God Is Red (10 page)

After the surgery, news spread faster than wind, and I was inundated by villagers seeking help. I ended up staying for more than a week, including an eight-hour trek on foot from Jiaoxi to Zhaji in Wuding County. There was no road. I climbed hills, crossed rivers. By the time we got there, my shoes were almost worn out. I was quite a hiker, but that trip was the longest and toughest I had ever done.

Liao:
I know the area. Locals use donkeys to carry their goods, and the animals slip and fall into the ravines all the time.

Sun:
After the climbing and walking, I slept soundly and did two surgeries, one related to chin cancer and the other skin cancer. Both went smoothly. I had found my path and mission.

Yiliang County in Shaotong region is one of the poorest in Yunnan. The mountaintops have been cut bare of trees and villages are scattered. People live in low thatched houses with doors like cave entrances requiring you to stoop to get in. In one village I visited, people relied on two wells to draw water, one for livestock and the other for humans. When drought hit the region, villagers had to carry water from a river at the foot of a mountain.

I traveled there on several medical missions. Sometimes we had no cleaning water, and I would go days without a shower or even washing my face. But I didn't mind it.

On one such trip, I encountered a Yi limping around on a rough crutch. One of his pant legs hung empty and one side of his face was twitching. When I inquired about his situation, he said he had lost part of his leg in a traffic accident. I asked if I could see and had him sit. I don't know what bastard did the amputation, but it looked horrible. Half of his right leg was gone and the bone of his thigh was poking out like a knife; the flesh around it had decayed and the stink was horrible. I told him: “I have to fix this, now, or you will die.”

He looked at me, stunned at first, but he understood me and tears ran down his cheeks. I had to amputate the rest of his leg if I was to save his life. Soon, I found myself surrounded by a crowd. Nobody knew who I was, except that I had come from Kunming. But they were trusting and helped carry the man to his house and laid him flat on his bed. I took my instruments out from my bag, sterilized them and the infected area, injected anesthesia, and removed the gangrenous tissue.

I sorted out the blood vessels, and sewed them up, like a grandma sewing the soles of shoes, and started the amputation. The process is nothing mysterious. It's very much like carpentry. You need a saw, a file, a chisel, a hammer, and a planer. I carried with me a small saw with sharp teeth. The bone on the thigh of an adult is fairly tough; not as hard as iron, but harder than wood. It's not easy to cut a man's leg off. My arms became numb from the vibration of the saw, back and forth, back and forth. Sweat poured down my face. If we had been at a regular hospital, the nurses would have helped, but all I had was untrained villagers, who simply stood there clueless. I smoothed and rounded the cut bone with a hammer and a chisel and sewed up the healthy skin and flesh.

On another occasion, I had gone to the Red River Prefecture, where the famous Red River Cigarette Factory is located. I visited a leprosarium to operate on someone with appendicitis. None of the doctors in the area would treat him. One had some medicine delivered but wouldn't go there for a diagnosis. Appendix removal is relatively minor surgery, and I thought nothing of stopping by to do the operation, though the patients in the wards there were surprised. “You certainly have guts to visit us here,” they said. The patient was a middle-aged man; his hands and feet appeared deformed because of all the dead and dying skin. He was very calm, never complained about pain. A Catholic girl from Gansu province assisted me with the operation. It went smoothly. It was a straightforward procedure done under local anesthetic. After we stitched him up, the patient nodded his appreciation and slowly walked back to his ward.

Speaking of leprosy, as I was waiting for a bus on the side of a road near Shimenkan one day, I saw in the distance a thatched house half hidden among the trees on a hill. Thinking it might be the residence of a hermit or a scholar, I decided to pay a visit. The guide looked scared and stopped me: “That is the home of two leprosy patients.” Driven by curiosity, I ignored the guide's warning and went. I saw an old couple dozing off in the sun. When I examined them, I saw that neither displayed any leprosy symptoms. They were quite healthy people.

