Andrea Barrett - The Middle Kingdom

I could tell you , I heard; Zillah. It had to be. I coughed so hard my ribs ached. More people, more directions: turn right, turn left, turn right. The bells of the bicycles rang and rang, chiming off-key. At last we ran into an old man who sent us back down the road to the hutong we’d disregarded. The hutong : the alley. Beijing alleys run like veins, piercing the blocks of tall new buildings lining the avenues and leading to the blocks’ secret cores, the remains of the old city. This alley was dark and narrow and cobblestoned, lined with crumbling old houses and littered with paper and broken boxes and leaves and bones. But at its end was a courtyard surrounded by stately brick buildings — the hospital, at last. One wing bore a small sign in English, announcing the foreigners’ clinic.

The door to the clinic was open, but we saw no one inside at first. A high white ceiling, glossy yellow walls, a splintered wooden floor. The rooms off the corridor were empty, inhabited only by metal cots and wooden desks and chairs, everything scrubbed and worn. At the end of the hall, at the reception desk, two women sat cackling and sipping tea from a battered metal thermos. Their broad faces shone beneath white paper caps.

Walter was trembling with the anxiety that always overcame him in strange places. ‘Doctor,’ he said, his voice cracking. ‘My wife needs a doctor.’

The two women looked at each other. ‘ Meiguo ren ,’ said the shorter one. She reached behind her and brought up a tattered, paperbound book, which she held in front of me. I looked at it dully, not knowing how often I was to see it. A Dialogue in the Hospitals , I read, beneath a set of Chinese characters. English-Chinese. The woman opened the book to the third page and pointed out an English phrase. Do you want to see a doctor?

‘Yes,’ I said, and looked at her closely. She had a mole below her mouth and three creases on her neck.

She blinked at me. ‘Hello?’ I said.

She smiled but didn’t say anything. I pointed to the next line in the dialogue, the line assigned to ‘Patient.’ Yes, where shall I register?

She nodded approvingly and pointed to the next line, marked ‘Nurse.’ Have you been here before?

I shook my head no and she pulled out a stack of forms. My ears were ringing and several conversations seemed to be going on inside my head at once. ‘I can’t do this,’ I told Walter. ‘Can you?’

‘I’ll try,’ he said. I collapsed in one of the slipcovered armchairs stretched down the hall in neat rows, each one dotted dead center with a crisp white doily. Behind me, I heard the two women and Walter struggling to make sense of each other and the forms. The women spoke no English and Walter didn’t know a word of Mandarin. The women flipped through the book, pointing out sentences for each other and speaking louder and louder. Walter raised his voice, enunciated more and more clearly, separated his syllables more distinctly. ‘They don’t understand loud English either,’ I told him. Walter shot me a dirty look and struggled on, repeating my name, my birthdate, our hotel address, the reason we were here — why were we here? — and our host organization. The women nodded and smiled, nodded and smiled, understanding nothing. Walter stopped talking and filled in the forms. One of the women took them with her into another room, while I sat and sniffed at the sweet, warm smell in the hall. Soap and herbs and starch and fabric dried in the sun; nothing like an American hospital. Walter threw himself into the armchair beside me, mumbling something I didn’t catch, and then the two women reappeared and led us into the doctor’s office.

The doctor was young and spoke very little English, relying on a bilingual dictionary and the same book the women at the front desk had used. Her office was almost bare: a desk, three wooden chairs, a glass jar full of warped tongue depressors, an ancient stethoscope and an even older blood-pressure cuff. I could feel Walter shuddering at the germs, at the microscopic cracks in the wood. The doctor waved us into the chairs.

‘ Wo jiang de hua ni ting de dong ting bu dong? ’ she said, slowly and precisely. All I could catch from that was de dong — understand. I suspected she was asking me if I could understand her.

‘ Wo bu dong ,’ I said faintly, the first phrase I’d learned. ‘ Bu dong .’ I don’t understand.

She smiled and bent over her books. Walter, waving me silent, took my phrasebook from my purse and began flipping through it. ‘Let me deal with this,’ he said. ‘How do I tell her I’m a scientist?’

‘Look up “occupations,”’ I whispered.

‘Doctor, lawyer, teacher, farmer,’ he muttered. ‘Closest is doctor, I guess. What is “American”?’

‘ Meiguo ren ,’ I told him.

The doctor, puzzled, was turning her head between us as if we were playing table tennis. Walter straightened himself and mangled the words he thought meant ‘American scientist.’ ‘ Wo shi Meiguo ren yisheng ,’ he said.

The doctor’s face crinkled in a smile. ‘Dr Amurr-ika?’ she said.

I closed my eyes. Dr America — not far from Walter’s vision of who he was.

‘Bronchitis,’ Walter said loudly. ‘Bronchitis. Bronchitis! ’

The doctor shook her head and thumbed through her book, opening it to the entry for ‘Cold.’ She held the book so I could see it, and she read the English version of the first line haltingly. ‘What seems to be the problem?’

I read the second line back to her, pointing at the Chinese version as I did. I think I have a cold, I read, but I shook my head at the same time. ‘No. No cold.’

She took my temperature and laid her stethoscope over my chest and back, tapping me lightly with her fingers while indicating that I should breathe. Then she flipped to the next entry in her book and showed it to me.

‘Pneumonia,’ I read. I shook my head again.

‘Pneu -monia ,’ she said loudly. ‘Yes.’ She pointed out the appropriate lines. Do you cough up any phlegm?

I nodded reluctantly.

She pointed to the next line. What color is it?

‘Yellow,’ I said.

‘Yen-no?’

I pointed at the word in the book; she nodded and pointed again. Do you have fever?

I nodded again. She knew that; she had taken my temperature. Maybe she wanted to know how long I’d had it.

‘Bronchitis!’ Walter said. ‘Tell her you have bronchitis!’

I heaved myself over and grabbed her dictionary and her handbook. Her handbook had entries for ‘Cold’ and ‘Pneumonia’ but nothing for ‘Bronchitis.’ I found the word ‘bronchus’ in her dictionary and showed her the Chinese definition, tapping frantically at my chest and coughing, coughing. ‘Bronchitis,’ I repeated.

‘No,’ she said, and tapped her own chest in return. ‘Lungs full.’ She took back her handbook and pointed out a section to me. ‘Need draw blood. Chest X-films.’

From a drawer she pulled a needle and a syringe that looked as old as her stethoscope; I didn’t want to imagine the age of her X-ray machine. Likely it dated, as did everything here, from the early 1950s. One shot from that and I’d glow for years.

‘No,’ I told her. ‘No blood. No films.’ She frowned and I tugged at Walter’s sleeve.

‘What do you want me to do?’ he whispered. ‘Should we leave?’

‘The paper I gave you,’ I said. ‘There’s a phone number on it. Dr Yu’s husband works here in the hospital somewhere, and he promised he’d help if we had problems. Call him — his name is Dr Zhang Meng.’

‘What good will that do? Maybe we can get this woman to give you some pills.’ He turned to the doctor. ‘Medicine?’ he said. ‘Erythromycin?’