A Stranger in a Strange Territory
Beijing, China
The fall rain blew through nighttime Shanghai like curtains of gray gauze. Behind the veils, the sprawling city shimmered, a sea of twinkling lights and solid neon. My friend dropped me off at the rail station, where the rush of traffic and scurry of pedestrians were left behind.
I waited on a hard bench to board the northbound train, headed for Beijing to see if the clinics there could help with my back problems. Around me sat the stylish urban young, clinging to cell phones and smooth black leather bags. Shy rural people in gray Mao suits came laden with baskets of food, steel thermoses and over-stuffed shopping bags.
We boarded our sleeper car, a rolling dormitory, that soon became a party-mobile as strangers got acquainted. Children played in the long aisle and foreigners were offered surprises slipped from brimming picnic hampers. My few words of Mandarin echoed up and down the car as people smiled at my efforts and repeated my phrases. “Hey, did you hear what she said? This green-eyed alien is learning putong hua, the People’s Speech.”
By morning, we felt like a community, a big extended family waking up together in tiers of bunks, everyone’s hair tousled, clothes and bedding disheveled. Even the cell phone users had let their cool collapse and looked innocent of pretense. A plump boy of three ran full tilt down the aisle while confused elders sat up and took steaming cups of tea in two hands. I dressed and stood by the windows with a group of men gazing out at the misty dawn.
The train clattered onto a long trestle, crossing a huge river. I pulled out my map and asked a middle-aged man, “Huang huh ma?” Is it the Yellow River? “Shuh. Yes, it is,” he said, “Huang Huh da jiang.” The yellow, the big river. It was his words that moved among the people like an electric current. Huang huh, huang huh. Several moved to the windows to take in the vast width of it, the legendary waters of the river where China began.
They all know the story, how ten thousand years ago beside the great curve of this stream, the first farmers built their villages, cast bronze and made pottery, and how they carved the shapes of words into their tombs. Most Chinese are pluggers, not dreamers, but crossing the Huang Huh stirred them. The shared glances told me this river would be part of their journey stories later.
Soon, the red sun rose. We watched people on bikes along country roads where oxcarts and chatting groups of workers made their way. Small children waved at the train. As we approached towns, factories coughed smoke into the blue sky. At noon we pulled into Beijing. Everyone stood, getting organized. A well-dressed woman in bold make-up arranged by cell phone to be met.
I stepped out into the cool sunshine, a stranger in a strange territory. Feigning confidence, I pulled my bag through the station and onto a bright terrace where dozens of taxis waited. My heart raced for a moment. Would they understand my halting words? Swallowing, I calmly unfolded the address I’d been given and stepped up to an alert young man with a bad haircut, who had been shouting at the crowd.
He read the address, smiled and put my rolling bag into the trunk of his taxi. He gestured for me to climb into the back seat, while he continued to shout for passengers. The crowd thinned, but he would not give up.
“When we go?” I asked, in my best Mandarin.
“One more person.”
Heartened that he’d understood my question, I got out again to wait, leaning on the warm rear fender, chatting with English-speaking tourists climbing into nearby cabs. At last, everyone had gone.
“How much go my place?” I asked the driver.
“Cost’s a lot for one person. Twenty yuan.”
“Good. We go.”
I felt smug and satisfied. I’d worked every day for months to have this conversation, kicked the floor in frustration over the odd sounds just so I could survive this place on my own. Shanghai had been a slap in my face. They speak Shanghainese and only a tiny bit of that dialect had made sense. Now I was hearing my teacher’s refined Beijing accent and I got it. Big time. What a relief.
The hostel for the School of Traditional Medicine opens onto a broad paved square in the center of an immense city block, three miles east of the Forbidden City. You enter the square through a grand old cast iron gate with a guardhouse. I paid the driver and went inside. The women at the hostel desk spoke no English but the transaction was a basic one and soon I was unpacking in a shabby room with a bath. My windows faced a high wall beyond a yard filled with honey locust trees.
