Frog

Our doctors initiate detailed conversations with the pregnant woman and their family regarding the state of the woman’s health, the state of the foetus, the mother’s nutritional and exercise routines, and other concerns.

I desperately wanted to share my discovery with Little Lion, but she was too focused on the brochures, muttering as she read. How can they call this a hospital? Who can afford to stay in a place like this… With her back to Xiao Bi, she hadn’t noticed their arrival.

Apparently concerned that they were too conspicuous, the man stood up, took Xiao Bi by the hand, and walked over to the coffee shop at the rear of the entry hall, separated by large pots of tortoise-shell bamboo, with their jade green leaves, and a potted banyan tree whose leafy branches nearly touched the ceiling. The wall behind a fireplace was papered in a red brick design. The coffee shop was equipped with a bar with a rack filled with brand name liquor. A young man in a black bowtie was brewing gourmet coffee whose fragrance blended with the floral perfume to produce a sense of nurturing.

The hospital is also equipped with a rehearsal room for women late in their pregnancy. Delivery options are discussed with doctors and nurses, based upon the pregnant woman’s particular situation, and a mother-to-be classroom, all structured to enhance communications between hospital staff and patients, who are given unlimited opportunities to make their needs, concerns, and questions known.

He sat there with a cup of coffee, talking intimately with Xiao Bi. Yes, indeed, that’s who it was. A person can change the way he talks, but not the way he sneezes. A person can turn single-fold eyelids into double folds, but the greatest plastic surgeon alive cannot change the look in a man’s eyes. He was talking easily and laughing no more than twenty metres from me, totally unaware that a childhood friend was watching him. And as I watched, the wicked and merciless Xiao Xiachun, no longer with single-fold eyelids, separated himself from the body of the distinguished man.

It’s hopeless! Little Lion said dejectedly as she tossed the brochure onto the table and leaned back. US-trained doctors, French-trained graduates, medical college professors… top medical group in the country… the only way they’d let me in here would be to clean the toilets…

We were from the same hometown, we lived in Beijing at the same time, and yet I hadn’t seen him even once. I recalled how his father had paraded up and down the streets shouting, My son has been given a job at the State Council! after graduating from college. He spent several years in an office there before being taken on as the secretary to a bureau chief, and from there he took a post as deputy Party secretary somewhere. Then he left public office and became a real estate mogul worth billions…

The elegant woman who had greeted us located the two of them and led them out back somewhere. I shut the brochure I was reading. The back cover showed the hands of a doctor and a pregnant woman, all resting on her swollen belly. The text at the top read: Mothers-to-be and their children are family to us. We provide the best treatment found anywhere. You will be able to soak up our atmosphere of sweetness and experience the blessing of total care and attention.

In a complete funk as we left the hospital, Little Lion used every hackneyed political expression she could think of to excoriate these modern developments. I was too occupied with my own thoughts to pay attention to her. But her monotonous chatter started to bother me. All right, madam, enough sour grapes!

Rather than get angry with me, she just coughed up a bitter laugh and said, All a rustic doctor like me is good for is raising bullfrogs at Yuan Sai’s farm.

We came back here to live in retirement, I said, not look for work.

I have to find something to do, she said. Maybe I can work as a live-in wet nurse.

Enough, I said. Say, guess who I just saw?

Who?

Xiao Xiachun. He changed his appearance, but I recognised him.

Impossible, she said. What would a rich man like him be doing back here? You must have mistaken somebody else for him.