The old street vendor began to cackle as she gazed upon my distress. This accomplished nothing besides making me a bit nauseous. The cracked, yellow enamel of her teeth reminded me of the texture of the pepper-specked, oil-soaked potato I had just bitten into.
She spoke to me in Chinese, “Your face is very red, xiaohuozi! Are you enjoying the food? More peppers?”
I made an attempt to smile politely. At least she called me, a 15 year-old, xiaohuozi, which means young man in Chinese.
“Yes, it’s very good. Very hot. Please, no more pepper.”
Her laughter increased in volume. “Ha! Haha! I bet you hate it here, eh, city boy? I see, haigui, am I right? How do you like it here?”
I was in front of the entrance to Hutiaoxia (literally Leaping Tiger Canyon. The Chinese are fond of such flashy names), in Yunnan. I was about a day’s travel away from the village where I would begin my volunteer clinical work. On this trip, I had been fairly successful at keeping my “Made in the U.S.A.” label from showing too much. Unfortunately, the Chinese are specialists in foreign merchandise, and I had been identified. I suppose it didn’t help that when I reached into my pocket to find money to pay for the snack, my hand came out displaying George Washington’s serene expression.
Thankfully, Hutiaoxia is a fairly popular tourist attraction (yellow hair will not cause a flurry of excitement), and no one paid much attention to a senile old street vendor and her red-faced customer. Nevertheless, I failed to endure her jibes without feeling a familiar sense of alienation.
“Would you like another, haigui? Or perhaps you would like to try one of these? Hmm?” She flourished a bunch of small yellow fruits on a skewer. I feared for my digestive tract.
“No. Thanks.” I promptly hurried away.
“Come back soon, haigui! Ha!”
There is something that everyone should know about the Chinese: we can sniff out foreigners before they even open their mouth. Even among different Chinese ethnicities, there are distinguishing features invisible to others that we can establish before even starting a conversation. Understandably, pandemonium usually ensues when Chinese people see an actual foreigner. Our eyes widen, our pupils dilate into black discs of ecstasy, and we rush forward to sell you our wares.
“Oh, mister, come see here! You like jewelry? I have many things, unique, popular across China!”
Mister succumbs to such cajoling, and promptly buys all that he can. “Thank you, I’ll take one of those, and one of those…. Oooh, what is that?” Mister is now pointing at a small green stone that the seller has obviously been trying to grab his attention with.
“Ah, mister, you good eyes! This good quality real jade, stone of China, can take home and show off to friends! Not the fake jade those other people sell, see nice green color. Go well with your yellow hair!”
Mister is swayed easily and buys the “jade” happily.
“Thank you, xiexie!”
Such bounciness of character, and pidgin English, is only displayed to those light-skinned and dark-skinned foreigners, however. American-born Chinese receive an altogether different kind of treatment, one of snide alienation. I was lucky: I had no accent, typical hair color, as well as a fairly common skin color. I could pass for a native. Most of the time.
“Hey! You! Where are you from?” I was busy haggling with a Chinese vendor in Beijing, some years ago, when he asked me this. I remained silent and asked for a better price.
“Don’t ignore the question! Want me to speak in English? Hallo, what name? Hailou!”
“I can speak Chinese, thanks.”
“So where are you from then, haigui?”
“It doesn’t matter. Now, are you going to sell for 30 yen, or will I have to leave?”
2
My trip to Yunnan marked a change from my usual trips to China. It started with the word haigui.
Foreign “Chinese” people, like my parents and I, are usually called haigui. Haigui literally means sea turtle. Sea turtles are always crossing the sea from one country to another. The Chinese follow this logic surprisingly well. My parents were actually in the clear: they had been through the Cultural Revolution and their first language was Mandarin Chinese. The same couldn’t be said for me: for my entire life, I had been haigui.
When my parents and I went to China on our nearly yearly trip to visit my extended family, I would feel tension in the air. My aunts and uncles would tell my parents and me how lucky I was to be educated in America and gave me the largest bedroom in whosever apartment we were staying in. This method of welcome cut me off from the rest of my family: my cousins, one of them now attending the most prestigious university in China and the other a successful engineer, made no mention of their lives, nor did they ask about mine. I did not broach the subject.
6000 miles is a very long way for any animal, human or turtle or otherwise, to travel. Before my trip to Yunnan, I hadn’t gone back to China for two years. Although this may seem like an understandable span of time between “vacations”, it stretched intolerably long in my parents’ minds. A broadening expanse of time-consuming summer programs and the onset of high school washed away any hopes of trans-Pacific travel.
At least, that’s the excuse I gave to my puzzled and essentially homesick parents. The truth was that I did not want to go back to China. I didn’t want to be treated as the odd one out, the displaced relative, the son of success, the weak link. I was a coward. I devoted myself to study and to hard work to the point of obsession. Exhausted, I went on binges of laziness and idleness, only to torture myself afterwards at the thought of wasted time. Periods of depression interspersed with hyperactivity confused and upset my parents.
