Five Hundred Yuan, Up Front

In the 1990s, Chinese hospitals required a cash deposit before emergency treatment began. I already knew this the way you know any rule of the world you live in. What I did not know, until one night at the county hospital, was what that rule looked like when it landed on a family that did not have the money. My son was about eighteen months old. His mother had gone back to her parents' home, and I was raising him by myself. With a child that small, nothing about him was a small matter to me; the moment he burned with fever, I felt we could not afford to lose a minute. That night he spiked a temperature, and I carried him from our town to the county hospital's emergency room. The doctor took his temperature, said he needed an injection, and told us to wait. While we waited, the emergency room doors were pushed open. Two women wheeled in a gurney. On it lay a girl of eleven or twelve. Her whole body was shaking, convulsing violently, and white foam was coming out of her mouth. The two women stood beside the gurney, rigid with fear. A male doctor and a nurse came out. One of the women told them the girl had drunk pesticide — that she had tried to kill herself. The doctor listened, and then he said: five hundred yuan had to be paid first. The two women froze. Between them, they said, they had a little over a hundred yuan. The doctor said a hundred-odd yuan was not enough. Then he said: "Either you pay the five hundred yuan, or I issue a critical-condition notice." And with that, the doctor and the nurse turned and walked away. At that time, an ordinary factory worker in our town earned about seven hundred yuan a month. Five hundred yuan was most of a month's wages. The gurney stayed where it was. After a while, one of the women remained beside the girl, and the other one left. I don't know where she went. I assumed she had gone to find the money somehow. Whether paying before treatment was that hospital's rule or that doctor's own way of doing things, I did not know then, and I do not know now. I only know what I saw. When my turn came, I carried my son in for his injection. The doctor and the nurse had already gone; no one was attending to the girl. About half an hour later, I came out holding my son, his injection done. Her gurney had been moved to the wall by the emergency room entrance. The one female relative was still standing beside her. There was no medical staff treating her. Putting that together with the words the doctor had said, I believed, standing there, that they had not treated her. The woman who had left had still not come back. When I first saw her, she had been convulsing hard, her whole body shaking. When I came out, she was still moving — but no longer the violent convulsions. Just a slight movement. Then I took my own child and left the hospital. What happened to that girl afterward, I don't know. After that night, the pressure I was carrying grew heavier. By then I had been raising my son alone for a long time. I could not go out to work, my savings were nearly gone, and my parents were not helping me with the child. From morning to night it was just me. Before, I had only known, in the abstract, that I needed to earn money. After that night, the thought became specific: if one day my child truly had an emergency, and it took money, and I had no money — what then? When he was a little past two, I finally went to my mother and asked: could she look after him, so I could go out to work? I explained — I had to work, I had to earn; the child was still so small, and there would be so many expenses ahead. My mother answered with one sentence: "I raised you. Now you want me to raise your child too?" She did not agree. There was nothing else I could do. I went on raising him myself. So I raised him, from about eighteen months, until he was nearly three. At three, an opening finally came: a school in the county town that took full boarders, and three was the youngest age they accepted. Full boarding meant he went in on Monday morning and lived there until I collected him on Friday. Day care alone would never have let me travel for work; boarding gave me a chance to start again. I had been stuck at home for over a year. I could not go on like that. Once he was boarded, I found work again, back at a factory, selling on the road. But I was not the man I had been. Every Friday, someone had to collect him; every Monday, someone had to take him back. If I was out of town, the only person I could turn to was my mother — and in practice, she would not do the weekend pickups and care unless I offered her five hundred yuan a month. When I offered, she accepted. His food I bought in advance myself; it did not come out of the five hundred. In my mind at the time, that money was payment for a day or two of picking up and looking after my child each weekend — not so different, honestly, from hiring someone outside the family to do it. And even then I could not relax: she did the pickups, but with no warmth I could feel, nothing that let me hand him over with an easy heart. Her attitude stayed cold. In those years my phone was never switched off, twenty-four hours a day. Traveling, sleeping in hotels, I kept it on the table nearest the bed, ringtone at full volume, so that if a call came I would hear it at once. On weekends away I called him, talked a few minutes, and told my mother: anything happens, call me. What I feared most was still this — that he would suddenly burn with fever, I would not be there, and my parents would not deal with it in time, or would deal with it badly. At fifty, looking back, what I remember most clearly about that night is not my son's fever. It is the gurney against the wall by the emergency room door. A sick child is not the frightening thing. The frightening thing is when he is lying there, and you have no money in your pocket, and there is no one. — Mufan From Mufan's memoir At Fifty, I Came to the Wu River — Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HMFM99H8