Going out a while later, I heard two men speaking English and said hello. One of them caught up with me near the guardhouse.
“Hello, Madam.”
I turned and gave him a smile. He was balding, middle aged like me. We decided to go exploring together. He’d also just arrived. We talked as we strolled through the narrow lanes of the old hutong, or traditional neighborhood. He was Egyptian, taught medicine in Cairo, and had just come from North Korea.
I said, “You’re the only person I’ve ever met who’s been there. Tell me about the place.”
“Of course.” He smiled. “If you will be so kind as to join me for dinner.”
We chose a crowded restaurant with good smells and sat at a table, our elbows almost touching those of our curious neighbors. My new friend, Ali, asked me to order, so I chose several dishes, pretending to know what to expect.
“North Korea.” Ali said, “Pyongyang is the saddest place you can imagine.”
Our café faced a wide avenue with endless streams of trucks of all sizes, hundreds of people on bicycles, stalls brimming with food and manufactured goods.
“There is no life in North Korea. Nothing. A feeling of no hope. Spies everywhere, watching. You cannot conceive of the repression. I am so happy to get out of there.” He gestured to the busy street outside. “This place has life.”
He had come to Beijing to learn about Chinese medicine.
“The poor people of Egypt cannot afford imported pharmaceuticals or the kind of hospitals you have in America. I must teach my students what works for us. We must use what patients can pay for. Herbs, acupuncture, massage – these things can stop suffering.”
At last, used to our strangeness, people around us returned to their food, conversation, smoking and tea drinking. Eating clumsily with chopsticks, we exclaimed over broccoli with walnuts in a rich dark sauce, shredded beef fried with water chestnuts and slivered green beans. The deferential waiter returned with a heavy pot of tea.
Ali left me at the hostel guardhouse and went off to find the clubs he was sure must exist where men could relax and drink. A gang of small children kicked a soccer ball along the lane. School girls sold candy and stationery, or rented out minutes on the family phone, through house windows while they did their homework. I watched local television until bedtime.
It rained hard all night. In the morning, a huge dump truck backed up to our building and disgorged a great heap of black coal. It was much colder this morning, the chill of Siberia’s winter all too near.
I bought a couple of steamed buns and an apple through one of the windows along the lane and went off in search of the School of Acupuncture, said to be a short distance to the north. I showed my address card and asked a dozen people. No one had a clue. At last, in a clinic of unknown purpose, the man in charge sent me away with a little girl. She took me around the corner and into another hospital.
Dr. Yang emerged from behind a white curtain, wearing rubber gloves, and we exchanged introductions. Dignified and confident, he read my card and nodded understanding, then swung his arm directing me to walk that way. The little girl had gone. I went out again and through a long series of inner courtyards where hundreds of bicycles were parked. Soon, despair crept over me.
This was useless. I bought a drink from a machine and sat on a wood bench, feeling frustrated.
A girl in blue parked her bike and locked it. I held out my address card. She nodded, then assured me with a soft voice that the place I wanted was just through that gate ahead. And it was. Not a hundred yards north of the guardhouse where I’d begun, I walked into a building I’d passed by earlier, the School of Acupuncture. The sign in English, three inches high, was hidden by a bush.
A square-faced woman with big glasses sat behind a window in the entry hall. She was reading my card when a voice behind me said, “Hello.” I turned and was surprised to see a large blond woman and a slender, hopeful-looking Latina. They were with a quick-moving local lady about forty. All wore white lab coats.
The blond said, “You speak English? Come along with us. We can talk.”
In your own language you trade vast amounts of information in moments. By the time we’d climbed the dirty concrete steps to the third floor, I’d learned the smaller woman was Sara Mendez from UCLA Medical School. The blond was Hadda, an Icelandic doctor married to the Dutch ambassador. The Chinese woman was Goh Bing See, top acupuncture teacher at the institute. If I wanted to follow them around, Dr. Goh could give me a treatment before lunch. I almost whooped with joy. Like a child offered promises of acrobats and ice cream, I tagged along, humbled by gratitude and enlarged by the wonder of my good luck.