Such symptoms of bipolarity may indicate mental weakness. Rest assured, I have no doubt that somewhere in my head there are firecrackers going off constantly to the roars of paper tigers. But a better explanation is that I wanted to win the acceptance of my family. If a novel were made out of the life stories of my various relatives, it would rival a work of Hemingway’s for somber tone and grueling terseness.
My father came to America with a plane ticket and his mother’s blessings. Arriving with no cash and rudimentary English, he bound himself to his studies, devoting a decade of his life learning how to become an American doctor. He relearned the nearly endless lexicon of medical terms in English while courting my mother and taking additional college classes. His father, my paternal grandfather, labored for his entire life, and passed away due to diabetes and the closing of hospitals from the Cultural Revolution. Maybe that's how my father decided to take a medical career?
My youngest uncle from my mother’s side was almost a genius. Rich off the stock trade, he spent all of his money buying gifts for his friends and caring for his wife and equally bright daughter. When his stocks crashed, he was left with nothing. His friends were silent, and his wife divorced him. He constantly argues and fights with my grandmother, who is going deaf and is losing her memory. His daughter, my first cousin, sacrificed her inherent talent for math, and stayed up late for the sum total of her high school years studying French, which her mother believes will help get her a job.
What can I say? I’m the next chapter in the story.
3
I boarded a plane in Los Angeles, flew across the Pacific Ocean and landed with sweat- soaked hands and burning eyes in Beijing. After a week’s stay, another flight on a smaller and (to my fear of flying) even shakier plane placed me in Kunming, the hub of Yunnan province. From there, an equally turbulent car trip took me to Dali, a city that housed the headquarters of ChinaCal Heart Watch, an organization that provided free medical clinics to people across rural Yunnan.
Next, a faux-luxury bus carried me and the other twenty or so interns to Liming, an obscure park in China unknown for its glacial geography and small size. Later, ramshackle minivans would carry me on slow-motion rollercoaster rides through winding mountain roads to the villages we were to visit on those days.
Before that, however, I wobbled haphazardly into bed to sleep off the day’s traveling.
The chill air of the morning expanded like a bubble in my lungs, bringing me a renewed sense of purpose and awakening. I dressed, went out and jumped into the waiting bus.
It was the first day of our clinical activities. I’m not sure why I decided to return to China that summer. There are many apparent contributing factors. I knew I wouldn’t be staying in Beijing for too long, so I thought that I wouldn’t have to endure any aggressive hospitality. Of course, I also wanted to get out of my house. The vacation sun was annoying after the first few weeks of summer, the Hollywood sign never failed to infuriate me with its gleaming letters and the start of school seemed hopelessly far away. My parents growing resolve to send me back, too, affected my decision. Maybe, for some reason, I even wanted to go back.
In any case, we arrived at a small, shabby little village consisting of a group of wood shacks. These shacks formed a sort of miniature square. Chickens ran about pecking at the ground, and I worried that I would accidentally step on one. A gigantic pile of wet leaves and brush rose like an organic hill to one side of the square. Movement was apparent within this organic mound; up close, insects scampered about within the infinitesimal caverns of this floral mountain. The shacks themselves were nondescript and ordinary. They were the kind of run- down, functional shelters that dotted the rural landscape. Their windows had no glass and no blinds, as they were merely square holes cut into the walls. From these windows heads peaked out at the strange sight of ten light-skinned foreigners emerging out of a bus.
The most stable-looking building in the area was the communal bathroom. A concrete foundation and walls of plaster distinguished it from the surrounding houses. It consisted of a single floor that sloped towards its center, where a large hole was supposed to drain away the waste.
The other important building in the area was the school, where we were to systematically apply stethoscopes to every single student. They were mostly children ages 7-11, and all had absolutely no idea what a stethoscope was. So, they were scared.
“Here, don’t worry. It doesn’t hurt…” Rachel, one of the other interns, was trying to apply her stethoscope to a struggling third grader. Her murmured English, completely incomprehensible to the child, only scared him more.
“Hey, George, could you help me over here? This kid’s really scared.”
“Sure thing, Rachel, give me one second.” Giving the girl who I had been about to check a quick, “I’ll be right back!”, I walked to Rachel’s line.
“What’s up?”
“I think you need to calm him down,” she said, dipping her chin at the pouting child in front of her.
“Okay.” I sat down beside her and looked the child in the eyes. “Hey. What’s your name? I’m Dr. Q.” I figured that calling myself a doctor would reassure him.
After half a minute, he whispered, “Guo LiSheng.”
