immediately, she turned around and came back in. She knelt on the floor, kowtowing three times. I was a little angry.

  “Stella, let me tell you something. My God does not allow me to kneel before anyone and doesn’t allow me to accept obeisance from others. The first time you did it, you didn’t know better, and where there is ignorance, there can be no guilt. But now you know what you’re doing.”

  Stella looked up at me in distress. “If you don’t accept my obeisance, how can I declare myself your disciple?”

  From then on, I relieved Stella of her housework and began focusing on two things. The first was teaching her English, so she could read general medical texts. The second was imparting some basic medical knowledge to her. I condensed the knowledge I’d acquired at medical school and through my residency at the hospital, putting it in the simplest, most direct language, and taught it to her. That is actually putting it lightly. The truth is that I excluded the deep theoretical principles and the inextricable logic connecting them, and I explained to her only the most superficial, practical parts. I skipped human anatomy and the nervous system, the chemical ingredients of drugs, and the relationship between the internal and external causes of diseases. I taught her how to take body temperatures, how to disinfect, simple methods of cleaning and suturing wounds, and how to treat headaches, fevers, diarrhea, and snakebites. If my professors had seen me imparting medical knowledge through the method of treating the pain wherever the symptom occurred, they would’ve certainly asked the medical board to expel me. But I had no choice. I needed to train Stella as a rural doctor capable of treating common ailments in the quickest possible way.

  Stella’s comprehension and memory were beyond what I had hoped, and her hand was steady. She possessed the three basic qualities a doctor needed: compassion, intuition, and calmness under stress. When I came across a patient who wasn’t terribly ill, I encouraged her to draw her own intuitive conclusions according to the symptoms. Most of the time, she arrived at the right idea, though occasionally she would be far off the mark. But even if it was one step back for every three steps forward, she was making immense progress. I told everyone in the village that Stella was no longer just a domestic worker taken in by the church, but that she had officially accepted me as her teacher. When I saw patients or went on house visits, I always brought her with me. She was a fixture on the back of my bicycle. Sometimes we took sampans, when the
bicycle wouldn’t serve. Stella had much greater strength and skill with the sampans than I did, so on the occasions when I was too tired, she rowed by herself.

  I dared take Stella out because I possessed something that gave me confidence, a Baby Browning with two magazines for self-defense. It was new, and the barrel gleamed with a blue light. It was said to be from the private collection of an officer in the Japanese army. I got it from a pirate captain. His mother had been suffering from a strange disease. She believed a ferocious ghost kept howling and scratching in her ears. She was unable to sleep, the sound driving her so crazy she wanted to kill herself. The pirate was a dutiful son and had spent a great deal of money on exorcisms performed by Taoist priests and sorceresses, but with no results. He mentioned it to me in passing, and I suggested he bring his mother to see me. I found that the “ghosts” were two cockroaches that had settled into her ear canal. With a few drops of glycerin, I drove them away, the old woman found peace, and I won the gratitude of the son who would have lain down his life for me. Declining all his offers of thanks, I told him that all I needed was a weapon with which to defend myself. A month later, he gave me the pistol. There were only twenty-six bullets for its magazines, but for me, that was enough. If twenty-five bullets couldn’t save us, I would save the last one for Stella. I had vowed before God that as long as I lived, I wouldn’t let Stella suffer the humiliations she had before, no matter what.

  I started saving more than I had before, minding the church’s every expense. I was quietly squirreling away my income with a larger, distant goal in mind. After the war was over, I wanted to send Stella to medical school, giving her the formal medical training that would make up for my elementary education, which left out many important facts and put the incidental before the fundamental.

  One day a few months later, a boy of six or seven came into the church. He had injured himself chopping wood, and the back of his hand was bleeding profusely. I had instructed Stella many times on how to clean and suture wounds, and on this occasion, I let her do the operation on her own, while I stood by, observing. Stella always got on well with children. She was always able to persuade them to drink even the bitterest medicine or to endure the pain of debridement and suturing. But on that day, she wasn’t quite herself. The hand holding the rubbing alcohol was shaking. She fidgeted on the stool and seemed unmoved by the child’s cries of pain.

  When she finally finished, I asked, “Is something wrong today?”

  Uneasily, she stood up and mumbled, “Pastor Billy, I think my wound is infected again.”

  Looking at the stool where she had been sitting, I saw that it was streaked with blood. I immediately examined her. After the examination, I thought for a moment, unsure how to explain it to her. Her lips trembled, and with fear in her voice, she asked, “Pastor Billy, tell me the truth. Am I going to die?”

  I realized my silence had misled her. Smiling, I said, “Stella, I haven’t taught you the basic principles of gynecology yet. We can start now. You aren’t dying. You’ve just grown up. You’re menstruating.”

  In that moment, I felt as if every pore in my body wanted to sing. The gloomy days had passed. Though Stella’s life had had a rocky start, there were countless opportunities to remedy it. As long as I was willing to work diligently, she would become a happy, useful person, with all options open to her. Looking back now, I can see what a stupid, shallow optimist I was. I knew nothing about the cruelty of fate and the helplessness of the individual.

  Not long after that, the training camp of the Sino-American Cooperative Organization came to Yuehu Village, and the trajectories of our lives were derailed and sent in a completely different direction.

