Country Driving [84]
“Absolutely not! Only female comrades allowed!”
“Look, they live two hours away,” Mimi said. “I’m sorry, but the only family he has here is his father.”
“The father cannot stay here! Female comrades only! You can stay if you wish, but not the father!”
The nurse was a heavyset woman in her fifties, and she had planted herself solidly in front of Wei Jia’s bed. She kept repeating that phrase—Female comrades only! The more she said it, the stranger it sounded; almost nobody used those old Communist terms anymore. The boy began to cry again, his face panicked. “I don’t want to stay here alone!” he said. “I don’t want to stay here alone!”
“Don’t worry, you’re not going to stay here alone,” Mimi said, and I turned to the nurse: “Can we talk about this outside?”
I didn’t want to get angry, because Chinese hospitals have a reputation for mistreating people from the countryside. As calmly as possible, I explained the situation, and Mimi begged the nurse to make an exception. But she was adamant—people in Chinese bureaucracies often behave this way, especially those who are middle-aged. They were educated during the chaotic years of the Cultural Revolution, and many of them have spent their entire adult lives in the work-unit system of Communist China. They essentially missed out on the Reform years, and they lack the flexibility and pragmatism that have become so common among younger Chinese. In the hospital the nurse refused to budge, and finally I decided to drive back to the village and pick up Cao Chunmei.
“You better be back here by ten o’clock!” the nurse said. “If she comes after ten, we won’t let her in. We lock the doors at night. Those are the rules!”
I called Cao Chunmei and asked her to find a motorcycle ride down into the valley, so we could save time. But half an hour later she called back: only one neighbor had a motorbike, and tonight he was already too drunk to drive. It was dark by the time I reached the dead-end road. Cao Chunmei waited with a bag she had packed for the hospital. It contained several bottles of local spring water—most villagers believe that Sancha water is healthier than anything you can buy in the city.
“It’s a lot of trouble for you,” she said, hurrying into the car.
“It’s not a problem,” I said. “Do you have everything you need?”
“I’m fine,” she said. “Have you eaten yet?”
“I already ate,” I said. In truth I hadn’t had a meal since morning, but there was something reassuring about the polite exchange. In rural China, no matter how stressful a situation becomes, you can always count on certain conversations, and Cao Chunmei’s words made me feel calmer. Driving fast through the mountains, I watched the shadowy landmarks slip past for the fourth time since dawn: the Huaisha River valley, the Nine-Crossings River, the Black Mountain Stockade. The roofs of the Ming tombs shone ghostlike in the darkness. The expressway was empty; we made it to the hospital with half an hour to spare. Wei Jia was already fast asleep, and the boy didn’t stir when I told his parents good night.
FOR MOST OF THAT week Wei Jia ran a fever. On the fifth day, it reached one hundred and four degrees, and his platelet count dipped beneath fifteen thousand. If it went much lower, there was a serious risk of bleeding in the brain.
Mimi and I visited daily, and every night I wrote my doctor friends in the United States. They told me that a combination of rest and good diet often stabilizes a child with ITP, but we still weren’t certain of the diagnosis. In the States, a patient in his condition would be given a blood transfusion, but the Chinese doctors hadn’t recommended it yet. And I had advised the parents that such measures should be a last resort. The blood supply in China isn’t safe; donors are in short supply and the system relies primarily on people who are paid for giving blood. At the time of Wei Jia’s illness, experts estimated that more than one million Chinese had been infected with H.I.V. The epidemic was particularly severe in