Well, Doc, It Seemed Like a Good Idea At The Time!: The Unexpected Adventures of a Trauma Surgeon by J. Paul Waymack

Author:J. Paul Waymack [Waymack, J. Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: www.writingnights.org
Published: 2017-11-04T20:00:00+00:00

Figure 1. Sino-American Burn Conference in Chongqing, China.

As part of this plan, Deng began to open up China in a way it had not seen since before World War II, and one of the results was a series of international scientific, medical, and business conferences held throughout China. The meetings were ostensibly to teach Chinese scholars, doctors, and scientists about Western methods and knowledge, but an ulterior motive was to show the rest of the world that Red China offered the potential for great rewards from the investment of capital and ideas.

One of these efforts to improve relations between China and the Western world was the Sino-American Burn Conference, at which I was asked to give a lecture and moderate one session. The conference was held in Chongqing, because China’s premiere burn surgeon, Dr. Li, lived there. Now a bustling, sophisticated metropolis with more than thirty million people, Chongqing in 1985 was quite a different city. Unlike the coastal cities of Beijing and Shanghai, Chongqing is far inland—a thousand miles west of Hong Kong—and was largely unfamiliar with Westerners in the ’80s. In fact, the burn conference was the city’s first experience hosting an international event.

From Cincinnati, I flew to San Francisco, then on to Hong Kong. The flight, with a refueling stop in Honolulu, took about sixteen hours. After a night in Hong Kong, my colleague Ed Robb and I joined a dozen Western burn specialists on a small, aging Russian aircraft (circa 1960) that Air China had bought second-hand. The flight was supposed to take three hours, but because it was raining in Chongqing, the pilot decided to go to Chengdu instead, since it was the nearest airport where the weather was clear. Chengdu sits on a large plain in the Sichuan Basin about 250 miles west of Chongqing, and the two cities are separated by the Longquan mountain range.

Within half a minute of landing, police ordered us off the plane; we learned later that no one from the control tower had notified them that the plane had been diverted from Chongqing. We also learned that no plane from a Western country had landed in Chengdu since about WWII—and Hong Kong, as a British territory, qualified as “Western.”

I’m 6’5” and don’t find airplanes particularly comfortable, so I was the first one off the plane. I walked down the stairs and strode briskly across the tarmac and into the terminal. A dozen smarter (or luckier) Western burn specialists followed a good distance behind me.

Several grim-faced men in military uniforms—the national police, as it turned out—greeted me. One of them barked something in Chinese and stretched out one hand impatiently. I assumed he wanted my passport, so I handed it to him. He flipped through the pages and then glared at me. He said something to the other policemen and they all began questioning me in heated, rapid-fire Chinese. They gestured at my passport and several shook their fingers at me angrily.

Nervously, I looked back toward my so-called friends, who were taking an awfully long time to enter the terminal.

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