God Is Red - Liao Yiwu [39]
Liao: How did you communicate with patients and fellow medical staff?
Sun: Many of the patients spoke Chinese. I also knew some Dai and English. The conditions there were rough, but we had amazingly amicable working relations. We all took our jobs very seriously, and it was not unusual to work for days without a break. I learned a lot working there.
I returned to China in 1999. I had confidence, but not much else. My nephew helped get me a job as an adjunct professor in the medical school of the University of Yunnan.
Liao: With your experience, why not a big government-run hospital?
Sun: I’m a Christian. I found it impossible.
Liao: How could faith be an obstacle to your career?
Sun: It’s not that. I couldn’t work there out of conscience. Say a patient, tortured by illness, sits in front of you, staring at you, hoping you can find a cure for him. What kind of medicine should you prescribe? Many meds do the same thing, but their prices can vary sharply. I would prescribe the cheapest and most effective. But if I continued to do that, the pharmacy and the hospital would be upset because I have undermined their profits, disrupting the cozy deal between pharmaceutical companies and hospitals. When you break hidden rules and harm the collective interests of hospitals and doctors, you find yourself very alienated.
Liao: There is a saying in China now: “Doctors are like robbers, corrupt and unconscionable.”
Sun: You are right. Doctors should be able to diagnose many types of illness with ease and treat them with the right kind of medicine. It should be easy, like pushing a stranded boat back into the flowing water. The reward is in helping the patient. But the reality is quite different in China. It now costs hundreds of yuan to see a doctor for even a minor ailment. Instead of a course of antibiotics or traditional herbs that costs ten or twenty yuan, and that includes a decent profit, hospitals want doctors to charge ten times that. It’s greed. As a Christian, I have to tell my patients the truth. I cannot lie to get more money out of them.
Liao: So you were forced to become an “itinerant doctor.”
Sun: Nobody forced me to do anything. One day I bumped into a former student of mine at the church. At first, I didn’t recognize him; I taught so many students at the University of Yunnan. He told me he had grown up in the rural areas of Jiaoxi in Luquan County, which is deeper in the mountains, along the Jinsha River. His village is remote, but its people welcome outsiders. All the villages had converted to Christianity. My student told me that a woman in his village was dying of an unknown illness. He asked if I was interested in taking a trip there. I was noncommittal, but he showed up at my door the next day, so I went with him. It took us the whole day to get there by long-distance bus. It was the wife of a local minister who was ill. I examined her. She had breast cancer; the tumor was as big as an egg. She needed surgery right away. The minister explained that he had taken his wife to various hospitals in the provincial capital city of Kunming, but they wanted eight thousand yuan to do the operation. He had gone to relatives and fellow villagers, but all he could raise was two thousand yuan. I told the minister that I would do it for free, that I had done far more complicated surgery than what was required here, and he needed to trust me. He looked at me in disbelief, as did the villagers gathering around us. I’m not sure which of my assertions they had the most trouble believing.
I wanted to take the woman back with me to Kunming so I could use a proper operating room, but she didn’t want to leave her home. That night, I knelt and prayed, and as I was praying, an old American TV show popped into my mind—a team of cheerful doctors doing surgery while cracking jokes, a mobile army hospital, tents in an open field, the war in Korea.
Liao: You must be talking about the TV show M*A*S*H. I’ve seen a couple of episodes.
Sun: Yes. I felt inspired. The next day, I bought some basic surgical instruments to supplement the