God Is Red (9 page)

I wasn't well educated, but I was pious. I set up an altar in my home and worshipped the god of fortune and goddess of compassion every day. Even so, my lot never changed. I continued to lose big. My husband tried to talk me out of playing it, but I wouldn't listen. He became frustrated. Out of anger, he picked up the habit himself and fell into a bottomless pit. With two gamblers in the house, we fell deeply in debt. Sometimes we didn't even have money to buy food. Even so, we couldn't escape our addictions. We both ended up getting sick. Many people thought we were hooked on heroin. In truth, it was a type of heroin.

Luckily, we ran into Ruth, who generously helped us when we had no place to go. I heard a sermon one Friday evening. On the following Sunday, I participated in this fellowship group and was on my knees to make my commitment prayer. I changed my name to Yue Lang—Bright Moon—to mark my rebirth that moonlit evening. When I went home that night, I bundled up the statues on my altar and my mahjong tiles and tossed them into a river. I cleaned the house, inside and out, and was soaked in sweat. It felt good. I had suffered insomnia for four years, but as soon as I fell into bed, I was asleep and slept through to the next morning. When I awoke, I opened the windows and felt the fresh breeze. That was 2005. I have played mahjong just once since then. I couldn't concentrate. I knew I had sinned. When I got home, I was on my knees, praying, and my husband saw me and asked, “What is this for? Is it worth it?” That night, I dreamed about a cross, shining so brightly it hurt my eyes.

I have not played since then. Our family situation has changed for the better. I no longer have insomnia. I'm quite healthy. My husband has even given up smoking. I don't have to beg the Lord for anything. He knows everything. Each time I make some progress, he would reward me with his blessing. I'm going to follow the path of the Lord and seek redemption until I die.

 

By eleven o'clock, the Christian brothers and sisters were making their farewells. Since I was the only nonbeliever in the group, people took turns urging me to remove my worries and submit myself to God. The simplicity and sincerity in their offerings touched me. They believed that faith was a valuable gift, and they wanted to share this spiritual awakening with a guest. At the crossroad, I parted with my friend Li Linshan, who leaned on the shoulder of his wife and walked home, step by step. I watched as he shuffled down the street. I knew the cancer was eating him away, but he made steady progress toward the light of his home.

D
arkness in the countryside is truly dark, black-ink dark, when the clouds are out and the moon so new it has yet to be born. I had not seen darkness like it for years. With the chill wind whistling, I felt alone, though I knew my traveling companion was just an arm's length away. Dr. Sun (I will only use his family name because he wishes to avoid undue attention from the authorities) was taking me, on this dark night, to Fakuai Village in the mountains of Tianxin County in Yunnan province. “Fakuai,” I learned, was slang in the local Yi language for “waist of the mountain,” which was indeed where the village was located, though Dr. Sun was more precise when he explained we were going into the mountain's “belly button.”

Dr. Sun, a missionary doctor I had met in 2004, agreed to introduce me to some Christian leaders in the ethnic Yi and Miao villages, where he visited three or four times a year. We had set out early enough, I thought, on December 9, 2005, but it was late in the day when our driver reached the end of the asphalt highway and his van began to shudder as its tires rumbled along a “hard candy” road, made from a mixture of mud and small stones. The driver, teeth now clattering, made no effort to slow down, and the van hurtled forward. Dr. Sun shrugged his shoulders—such was the violent shuddering of the van it was hard to tell—and grinned, “You just get used to it.”

Dr. Sun was clearly well known in these parts; he was greeted like a lost brother as we entered the courtyard house of one of his assistants at about nine o'clock, the group sitting around the fire jumping at once to their feet and rushing to surround him. The owner of the house helped unload the bags of donated clothing we had brought with us. It was around midnight by the time the clothing had been distributed, the villagers had left, and we were left to soak our feet in basins of hot water set before the fire. Neither of us was sleepy, so we talked:

Liao Yiwu:
It seems so surreal, sitting here with you, in this remote mountain village. It's so quiet and beautiful. When we first met, you told me you were born in the city of Nanjing. How did you end up in Yunnan province?

Dr. Sun:
Both my grandparents and parents were herbal doctors. They used to run one of the oldest and most reputable hospitals in town and made quite a lot of money. They purchased lots of farmland as investments. When the Communists came, the world was turned upside down. My family became the target of persecution—members of the evil exploiting class. Their hospital was confiscated; so was their farmland. But they were well known for their medical skills, so they were considered valuable for local senior Communist officials. As a result, they escaped execution. It was hard being born into a family with such a murky political background. I was constantly taunted in school and banned from participating in many school activities.

In 1975, when I was in junior high school, I signed up as a volunteer and came to Xishuangbanna at the southern tip of Yunnan, about as far south as you can go. I joined a state farm. I was the youngest worker but lied about my age. I wanted to get out of Nanjing, get away from my family, to disappear.

You know, Xishuangbanna has many different ethnic groups. The Dai people form the largest group; then there are the Hani, the Lagu, Bulang, Yao, Yi, Wa, and the Bai. It is easy to disappear here. I was assigned to Jinghong Commune, which was close to the border with Myanmar and Thailand and consisted of many Dai villages.