  US Navy Historical Archives Collection: Three Letters from Personnel in the Field

  The First Letter

  From:

  Ian Lawrence Ferguson

  Navy Post Office 86

  US Army Postal Service

  Postmark Date: June 29, 1944

  Passed by Naval Censor

  To:

  Elizabeth Maria Ferguson

  307 Douglas Street

  Chicago, Illinois

  USA

  June 25, 1944

  Dear Mother,

  We’re in a new place. I know you’re eager to know more, but I trust you’ll understand my not being able to tell you much. I can only write about trivial things, according to the military censor. Don’t worry, though. I’m safe. You can still use the same military address when you write back, and they’ll forward it to me—I’m not sure how long it will take, because the fighting often blocks the mail routes. Your last letter took almost two months to get to me. Hopefully the next won’t be as slow.

  The first big challenge I faced here was sleep. The Chinese are smaller than us, so I have to curl up and bend my legs to fit in the bed. But the size of the bed is a minor issue compared with the mosquitoes and fleas. In my last letter, I told you all about how we use our courage and wits against the mosquitoes. This time, I’ll tell you about the fleas.

  I’ve never seen a flea under a microscope, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they had a hundred legs, because they’re at least a hundred times stronger than humans. They easily crawl from one room to another and jump from one bed to another. They’re the most advanced scouts. No matter how many layers of clothing you wear, they always find their way straight to your skin. They only like the blood of the living—once I saw an old man dying on the side of the road, and the fleas fell right off him. It’s better to deal with them in summer, because then you only have to fight with one layer of clothing. Fleas in sweaters can only be killed with boiling water, but then you ruin the sweater too.

  Our medical officer, Dr. Lewis, said the fleas have been biting rats and may give us typhoid fever, so we change the straw in our beds every week, the sheets every ten days, and bathe every other day (thankfully it’s summer). Even then, we can’t keep the fleas from breeding elsewhere and jumping into our beds. Jack, who sleeps on the bunk above mine, woke up last night because he was itching so much. He struggled to decide whether he’d rather have mosquitoes or fleas, but finally settled on mosquitoes. He crawled out from under the mosquito net, woke our poor Chinese servant, Buffalo, and had him boil water. Then he poured a few pots of boiling water over a wooden chair. Then he rubbed flea powder on the legs of the chair and lit some mosquito-repelling wormwood. He tried to sleep sitting in this chair, but he didn’t escape either the fleas or the mosquitoes. The next morning, the bite marks on his arms formed two red armies. Buffalo says Americans smell good, and that’s why we attract so many bugs. It’s strange. Buffalo sleeps shirtless, without a mosquito net, at most burns one moxa stick, and almost never has bites. Maybe the locals have built up their own resistance.

  I don’t understand how a country where most people don’t have enough to eat can feed this endless army of fleas. Fleas can be described without exaggeration as coming from nothing and going from zero to a thousand. But so far no one in our unit has gotten typhoid fever—thank God.

  Fleas weren’t the only surprise. Today, my encounter with a couple of rats could’ve been straight out of a movie. On my way to breakfast, as I passed the pantry, I saw two rats stealing eggs. They were the largest rats I’d ever seen, almost like small rabbits. They had a clear division of labor, with one on the table and one on the ground. The one on the table curled its tail around the egg, dragging it along the edge of the table. The one on the ground lay on its back, legs in the air, and caught the egg on its soft belly. Then the other one climbed down and helped the one on the ground turn over. Together, they rolled the stolen item with their paws, like rolling a snowball, into a dark hole in the corner of the room. I could’ve scared off the pair of daring little thieves, but I didn’t. I was too impressed. I didn’t know they could communicate well enough to design such a scheme. It was enough to put any professional soldier to shame.

  My dear mother, have I told you too many bad things? I hope I haven’t given you the
impression that there’s only poverty here. The countryside is beautiful, and because the population is so large and good land so scarce, the farmers here cherish every inch of soil. In America, hills are usually not farmed, but here the hillsides are terraced for crops to grow. They’re well-planned, each terrace growing a different crop—rice, orange, rape, milk vetch, and many others I can’t name. In the spring and summer, their flowering seasons, there are yellow, purple, pink, and green flowers, one after another. It’s unreal. I’ve only seen such bright, pure colors in paintings. Most of the low-lying areas are paddy fields, and usually there are water buffaloes there. They’re a farm animal, not at all like the buffaloes in Western movies. During farming season, farmers don’t usually ride them, trying to save their strength, but when there isn’t much work, you’ll see the buffalo lounging in the field or kneeling on the roadside, and sometimes children will ride on its back. They seem docile, and they let people drive them easily, but one shouldn’t underestimate their temper. I made that mistake once, and I’ll never forget it.

  One day I was crossing a paddy, and I saw a water buffalo resting there with its eyes closed. It was larger than average, and its back broke the surface of the water like a wrinkled gray rock. Feeling mischievous, I decided to disturb its nap with a pebble. I must have hit a sensitive spot, because the beast screamed, pulling its bulk up from the field and charging me. I was caught off guard, but turned and ran. I don’t know how long I ran, but it felt like I’d been running for an hour, but it still chased me. Just as I thought I was going to be gored to death like a Spanish bullfighter, there was a sharp whistle behind me, and the buffalo stopped. Looking back, I saw a boy who seemed to be around eleven. Pointing at my feet, he suddenly burst into laughter. When I looked down, I realized that one of my shoes had been lost in the wet mud, and I’d been running on one bare foot. I couldn’t help but laugh too. We looked at each other and laughed until our bellies hurt, and we had to squat on the ground, unable to stand.