I recently came back from a 10 month experience teaching ESL to college students in China. It was a really interesting experience, one that I hope to never, ever repeat. I came back with some good stories, though. The best ones, I think, have to do with my experience with their health care system.

Now, I was in Kaifeng, which is a poor city in Henan Province, in central China. Kaifeng used to be the capital of Northern China, during the Northern Song dynasty (about 1000 AD). However, due to repeated flooding from the Yellow River, the city has been destroyed repeatedly. Nowadays it’s an interesting city of about (I’ve been told several conflicting numbers) 700,000, that is relatively unwesternized. (And by that I mean no McDonald’s, though there were 2 KCFs).

In order to live in China for over 6 months, you have to get a residency permit. And in order to get a permit, you have to have a medical examination. Now, I had one in the US, but the doctor didn’t do all the tests that they needed so I had to have another one in China. Kaifeng doesn’t have a hospital equipped to do the medical exams, so myself and other foreigners working or studying at the same university had to go to the next city over,  Zhengzhou, to get the tests.

In Zhengzhou we went to what was called a “Traveler’s Hospital”, a gray, nondescript building with bad lighting and bad English on all their signs. It was small, and I only ever saw one floor. The dozen or so foreigners and I all had bilingual medical forms that we needed filled out, with questions like weight, HIV status, and whether or not we had “manic psychosis.”

We first went to a small room where we were weighed and measured. The doctor thought we were all crazy because we didn’t know our own heights. I tried to explain that Americans use inches, not meters, but his English was not good enough to understand.

Next we were instructed to put on little booties over our shoes, but never told why.

The next test was an ultrasound. I felt really uncomfortable with it, because I had never had one before. I tried to ask the nurse what it was for, and she said something vague about checking our organs. I never found out what specifically they were looking for, like tumors or cerosis. I would think they were looking for pregnancy, but they performed ultrasounds on the men as well. (Who all made very bad jokes about ‘how far along the baby was’.)

The next test was a blood test for HIV. Now, before I tell you about the test I should add a little history about AIDS in China. Now, Henan province (where I was, remember?) has the highest prevalency of AIDS in the country. This is largely because in the past doctors were reusing needles. China, up until recently, had tried to hide the presence of AIDS because only “drug addicts” and “homosexuals” got AIDS, and China certainly has none of either! But in the last few years they have started taking a more realistic attitude, and admitted there is a problem.

But that still doesn’t mean that Chinese people aren’t more worried about getting HIV from foreigners than their fellow countrymen. An American friend of mine who was teaching at the same university as myself repeated a story to me from one of her students. This student’s friend had had sex with a “foreigner” (presumably American but my friend wasn’t told for certain), and then later started to feel sick. Now, she thinks she might have HIV but she won’t get tested because the government closely monitors test results.

I was astonished by this story for several reasons, including the fact that she has no proof that she has HIV, she could be sick for many reasons, and that she was way more likely to get AIDS from someone in Henan than an American. But I digress.

So they started taking our blood for the exams. Now, we were all nervous, knowing how HIV had been spread in Henan province in the first place. But luckily they were using fresh needles out of sterile packaging for everyone. The nurse who was drawing the blood, however, was not changing her gloves between person. I have a latex allergy so I asked our hurried “guide” from the university who was translating for us to ask her to put on non-latex gloves. She did, and after drawing my blood did not switch back to the regular gloves. So I was the only person who got fresh gloves before the blood was drawn.

After our blood was drawn we weren’t given band-aids (which until a few months later were not available anywhere that I could find, even after going to several pharmacies), but Q-tips to stop the bleeding. We stood around for a while until our guide, Jackie, told us that their x-ray machine wasn’t working so we would have to go to a different hospital.

So we got back in our van and drove to a much larger hospital. However, we did not go inside. Instead we went 2-by-2 into the van in the parking lot. The van had inside a chest x-ray machine and an EKG machine. When it was my turn I went in and had the standard x-ray. I do not remember any of the people in the van wearing led vests, so I hope they are alright. Then I went over for the EKG.

Now, the nurse doing the EKG did not speak any English and my Chinese was not good enough to understand what she was trying to tell me to do, so she abruptly starts taking off my shirt. I had already noticed in China that they don’t seem to have the same sense of modesty as in the US, even though people tended to dress more conservatively. This was evidenced by the fact that public toilets did not have stall doors. (SERIOUSLY). Of course, one was lucky if a public toilet (which were all squat toilets) actually flushed. Anyway, after I realized I had to take my shirt off for an EKG (hey, I had never had one before), I got really uncomfortable because it wasn’t like we had any privacy. The person at the chest x-ray was looking in my direction, and the doors were open. But it was only a momentary embarrassment.

Then, that was it. Jackie took us back to Kaifeng, after a brief stop at a Zhengzhou McDonald’s (where they didn’t serve cheese burgers). He then went back in the next day for our test results, but we never heard a word about what they were. But we then received our residency permits alright, so that must  mean I don’t have AIDS.

Next: illegal anti-biotics, 12-cent prescriptions, and a lesson on why (at least some) Chinese people think their health care system is so good.