No one in the clinic seemed to have a schedule or an appointment. It all appeared chaotic, without structure. Waiting people called out to Dr. Goh and others as they passed. Various medical types strutted around in white coats and people went in and out of rooms with open doors, talking with those in beds or sharing food and tea. An old woman swung her long rag mop left and right as she backed toward us along a dim hall lined with wood chairs.
Dr. Goh consulted with Dr. Chan and they decided to go down to the second floor. Baffled and innocent, I went along, asking Hadda and Sara about their course of study, what motivated them, what they were learning. We entered a large ward with tall windows opening to the bicycle court where I’d had the drink.
A boy of about ten sat on a bed, his anxious parents standing beside him. Dr. Goh introduced herself and began asking the boy questions, which the father answered for him. The boy, in a hospital gown, was asked to stand up. His leg appeared to be paralyzed. His mother looked distraught, his father serious. Dr. Goh palpated the leg, his arms and the other leg, then helped the boy lie facedown on the examining table. When his gown opened, his brand new green jockey shorts showed. Soon Dr. Goh had placed a large number of needles into the boy’s flesh and moved on to the next patient. The parents hovered near their only permitted child, too tense to sit down to wait.
The next patient was an elderly man. He showed how he could hardly move his stiff, arthritic hands. He lay on his back, hands at his side while the needles went in. Next was a girl with crossed eyes and breathing problems. She appeared retarded. The mother seemed embarrassed by her answers. I sat down to rest my back while Dr. Goh took care of several more patients.
The clinic reminded me of the downtown emergency rooms I’d seen as a child in Los Angeles, where accident victims and police cases went. My father took me there when I fell out of a tree and broke my clavicle and again when I crashed my bike, an inner city hospital of broken people without dreams. Could I hope for anything of value in a place so much like that?
But here in Beijing, the patients were clean and neat and filled with belief and trust. True, their shoes were worn and dull and women’s purses looked beat up by hard use. Hairstyles were simple, the greatest extravagance being an occasional permanent among young girls without make- up, girls who proudly wore their plaid shirts with flowered skirts.
I did not see dull poverty. Rather, I saw a nation on the way up. No longer do people starve, or sell the daughters they can’t feed. Today, this land offers stability, education and work for nearly everyone. China knows itself as a great and ancient empire of marvelous achievement that fell to the depths of horror before a new government turned it around.
Adding to the dignity of this recovery is the way the nation has turned to China’s powerful past, to learn from millennia of experience what is of practical value for healing. Dr. Goh was a mix of the best of east and west, efficient and quick, witty and knowledgeable as she worked with other patients. I watched in surprise when the little boy stood and walked normally, his paralyzed leg recovered. The old man clenched his hands, grinning at the improvement. I sensed I could trust this woman. Then it was my turn.
I lay back, wondering if anyone I knew at home would be this brave. The needles went in almost unfelt. Dr. Goh asked how I was doing, patted my hand like a sister and moved on. I lay there about half an hour, awake and content. Then the doctor returned and took the needles out. That was all. I rose and put on my shoes. The treatment was over.
Sara Mendez asked if I could notice anything. I took a deep breath, stretched my back. “Wow. I feel better than I have in months.”
Two days later, full of energy and renewed hope, I walked all around the immense Forbidden City with no pain. The next day, I clambered on the Great Wall and visited the Temple of Heaven, chatting with everyone. My back didn’t hurt. I joined friends for Peking Duck and Mongolian Hot Pot, perused the Russian fur market and art shops of the oldest parts of the city. Later I visited hotels that offered the newest of the new. My back held up.
It had been a long journey, but at its end I felt a glow of contentment. One can’t ever be good as new, but I was better. With great effort, the goal had been won. Yet the adventure itself was enough reward, even if I had not found the help I sought.
