So luckily I never got seriously ill while in China for 10 months. I did get sick to my stomach a few times after accidentally swallowing tap water while washing my hair. However, I did have a few sinus infections.

One day in January I realized that my sinus infection wasn’t going to go away on it’s own. So I called my Chinese friend Rosemary (that’s just her English name) who is a nurse, and asked her to help me get some antibiotics. Now, I’ve had enough sinus infections over the years to know the difference between a virus and something bacterial, so I knew that I needed antibiotics. I’m also allergic to most kinds of antibiotics, and had a list of the two that I can still take. However, I don’t know the Chinese names for them, Cipro is not exactly something in my dictionary, OR that I could find on-line.

So Rosemary took me to the hospital the university campus that I taught (and lived) in. There are no clinics in China, just hospitals. This one was small, barely bigger than a clinic. It was gray concrete, and appeared mostly empty. We went in through the front door and went right into an examining room. The doctor was standing near his desk, talking to some women who had come before me.

Rosemary walked right up to him and started talking. She translated for me that I had a sinus infection. He took a quick look at me and said that he wanted me to have a chest x-ray to make sure I didn’t have pneumonia, but that this hospital didn’t have an x-ray machine. I insisted that I didn’t have pneumonia, just a sinus problem, and needed antibiotics. He pointed in the direction of the pharmacy and then turned back to the other women.

We went to the pharmacy and asked for Cipro, which they had. I asked if I needed a prescription and they said no. Then they gave me a box of ten days worth and charged me 3 yuan (36 cents). Then I bought some Ibuprofen and paid twice that.

I remarked to Rosemary that it was very odd that I didn’t need a prescription, but she didn’t think so. I then told her how much Cipro costs in the States and she didn’t believe me.

As we were walking away she told me a story about an exchange student from Germany who had studied there before my time. She had to have an appendectomy, and had it at that same hospital. She didn’t speak any Chinese and the nurses didn’t know any English, so one day they contacted Rosemary to have her translated. Apparently, in China it is thought that after you have surgery you need to get up and move around a lot, so that you don’t get constipated. However, the German girl wouldn’t get out of bed the day after her surgery so they needed Rosemary to make her do it.

I told her I couldn’t believe a hospital that wasn’t equipped well enough to have an x-ray machine would do appendectomies and she told me that in China health care is very good because doctors have to treat so many patients.

A few days later I got better, so the Cipro must have been real.

—-

A couple months later I went on a trip to Xi’an (where the Terracotta warriors are) with Rosemary and a bunch of the foreigners. Xi’an is probably not much larger than Kaifeng, where I was living, but it is much more built up infrastructure-wise. While I was there I came down with another sinus infection (they are quite frequent with me, I have a whole lot of allergies and nasal issues).

I went with Rosemary to a few small pharmacies that are everywhere around China trying to find more Cipro. None of them had it, though they did have amoxicillin (which could kill me). Eventually we found a very large pharmacy downtown that had it. However, they wouldn’t sell it to me without a prescription. So we asked if it was just in this part of China, or if you needed prescriptions everywhere. The pharmacist said that you technically need a prescription everywhere but the more backward places don’t care.

So we asked how we would get a prescription, and they said to go up to the second floor of the building and talk to the doctor up there. We went to the second floor, and found a receptionist-like window with a sign saying “Prescriptions - 1 Yuan (12 cents)”. Rosemary talked to the woman behind the window (presumably a doctor) briefly, giving her my symptoms and my age. She filled out the tiny peice of paper, and we went back downstairs and got some more $.36 Cipro and I got better again a few days later.

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.

As I’ve mentioned in other posts, I spent last year teaching English to college students in China. I was sent over by my Alma mater, which sends three recent grads a year to one particular university in China, in Henan province. It’s in a very poor area so my experiences aren’t necessarily indicative of the rest of China, but they aren’t encouraging.

So we (the three Americans teaching at this uni last year) were supposed to give some advice to the people who were applying to replace us. I kept coming up with a million things to say to them, but I never did.

I was thinking about it and I didn’t say anything to the people applying because I didn’t know how to be honest without completely scaring everyone away. I came up with a list of ten things that could make anyone not take this job. Then I realized that there was one thing that could do that alone.

This requires a bit of cultural info first - sewer pipes here can’t handle toilet paper, so everyone just throws toilet paper away in the trash. Also, girls don’t ever wrap their used pads up in toilet paper before they throw them away. So the trash is UBER disgusting.

So, the building where I taught some of my classes, the Foreign Language building, is a large, five story building designed around a courtyard with balconies and stuff. The school, being really poor, doesn’t hire enough people to to janitorial work around the campus, no one comes around and dumps out the trash cans. Instead, when the cans are full students just take the trash cans and dump them over the balcony.

