The Hook at the Gate

Guifang lived in Houhe Village, in the thin-soiled north. The men had mostly gone to the cities to labor, leaving the women to their few acres of wheat and a brood of chickens. Guifang's husband had fallen from a scaffold three years before; the contractor paid twenty-eight thousand and kept the man. She raised her son, Xiaoman, alone to the age of fourteen.

That summer she found a hard lump beneath her left breast. It did not hurt, a soybean that had never softened, hidden in the flesh. She thought nothing of it — in the busy season, who does not carry a knot somewhere? But the bean grew, to the size of a pigeon's egg, and at night it ached dully. Her neighbor Sister Zhao said it was only pent-up breath, that rubbing would scatter it. The village doctor, whose license no longer let him prescribe even blood-pressure pills, only said to watch it.

After the harvest, Xiaoman needed four hundred and thirty yuan for his school uniform and books. Guifang sold two of her laying hens to make it up. Yet the lump in her own chest had begun to weep a little yellow fluid. At night she traced it with her fingers, again and again, and only when she felt that wet stickiness did true fear settle in.

She borrowed a neighbor's tricycle and took the early bus into the provincial city. The great hospital she had seen only on television. The registration hall was a black press of heads, like a pot of dumplings boiled open. She stood until noon before she got a general ticket, and that for three days hence. A man beside her asked what ailed her and whispered that the specialist tickets were long gone, that scalpers outside added two hundred to the price. Guifang felt the money in her pocket — two thousand borrowed, fifteen hundred from the grain she had sold, saved for Xiaoman's schooling next year, money she ought not to touch.

While she stood troubled, a middle-aged woman in a navy padded jacket drew near, all smiles, and said she had suffered the same sickness and been cured in this very city. "Sister, I have seen your look a hundred times. The big hospital has no room, and the specialists cost a fright. Let me tell you of a place — an old alley west of the city, a retired chief physician who treats exactly our kind of trouble, cheap, and patient besides." She produced a crumpled slip printed with "Huimin Clinic, chief physician on duty," stamped in red.

Guifang half doubted, but the woman rode the bus with her, walked the pitted narrow lane at her side, and spoke only of intimate things — that she too was widowed, that she knew how hard a woman's lot was. Guifang's guard melted in that warm show of shared suffering.

The clinic sat on the second floor of an old building. The front was small, but the walls were crowded with silk banners: "Miraculous hands," "A living Hua Tuo." An old man in a white coat, hair gone gray, peered through thick spectacles and pressed a dusty instrument to her chest. He frowned. "Girl, you have let this go too long. A little later and it would be past mending. But you have found me. Three courses of my medicine, and it will be gone." He wrote a prescription — a plaster, some pills, and a box of capsules labeled in a foreign tongue. Guifang could not read; she saw only the sum: four thousand two hundred.

She gave all the borrowed money, and owed the clinic three hundred more. The old man said the medicine must be taken by the course, that she must return next month. She thanked him a hundred times and carried her plastic bag of drugs home.

The medicine was sweet, powdered sugar dissolved in water. A month passed; the lump did not shrink but opened into a sore, stinking pus running down the front of her clothes. She called the number; it was dead. She sent a man to the west alley; the old building stood, but the second-floor door was locked, the banners stripped, the plaster fallen in great patches. A neighbor said the clinic had moved the month before, reopening under a new sign in the south of the city.

Then Guifang understood: what she had met was not a fellow sufferer but a hook.

She went to the city again, and this time reached the specialist. He studied her films and shook his head. "Half a year ago, a simple cut would have cured you. Now it has festered and spread. Too late." Guifang heard it like a muffled thunderclap in her chest. The debt could not be paid, Xiaoman's schooling was lost, and the hole in her breast widened day by day.

In winter she lay upon her bed. Xiaoman came home from school and set a bowl of thin gruel before her. The boy said nothing, only put the bowl down and turned to feed the stove. Guifang gazed at the crack in the ceiling and thought of the navy padded jacket, the old man's gray hair, the four gilded words "A living Hua Tuo." She thought how the cheats of this world always bite the wretched, and how the wretched, too, so often push one another into the pit.

After the new year, she heard tell that fresh faces had appeared again at the hospital gate, the same "shared suffering" smile, the same leading of the unwary down the alleys. The guards had driven them off a few times, but they could not be driven away; they turned a corner and returned. Someone reported them; the answer came that an investigation was underway. The investigation ran through one spring and then another, and the alley clinics grew like weeds in a field — cut one crop, and another springs up.

Guifang did not survive that spring.

Xiaoman buried his mother on the slope above Houhe Village and set up a wooden placard. He carved no words upon it — he knew few characters, and could not have written the grievances of his mother's life. The wind came and tilted the placard, as if someone on the slope had given a nod.