CHAPTER XIII

When his temperature did not go down for three days Liu went to see the doctor- The Organization had a standing arrangement with one of the government hospitals for the medical care of its kan-pu. Liu stood in a long queue that filled the large hall-like waiting room with its coils and trailed into the corridor. When he finally got to see the doctor he was told to come again the next day to have his lungs fluoroscoped.
So it was his turn at last to get tuberculosis after seeing it happen to so many college students and young kan-pu.
After standing in the queue all day he could not get out of bed the next morning- Paradoxically, he thought he would not be able to go to the doctor until he got better. He was not too keen either to learn his fate. What if he had TB? Imported medicine was so expensive the Organization certainly hadn't any to waste on the likes of him. The most he could- expect was that they might try the new Soviet "cure by sleep" and "cure by exercise" on
him.

He would be expected to carry on just as before. They were always telling people not to be overscrupulous about their health. The Organization would be willing to overlook his handicap if he himself would. His chances for getting ahead would be neither better nor worse than before. Unless of course, he had an acute breakdown. Then he would probably be sent back to Peking to his windowed stepmother, who could hardly make both ends meet as it was.
He remembered seeing in a newsreel a handsome new sanatorium they had up north was it in Harbin? —but it was for model factory workers only. The film showed several patients, Stakhanovism heroes whose health had been broken by the new speed-up programs. They looked spruce and correct in their dark Liberation Suits walking up the flight of light-colored, broad cement steps, coming 'back to sleep at the sanatorium after a day's work at the factory. They went upstairs to their ward and hung up their caps carefully on the wall above the row of white iron beds.
"The only thing cheap in this country is human lives," Liu thought and then felt a quick start of guilt for letting the thought break through. And it does seem as if cheap things don't last. Look at himself — hardly been put to use for a year and already heading for the rubbish heap.
He closed his fingers around one of the black iron rails on the bedstead. It cooled his palm deliciously. But almost immediately he became aware of a dim churning in the void that had floated up inside him, working up into a fit of nausea- He let go of the rail and abandoned himself to the burn of fever.
The strain of overwork and undernourishment had started from his last year at college, after the Liberation, when the students' days suddenly become crammed full to bursting with heavy extracurricular activities while every month the food grew a little bit- worse- He had not minded then, bolstered up as he was faith and optimism. And perhaps he would not have broken down now if not for the change in his outlook.
But when your faith is your fortune, somehow you don't lose it so easily- There is always something in you which takes good care of it and sees that you get your faith lifted. Liu was just beginning to get acquainted with that part of himself which was unbelievably resilient and persuasive and always had his best interests at heart-
Much as it pained him, now that the Land Reform had receded into a proper distance he felt he could understand it better- It was like stepping back from an oil painting. The rough savage daubs of color began to take on meaning and he could see what the picture represented. Has anything ever been accomplished on this vast scale without coercion and the destruction of blameless lives caught in the movement? Take the building of the Great. Wall, which we are so proud of, he thought. No, perhaps that is not a good example. The tyrant Ch'in Shih Huang Ti had been in charge. But history must be full of such
instances.
No, the Land Reform was a thing quite unprecedented in Chinese history. Good or bad, the fact remained that the landless farmers been given land. And land talks to them as money talks to other people. Then this was the first time anything had ever been done that affected. the great stone heart of the peasantry. Before, no matter how many roads and railways had been built, they had always had to circumvent this gigantic boulder in the path of progress. The farmers might smile and nod and kowtow but from long experience they knew better than to believe a word you said.
Even now they were no different, he thought, but they would change. He had seen Li Hsiu-chung, a woman labor model from the old Communist areas in a newsreel. She

had come to Peking to be presented to Chairman Mao and attend a meeting. She was a lanky woman with bound feet. Her long, thin, careworn face locked over fifty though she might be younger. In her floppy jacket and baggy pants tied tight at the ankles she staggered briskly and efficiently on her tiny feet up the aisle of the meeting hall. They threw confetti on her. A close-up showed her startled, shyly laughing face- Liu could never -forget the happiness on that face. Who had ever made a fuss over her in all her life? What if this sort of thing was just an empty gesture, as Liu knew it to be, the pat on the back which had proved to be so effective when it went with the whip hand, and was extracting superhuman efforts from an exhausted people. The thing was: who had ever bothered before? He found himself asking the question angrily, helplessly furious with the people who had been here before the Communists for landing his generation into the present fix. And once again he was: back miserably at where he had started.
The hostel was deserted in the daytime. The room he
shared with Chang smelled of sweaty canvas shoes, like a school dormitory. The window was open, its dirty glass panes misty white in the setting sun. Flies buzzed around the bowl of rice gruel on the table- The coolie had brought it in the the morning and left it standing there all day,
Liu turned over in bed to face the whitewashed wall dot
ted with crimson tadpole-shaped stains of bedbug blood.
He heard footsteps and voices on the creaky stairs.
Turning around he was amazed to see Tsui P'ing, well
groomed as usual in black gabardine, entering the room,-
followed by Ho, his Culinary Officer, carrying a flour sack..
"No, lie down, lie down, Comrade Liu," Tsui said when
he tried to sit up, "How are you feeling? Better today?"
Tsui drew up a chair and sat leaning forward, away from
the wet face-towel hung on the chair back. He beamed at