The old man, Zhang Zhi-en, used to live in a village nearby. In the 1970s, while digging herbs in the mountains, he ran into a snake, which the locals called Ma snake. He killed it with a berry hoe. When he related the story to his fellow villagers, they spread rumors that he had leprosy. According to local folklore, people would contract leprosy if they encountered a Ma snake, the name of which sounded similar to leprosy. He was locked up in a local sanitarium for years. His ex-wife, who had also been accused of having leprosy, was burned to death when she was still alive, bedridden with another illness. The old woman I saw that day was his second wife. Their life was quite miserable. Nobody talked to them. Part of his house had collapsed, but he didn't have the means to fix it. I contacted the local church and donated two thousand yuan myself to the renovation project. We put tiles on the roof, and it looks really nice now. We even bought some pigs and chickens for him to raise. His life is much improved. He's now accepted by people in his church.

Liao:
Tell me about the young fellow, Little Sun, from the village of Malutang.

Sun:
He used to be a temporary worker at a shipyard in the city of Guangzhou, married, with children. Life looked quite good for him until he lost the use of his legs. He sought treatment all over the place. A well-known professor at the Zhongshan Medical University examined him, but just shook his head. As his paralysis progressed, his wife left him. His fellow workers sent him back to his native village, where his parents had to take care of everything for him, from eating to bathroom needs. It was all very tragic. Surgery wasn't the solution, nor was Western medicine, but it came to me that traditional acupuncture might be the answer. I didn't have any formal training in acupuncture, so I took lessons from a well-known Chinese herbal doctor, Mr. Liang. It was truly a fun and rewarding experience. Once Mr. Liang signed my certificate, I went to see Little Sun, and he agreed to try the treatment. After my first visit, he said his legs hurt, so he could feel them. We kept up the treatment. At the same time, I prescribed some herbs. Slowly, he was able to stand, and now he can walk without a cane. He is taking medical lessons from me and can take care of common ailments.

Liao:
He's opened a barbershop in the township, where he also does dental work.

Sun:
I introduced him to a visiting dentist from America. Little Sun received training from him. I'm told he's pretty good at it now.

Liao:
I've met quite a few of your students.

Sun:
In the past eight years, I have trained thirty or forty, and we now have a rudimentary rural medical network. While it's important to have professionally trained doctors available, it's more urgent and realistic to have people on the ground who have some basic medical knowledge. In the rural areas, when there is an emergency, it takes time for a doctor to get there. Life is really hard for villagers in these mountainous regions, which are hours from the nearest township, and even there the hospitals are poorly equipped and staffed. It's okay if you are well and healthy. But once a villager gets hit with a sudden illness, he is in big trouble. Many people die each year from what are really minor ailments and injuries.

Liao:
But setting up and running a rural medical network is a government job.

Sun:
The Communist Party is rotten; how can we rely on this government? Some overseas charity organizations have been very helpful, but their help is temporary. Mostly, we have to rely on our own local resources. In 1999 I contacted a charity in Singapore. They sent over three doctors, one from the United States, one from Hong Kong, and one from Singapore. We visited this area. That was when we met another man named Sun. He lives in Dazhuji Village in Zehei County. He had some medical background and was running a small clinic, but he was deep in debt and his clinic was facing bankruptcy. The charity offered financial help. But I think, more important, we gave him the confidence that he badly needed. I said to him: “Foreign aid is certainly good, but you can't rely on it. You have to figure out a way to use local resources. The best way to do this is to tap into Chinese herbs. They are readily available in the region.” Over the years, Mr. Sun has been able to help others and pay off his debts. He is now doing fairly well.

Liao:
I met two Chinese American doctors at your house in Kunming. Have they been of help?

Sun:
They traveled to the rural regions several times and were willing to make some financial contributions. They have seen what it is like in China's remote areas. I advised them to stay away from government officials so their money can directly benefit the rural villagers.