“Guo LiSheng. Okay. Xiaoguo.” Xiao is a prefix used to refer to someone for whom you care. Literally, it means “little”.
“Listen, Xiaoguo, do you see this? It’s called a stethoscope. Ste-tho-scope. It’s a cool little gizmo which’ll let me listen to your heart. See, it doesn’t hurt.” I pressed the stethoscope’s head to my own chest, and smiled at him. I kept in mind the descriptions of the heart murmurs that gave away the victims of heart disease.
After staring at the stethoscope curiously for a few seconds, he said, “Okay.”
I grinned sideways at Rachel and put the stethoscope to the boy’s chest.
4
Later, in the ultrasound (sort of like a portable, non-radioactive X-ray) room, Dr. Detrano, the head of the program, directed our attention to the image of the boy’s beating heart.
“Look there. See all the white matter? That’s all the cardiac muscle and tissue. Now, see that thick dividing line in the center? That’s his septum. It separates the right and left sides of his heart. This dark spot over here,” he tapped it, “is a ventricular septum defect, or a VSD. Basically a hole. It’s causing his blue blood to contaminate his red blood. Dangerous. Good job, George.”
We screened around 300 children at that school. Most did not come from the village we were in; it was the only school in a large area. Some trekked past mountains to get there. Of those, only Xiao Guo had any sort of problem with his heart.
I afforded myself a certain pride with my diagnosis. After all, if I hadn’t calmed him down, Rachel would have listened to him, and his fear would have accelerated his heartbeat, making difficult to hear the telltale murmur. Now, I thought, he would be sent to the professional Dali hospital, where he would receive life-saving treatment for his VSD.
As such, it was with surprise when I saw Xiao Guo the next day. He was sitting with his parents on the front porch of the inn we were staying in.
I walked past them, saying hello, and went into Dr. Detrano’s office.
“Hey, Dr. Detrano, when’s Xiao Guo going to the hospital?”
He looked at me with confusion. “Hospital?”
“Yeah, you know, to have his VSD checked up.”
The expression on his face went from puzzlement to understanding to sorrow. “Xiao Guo’s not going to the hospital. Well…not yet.”
“What?”
“He needs to go to the Kunming Medical Center. He doesn’t have the money. We don’t have the money.”
My understanding and my disbelief clashed and battled. “What about the money the interns paid to be here?”
“Air fare, lodging and transportation. I’m sorry, I thought you knew, George. We only send a few of the diagnosed VSDs to the hospital each year.”
“Oh.” Understanding prevailed, and I backed out of the room.
Back on the porch, I prepared to return to my room when Xiao Guo stood up and said to me, “Good morning, Dr. Q. Thank you!”
I mumbled a “good morning” in English and hurried to my room.
Thanks? Thanks for what? For telling you that your situation is hopeless, that your heart is a time bomb? I struggled with guilt and self-revulsion. I had been excited when I heard his heart murmur. The hundreds of perfectly fine children had bored me, and I was losing interest. Xiao Guo was just ten years old. What did he have to look forward to?
I looked out the window at the mountains outside, and said, with a plummeting feeling of shame, “There’s nothing I can do.”
Three weeks later I returned to America and sent all my allowance for books and songs to Dr Detrano.
A few months after I landed in Los Angeles, I browsed down my Facebook page and saw the following announcement from the ChinaCal page:
11 year old Guo Li Sheng, a child in Yunnan, has been sent to the Kunming hospital in order to receive treatment for a heart defect. Congenital, or passed down, heart defects are common in the Yunnan area.
So Xiao Guo made it to the realm of the few.
5
In September, school started with the usual blend of lethargy and fanfare. Students arrived with dark bags under their eyes, their tint reflecting all the ink they had to use to complete their summer work in one or two days. Others came in an explosion of color, decorated with the souvenirs of their vacation travels.
When asked what I did over the summer, I said simply, “I went to China,” and drew nods from the interrogators.
I no longer believe in the idea of identity. Though that may sound morbid at first, I mean only the best when I say it. I know now why the patient in the clinic, the patient on the deathbed and the patient in the rehabilitation ward will all say, “Thank you”, to their doctors at the end of their respective operations. At that stage, we are all the same. The medical knowledge we learned in English is applicable to a Chinese boy, no need for any modification. Connected through the two ends of a stethescope, we are merely one person and another person. As one man cuts himself off completely from everyone else, so goes the extinction of the human race. No one can exist with no one. We know this as the happiness of a group, and the pain of a lonely heart. Xiao Guo’s gratitude and my feelings of alienation are the human condition.
I still don’t know my family that well, and I still can’t always understand my parents. But that’s fine. The next time they offer a distant welcome, I’ll run to them and close the gap. Only then will I no longer be seen as a sea turtle, but be accepted for the human I really am.
6
From shore to shore, the whole world will be my home.
