Country Driving [87]
I waited in Wei Jia’s hospital room with the parents. Throughout the past week, they had remained perfectly calm: no tears, no panicking, no raised voices. Life in the countryside had toughened them, and it had also taught them the meaning of Mei banfa: Nothing can be done. During my arguments with the doctor, Wei Ziqi had stood quietly in the background. He made it clear that he deferred to my judgment; he had great faith in my unseen American medical friends, and he shared none of the insecurities of the educated Chinese. For him it was simply logical: he didn’t know anything about these issues, and he had no way of gaining information, and so he trusted the foreigner with his son’s health. My own reaction was different—I was also badly out of my element, but the seriousness of the situation made me want to control it. In truth all I could do was try to get information, hoping to make the right decision, and now it was a matter of waiting for a phone call.
Wei Jia’s hospital room was shared by two other boys. One was a twelve-year-old suffering from inflammation of the cardiac muscle, and the other was an eight-year-old with kidney problems. The room’s walls had been painted light pink and the only decoration was a Mickey Mouse clock. A clothesline hung across one wall, used by the mothers who had been living with their sons.
The eight-year-old came from Jilin Province, in the northeast, and his parents had brought him to Beijing for medical care. This was his second extended stay in the hospital, and since June the doctors had treated him with massive amounts of hormones. Over the past three months his body weight had increased by 50 percent. Everything about the child looked swollen: he had a big belly, sausage-link legs, and a face as round as a mooncake. He was constantly eating, and his mother was constantly talking about his eating. The Chinese love to talk about food and in particular there’s nothing better than talking about food and children. Over the past week the mothers had become friends—most Chinese are naturally so social that if you throw them together they talk endlessly, even in the most stressful situation. I sat there listening, my phone in hand.
“He didn’t get fat until he started the hormones,” said the boy’s mother. “Now he eats all the time, but he won’t eat fruit.”
“Wei Jia won’t eat fruit, either,” Cao Chunmei said. She sat on the bed beside her sleeping son.
“Fruit, eggs, milk—he won’t eat anything that’s good for him,” said the kidney mother.
“Neither will Wei Jia.”
“They should give him hormones, too,” the woman said. “He’s too small.”
The twelve-year-old wore headphones and listened to a CD player. He had the gangly look of an adolescent and for the past week he had been living in this room, surrounded by the parents and their constant conversation. He had his music turned up loud. His grandmother was also there, a sixty-eight-year-old woman from the countryside of Hebei. Of all the adults, she was the most talkative, and now she offered advice to Cao Chunmei.
“The first thing you need to take care of is the boy’s health,” the old woman said. “If somebody is healthy, he can always work and earn a living. The second most important thing is education. When I was young, I had no schooling—I still can’t read! When I was a little girl, I remember one of my aunts saying to my father, ‘Why should you pay for her to be educated? She’ll just marry into another family eventually. That means you’re paying for the education of somebody else’s family. Why would you do that?’ So they didn’t send me to school. That’s why I say that education is so important.”
“I’m hungry,” said the fat child.
Wei Ziqi laughed. “He’s hungry again!”
“He’s always hungry,” Cao Chunmei said admiringly. “That’s why he’s so fat.”
“You just ate!” the