But I have to admit that our help is limited. Many times we are helpless in the face of human suffering. In a remote village in Jiaoxi, I met the village leader who has a large tumor on his neck. Initially, it was a small one and some doctor tried to remove it, but he didn't root it out. The tumor returned and grew bigger and bigger. When I met him, the tumor had already spread to his left shoulder and the back of his head. It was so heavy he couldn't keep his balance while standing. It was cancer of the lymph nodes and had advanced to the stage where an operation was no longer possible. All I could do was sit with him. I read to him from the Bible and said, “Your life in this world is finite, but to God it is infinite.” He nodded at me and smiled. I held his hands and stayed with him quietly for an hour. He died the next day.

One time I was taken to the house of a fifty-year-old woman. She was fighting for her breath and in a lot of pain. She was bleeding internally, and it was too late for any treatment. I asked for a basin of warm water and washed her face and combed her hair. As a doctor, I could do nothing for her. But as a person, I could give her back some dignity. I sat with her, held her hands. Her breathing was heavy, painful. I felt very sad for her. So I whispered: “Big sister, I know that you have suffered a lot in this life. Don't be scared. Don't be afraid. It will be over. The gate of heaven is wide open for you. Your sufferings will end there.” Tears ran down the sides of her face, her body twitched a couple of times, and a few minutes later, she passed away. Things happened pretty fast.

Now, let me tell you an uplifting story. In the summer of 2001, I was traveling in the Jiaoxi region and stopped at a village. It was about three o'clock in the afternoon. After I had rested for an hour, a local official asked if I would see a man who was dying of a mysterious illness. It was a two-and-a-half-hour walk along muddy mountain paths. I slipped and fell several times. It was eight o'clock when we arrived. I remember the sun was setting behind the hills. There must have been about a hundred villagers surrounding the patient's dark thatched house. A red casket was outside the door, its cover wide open. It was quite spooky. The patient was coughing blood; there were bloodstains everywhere. He seemed to be on the verge of death. His family members told me that he had lung cancer and showed me his X rays. The patient was quite lucid. I gave him an injection to stop the bleeding and asked him for the history of his illness. After an examination, I was sure it was not cancer, but tuberculosis, still quite serious. I didn't have any TB meds with me. The next morning I set out with the patient's two daughters for Kunming, which we reached midafternoon, and sent them back with some medicine and instructions on correct dosage. When I called three days later, the casket was gone from his door and his condition was improving. A checkup three weeks later confirmed he was making a speedy recovery.

Liao:
You wander around the rural areas, providing these services to people. How do you support yourself financially? Do you charge people for treatment?

Sun:
In the first two years, a church organization in the United States provided some financial support so I could do my charity work. I developed a close friendship with a young woman at that organization. Later, her boss changed his mind and stopped the financial aid. But I put my trust in God. I don't have a lot of expenses. The only money I need is for bus or train fares. When I travel from village to village, I stay at the homes of local peasants who feed me a bowl of rice and beans.

Liao:
But that's not really a long-term plan.

Sun:
People are really kind. Some peasants insist on paying for treatment—ten or twenty yuan. Those requiring more complex treatment offer two hundred to three hundred yuan. I have some contacts willing to let me pay wholesale for meds, and the money the peasants give me covers those costs. In the past two years, some doctors abroad have learned about me and are interested in what I do. They contribute medicines, and the two Chinese American doctors have rented a place in Kunming to use when they are here; I look after their patients when they are in the United States.

Liao:
I stayed at their office once.

Sun:
The place can accommodate six people at a time. There are enough doctors in big cities. I think I'm going to spend the rest of my life here. It fits me perfectly.

Epilogue

In 2009 Dr. Sun caught the attention of Yunnan government officials, who accused him of harboring “ulterior motives” by treating the poor for free and subsequently banned his medical mission in Yunnan. Meanwhile, after Liao published Dr. Sun's story on an overseas Chinese website, he received an invitation from a Chinese church in the United States to talk about his work. He arrived in the United States in 2009 but has not been allowed to return to China. He now resides in California, trying to improve his English skills and seek missionary opportunities in Africa.