First, allow me to share a photo with you.
On Mondays and Thursdays I teach a class of 12 three year
olds, and this week one came in wearing a Run DMC t-shirt. I don’t know if anyone back home will think
this is at all funny, but I died laughing.
In China English writing is a trendy fashion just because of the way it
looks. Often people will go to the
market and buy clothes and not even read what they say, even my friends who
speak great English do this. I know this
kid’s parents and there is absolutely no chance that they know who Run DMC is,
and what’s further funny is how did this get onto a child size shirt in China?
Random.
Now, allow me to share a story with you.
This week my dear friend, Alan, got super sick and had to go
to the hospital. We sent him to the hospital that we always go to where they
give foreigners, “VIP treatment”. Once
there, they hooked him up to a drip and started giving him fluids. I don’t exactly know what happened but they
told him to hold some kind of pump and then the nurse left the room. Alan pushed the pump and all of a sudden his
blood started going up the tube. The
nurse came back into the room, saw his blood going up the tube, screamed, and then her first reaction
was to run over to his hand and ripe the IV out. Instantly all this blood shot
out, spraying the floors and walls like a scene from a horror movie. Within seconds his hand had swelled up to an
alarming size. An older nurse came in
and saw the chaos and started laughing.
She instructed the younger one to mop up the mess (which she did with
towels and no disinfectant) and then told Alan not to worry, the swelling in
his hand would go down in 1-3 days!
For what it’s worth I told this story to like six of my
Chinese friends over lunch and they were as horrified with the hospital as I
was, though maybe not surprised. In true
Chinese fashion they started brainstorming how they could help poor Alan, “I
know the number of a better hospital I can take him there.” “You should’ve
called me to go with you!”
Oh, my dear China.