Living so far from the city, I thought I could get away from Mao's political campaigns. I was wrong. It was the same everywhere, but about ten years behind the cities. While major cities had shifted their focus of political attack from former landlords to intellectuals and government officials, the leaders in my commune were still holding public condemnation meetings against the landlords. The day I arrived, I met a young fellow, a Dai. He seemed nice. He even climbed trees like a monkey to get fruit for us urbanites. We didn't know he was the son of a rich landowner until the local militia beat him up. He was beaten up a lot.

My disappointment with society and my doubts about Communism started there, I think. The older I got, the more reactionary I became. I came to realize that all those political slogans—“People are masters of the country,” “The Party is always great, glorious, and correct”—were utter nonsense.

One day in 1976, as I was harvesting bananas, the farm's loudspeakers began blaring mourning music, and the announcer's deep voice said our great leader, Chairman Mao, had passed away. I kind of laughed and thought how we used to chant “long live, long live” every day, and then he dropped dead, just like everyone else. What great news! Of course, I didn't share these feelings with any of the others.

Later, I was assigned to work at the farm's clinic. In 1977, when China resumed the university entrance exam system, I passed all the tests and was enrolled in Beijing Medical University. Five years later, after I obtained my MD, I got a job at a hospital affiliated with the Suzhou Medical College, close to Shanghai. I became a surgeon, working in the ER department. I handled all sorts of terrible cases—ruptured livers, disembowelments, severe head injuries, severed limbs. That was where I honed my surgical skills. By 1988 I was promoted to be an administrator, and in 1995 I became the deputy dean of the medical school.

Liao:
You were young and had a bright future.

Sun:
A critical skill of an ER surgeon is to diagnose fast and accurately, and then act. You can't play games. But as an administrator, none of the skills I had acquired applied. They played by a different set of rules. In my leadership position, I initiated some reform measures. The school assigned me a Santana car, but I asked the authorities to sell it and spend the money on the hospital. I rode my bike to work every day. I abolished the traditional big staff banquets during holidays and banned the use of public money for eating and drinking. I also tightened up on reimbursing expenses. All of those measures hurt the interests of other leaders; they hated my guts and conspired against me. It was very frustrating and depressing. In early 1990 our college invited some foreign teachers and students to teach and study there. It was through them that I got hold of a Bible. I was examining my life at that time. I felt extremely frustrated with my work as a deputy dean. The Bible taught me to be in awe of God and to love, two important qualities that the Chinese people lacked. Too many Chinese will do anything for trivial material gains and have no regard for morality, ethics, or the law. How do we change that? Can we rely on the Communist Party? Can we rely on government rules and regulations? Apparently not.

In September 1990 I participated in a prayer session at a foreign student's dorm. It was the first time I ever prayed. I saw several Chinese students there. I began to attend Sunday Mass at private homes and gradually formed the habit of praying before bed every night, reflecting on what I had done that day and how I might do better. In the winter of 1991 I went on vacation to Xishuangbanna. It happened to be Christmas. While I was attending a Christmas celebration at a Christian's home, my heart was touched in a way it had never been touched before. With the help of a missionary from Germany, I was baptized.

Liao:
Could you be both a Christian and a government official?

Sun:
I felt I had to make a choice, but that choice was largely made for me. One of the students at my first private prayer session ratted on me. In 1997, my boss came to me with an application form for membership in the Communist Party. He told me that by joining the Party, I would be able to dispel the “rumors” about my association with the Christian movement, that I had been in the system for many years and had established myself in the medical field, and that it was a minor concession that would open a lot of doors for me.

I told him I could not fill out the application form. I said, “What you heard are not rumors. It is true.” My boss was shocked and pretended not to have heard what I said. “I believe in Jesus Christ,” I said. “I have already made my choice, and this is the only choice.”

He was tremendously upset. “You are a Communist official. You enjoy the salary and the benefits of a Communist official, yet you believe in Jesus Christ. What can you do with Jesus? Can he provide you with food and clothing?”

I looked him in the eye and said, quite deliberately: “I am quitting now. I need to save my soul.”

The hospital relieved me of all my duties, and I had to leave the medical school. Soon after, Jinghong Hospital in Xishuangbanna hired me, but it didn't work out. I tried the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone and eventually landed in Thailand where I traveled to the beautiful northern city of Chiang Mai. I was recruited as a volunteer by a hospital sponsored by an international humanitarian organization and went to a poor mountain region in Myanmar, which was ravaged by war, epidemic diseases, and poverty. There were poppy plants everywhere and gun-toting guerrillas, who looked more like bandits. I heard shooting sometimes. The “hospital” was several sheds with thatched roofs in the middle of a forest, but it had some highly skilled doctors, many of them from the West, who came on rotation.

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 ones I carried with me, and we did the operation in her bedroom. Her bed was a wooden plank; no table necessary. All we had to do was clean up the room a bit and we could do it there.

Liao:
Did anyone assist you?

Sun:
Yes, another minister in the village. He was in his sixties, a grandpa figure. The room was very dark; even after we opened all the windows, it was still pretty bad. I tied four flashlights together and had the grandpa hold them as operating lights. That grandpa was strong and in great health. He stood there for hours without moving, holding the light steady. I removed the tumor, which took quite a while, but I didn't feel tired at all. It was a sweet feeling to be there with the poor villagers and to do God's work, though I never thought I'd ever have to perform surgery in quite those conditions.