Liu with hands joined and arms resting on widely parted legs. The bedside manner did not come naturally to him but as an old Party campaigner and officer in the Communist Army, visiting the wounded and sick must be all in the day's work and he had apparently developed a kind of competence in it. Liu knew he did not mean to stay long because he did not slip off a shoe or sock-
"Everybody misses you at the office," Tsui said grinning. "They all want to come and see you. I said no, I'll forward the message. Better get well quick. Here, I brought you half a sack of flour. Tell the cook to make something for you. Got to eat to get well."
Liu knew it was customary for a superior to visit a sick staff member, bringing him Face and some flour instead of flowers. But he resented the man's presence in the room, coming, as it were, as a part-owner of the world, breezily intruding upon the squalor and sickness of his own making. And yet all the same Liu felt his eyes smarting at Tsui's comforting words. He had to swallow his tears angrily, wondering if it was his present frame of mind that made him so, forlorn and abject, or if there was not a certain snobbishness in the most genuine
feelings.
The next week he was well enough to go to the hospital. Consultations did not start until two in the afternoon but the queues were formed early in the morning. The women brought their knitting and carried on polite conversations about their ailments. There was the usual preoccupation with food. Almost every patient had a relation who would come and relieve him in the line at lunchtime. And when he came back from lunch he- would tell the other person, a little reluctantly and mostly in grunts, but with an air of suppressed excitement, about what he'd had in one of the small restaurants he had found nearby — a minor adventure since he was not familiar
with the locality.

Toward mid-afternoon when the line was moving up sluggishly, everybody was outraged to see a woman pushing her way briskly through the crowd, cutting across the queues. Liu saw that it was Ko Shan of the Liberation Daily News.
"Does she have priority?" he thought. "So undemocratic."
"Ai-ya, you're so late!" exclaimed a uniformed young man standing near the head of the queue. "Look, it's almost your turn already!"
"My timing is perfect, isn't it?" Ko Shan said smiling, fanning herself with a big brown envelope which looked as if it contained X-ray pictures. Probably she was also a TB case, Liu thought-
"Look what time it is!" the young man cried, baby-faced and plaintive, thrusting his wristwatch under her nose. "I'm really going to get it when I go back there."
"Who told you to come?" she said. "Could have sent somebody."
"Not those Service Officers. They can't read — might get into the wrong queue," the young man said, self-consciously jocular, aware of all the people listening- "Might get into the surgical queue or the Tissue Cure queue or the maternity queue-"
"Well, one thing about you, there's no danger of your getting into the maternity queue," she said lightly. "They'd kick you out."
The young man colored slightly when he heard people giggle. He forced a laugh and was about to speak when she cut him short.
"Why aren't you going if you're in such a hurry? Get out, get out!" She swung her big envelope at him once or twice as if driving away flies.
Then she saw Liu- The long queue made several turns in the hall so that he stood quite close to her though he was far behind. She came over immediately and shook hands. "Haven't seen you for some time, Comrade Liu," she said. "I've been looking for you- I telephoned your office."
"Oh, I'm sorry," Liu said. "I haven't been in for days. I've been ill."
"Not serious, is it?"
"No, I'm much better now."
When she came over the young man again had to stand in her place in the queue. "Hey, I really have to be going!" he shouted.
"We're thinking of putting out some pamphlets," she lowered her voice slightly and spoke fast so that not everybody could hear- "The people over in your place are interested too, so it's going to be a joint project. Can you come over to our office, say tomorrow? — Ought to be a Shock Attack job really."
"Yes, sure, I'll come over — if I'm back on the job tomorrow, that is," Liu said. "But if they want to Shock Attack, maybe we can send you somebody else,  71
"Ko Shan, I've got to go now!" the young man yelled lividly.
"All right, go!" she flung at him, then turned to Liu. "Yes, they want it done as soon as possible. But the fact is, we're still behind on the research part of the work,'' she said with a sudden confidential smile. "You come when you can- I'm always there after six in. the evening."
She strode back to her place in the queue. The young man was already gone, having stomped out in a huff when she told him to go. But the others had got the idea by now that she was somebody. The gap had not closed up when she stepped in.
She must be married to the boy, Liu thought, the way she treated. him. At least they were living together. Liu
supposed he was also a kan-pu. It was difficult to tell

with everybody wearing the same Liberation suits and Lenin suits. But if he was a kan-pu he must be a new one on the bottom rung of the ladder; otherwise he wouldn't be so scared of being late for work. But she must be pretty important, Liu thought, to have this kind of a semi-dependent "little lover".
From where he stood he could see the fanning movements of her big yellowish brown envelope jutting out into view. She did not look around. Soon the door to the consultation room opened and she went in while another patient pushed his way out into the crowd, ducking his head like a cabinet minister avoiding cameras, secretive and important looking.
After a few minutes the door opened again. Ko Shan came out, buttoning her tunic. For a brief instant she stood darkened against the whiteness of the frosted glass pane on the door. She was the kind of woman who looked best in silhouette, like some flowers, plum blossoms for instance, with their posturing, leaning branches. She twisted around and lifted her big brown envelope at him in an abbreviated wave. Then she disappeared into the crowd, creating a slight stir which he could feel washing pleasantly over him for long moments later. The sense of pleasure — or amusement as he preferred to call it -¬frothed thinly over the stone that weighed on his heart as he waited to see the doctor.