The courtyard area below has this giant pile of all the trash from the semester. Toilet paper, used pads, etc. It has rats crawling over it, flies flying around it, and smells like you wouldn’t BELIEVE.  It gets rained on. It only gets cleaned up at the end of every semester, and only then. So during semesters it rises to about waist deep and is the size of a badminton court, approximately.

Another teacher told me that the smell is really bad on most of the floors, but is better on the 5th floor where I taught. This was because it was closest to the opening, so most of the smell just rises up and out.

This one time, I was leaning near a balcony waiting for the photocopy people to get back. I was unfortunate enough to be around when someone was dumping the trashcan out. Subesquently, I was almost hit in the face with a used maxi pad heading towards the pile.

And I was almost not surprised.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about all the product safety concerns involving China. A lot of people are saying that the problems have been overblown, and are a price we should pay in order to have cheaper goods. After living in China, though, I don’t buy it. I’ve seen so  much of a typical Chinese mentality (that isn’t shared by everyone, just the majority) that explains for me why there have been so many problems, and why they won’t go away without major action by the US government.

—

Last June I was hired by a high school in Kaifeng to help recruit new students. This high school primarily teaches English. The founder of the school, Mr. Yuan, spent one year in Canada and has enough English to have a conversation, though his pronunciation is horrid and his vocabulary lacking. He was a nice person, though, and very eager.

(One time, we were in a restaurant together and I asked where the bathroom was. He thought I meant an actual bath tub, not just a toilet. I don’t see how that wasn’t one of the first things he learned living in Canada. He was in Windsor, which is RIGHT NEXT TO Detroit, so I can’t believe they use a different word.)

Mr. Yuan wanted me to go around with him and one of his students, whose English name was Rainy. They were going to Mr. Yuan’s home town, Tang Yin City, in northern Henan province near Anyang. (Don’t worry if you don’t know where these places are, it doesn’t really make a  difference.) Mr. Yuan wanted to show off the fact that Rainy, after studying at his school, could understand me, a native English speaker, and translate my words. We went around to various middle schools in Tang Yin and I talked, Rainy translated (often incorrectly), and punk middle school students asked me questions about the US’s involvement in Iraq, my position on Taiwan, and my position on the Japanese PM visiting Yasukuni Shrine (which pisses off Chinese people to no end, but that’s another story).

All in all, I was paid $12 a day for this, plus hotel, travel, and food, for three days. Hey, $12 gets you pretty far in China.

Anyway, the three days we were in Tang Yin we were being driven around by Mr. Yuan’s brother. Actually, I don’t know if he was REALLY his brother, because Chinese people have a habit of referring to their friends (close and not) as brother and sister. Our driver’s car had no shocks or A/C, and was falling apart. It didn’t ACTUALLY die on us at any point, though, so it was better than some other experiences I had had.

On the first night of the trip we had a very large meal with some of Mr. Yuan’s friends, who didn’t speak English. It was a very common thing, if you were eating with a foreigner, you would invite your friends to show off the foreigner because it made you look good, no matter if any communication was possible.

The meal was a typical communal style meal,  with dozens of dishes served  on a lazy Susan in the center of an enormous table that could fit near 20. Also, it being a typical Chinese meal, everyone had a large amount of alcohol, except for me and Rainy (I don’t like getting drunk around people I’m not comfortable with, and I think Rainy was too young). Mr. Yuan had a lot of bai jiu (rice spirits), which is like vodka but smells like licorice and anise. The driver just had a few beers, not enough to be drunk, but too much to drive (so I thought).

As we were about to leave Mr. Yuan says that now the driver will drive me back to my hotel room. I protest, because I’m not sure he is capable. The driver didn’t speak English so Mr. Yuan said something I couldn’t catch in Chinese that was probably along the lines of “she doesn’t like your car” (Chinese people liked to not hurt people’s feelings, so they often made up excuses that had little to do with the truth). I got in a cab, went back to the hotel, and they even let me sleep in the next morning! (Sleeping in for them was 6:45 instead of 6:30 am).

The next evening, we had dinner, and the driver again drank enough beer to easily fail a Breathalyzer in the US. I objected again. This time, Mr. Yuan tried to argue the point with me.

“I know what you think, I was in Canada. I know there are laws against driving after drinking. But in China we do not have these laws.”

I fumed silently. That was not the point, the point was that we might die. And how could China not have drunk driving laws? I tried to explain this, but he kept saying, “it’s fine, it’s fine”. Either way, I got in a cab and went back to the hotel, and prayed that the cab driver hadn’t been drinking.

—-

When I got back from this trip, I told this story to one of my regular students, who was one of my brighter and more aware students. I told him this story, and after assuring me that China DOES have anti-drunk driving laws (that are not enforced), he said this:

“In China, often, if there is a 70% chance something bad will happen, people will do it anyway because there is a chance nothing bad will happen. If there is a 80% chance, they will do it. If there is a 90% chance, they will do it.”

—

No wonder Chinese companies try to get away with lead paint!