Dr. Bethune's Children by Yiwei Xue

Author:Yiwei Xue
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: contemporary
Publisher: Linda Leith Publishing
Published: 2017-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

A Little Girl

Dear Dr. Bethune, your great friend, our great leader, and the great saviour of all the world’s peoples left us forever on September 9, 1976.

It was a hot afternoon. My father had taken me to the hospital not far from the compound where we lived, to get my eyes checked. A couple of months before this, on the afternoon of Yangyang’s thirteenth birthday—his first birthday since his death—I had felt a throbbing pain in my right eye and then everything went blurry. It had taken me two months to tell my parents, and it was September 9th when my father took me to the hospital for tests. He was impatient, telling me not to dawdle, because he had to go to his office at three o’clock to listen to an important broadcast.

A voluble old woman was sitting beside us in the waiting room, her left eye covered in cotton, while her right eye was very active, peering around everywhere. The picture of Chairman Mao on my father’s bag upset her, and she started to enumerate the bad things in the old regime and the good things in the new society, concluding that her life had been worse than a dog’s under the vicious old regime and that it was only thanks to our great saviour that she had managed to survive and live the life of a human being. The reason she was so upset is that her son had mentioned that recently his colleagues had been wondering why the great saviour had not made a public appearance for such a long time. He said the rumour was being spread that our Chairman Mao, who was to live for ten thousand years, might have health problems, and this made the old woman very angry. She cursed her son and wondered how someone who had already become a father could be so immature, spouting such nonsense. She said there was no chance that our great saviour was in poor health. She said he would live forever.

We didn’t pay much attention to what she was saying, but she kept on repeating it, over and over again. Her gravelly voice and persistent cough soon got on my nerves, so I was relieved when my name was called. My father and I followed the nurse to the doctor’s office and sat down. When handing my my chart to the doctor, the nurse covered her mouth with her hand and yawned a big yawn. Then she smiled awkwardly at us. I felt that a young woman’s yawn was a lot more pleasant than an old woman’s chattering.

The doctor was really easy-going, meaning he wasn’t too focused on what he was doing. He had no sooner started checking my eyes than he began to talk to my father. He asked where my father was from and where he was working and what his monthly salary was. Then they changed topics. The doctor’s face was so close to me that I could not only smell his bad breath but also see spittle flying out of his mouth.

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