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Renmin Hospital

A linguistic adventure in China

By S RosePublished 3 years ago 5 min read
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The pharmacy on Nanhu Road has fluorescent lights, dusty tiled floors, and a kitten on a chain sleeping at the bottom of one of the shelves. Unlike CVS and Right Aid in the United States, it’s a place purely dedicated to medicine, with sales clerks dressed in white cloaks. I’ve been in Wuhan for less than six months, so I don’t yet have words to describe the herbal smell that permeates the small building.

I come in wheezing from the ten minute walk. No amount of shaking and swearing will coax albuterol out of my empty inhaler. I don’t often think of my asthma as a life or death matter, but I’m in a foreign country, I’m out of medicine, and I don’t know what to do about it.

As I wander the aisles, trying to find something helpful and familiar, one of the sales clerks grabs my sleeve and says something in Mandarin. Before coming to Wuhan, I’d spent four months teaching myself the language with a three hundred dollar Rosetta Stone CD-ROM. I can say “the dog is running” and “the girl is not asleep”. I know words like spoon, fork, and pie. I don’t know the word for asthma, but I know the word for sick.

“Wo bingle!” I say. I’m sick.

The sales clerk says something in Mandarin.

“Wo bingle!” I repeat. I touch my chest, deliberately pushing out a phlegmy and exaggerated wheeze.

The woman blinks and points to the phone. “One-one...” She pronounces the English number carefully, but trails off, pursing her lips. She beckons me over to the front counter, where she writes 1-1-0 on the back of a discarded receipt. One-one-zero is the Chinese equivalent of nine-one-one.

“No, no,” I say, holding up my hands in the universal gesture of stop. I take my empty inhaler out of my pocket. “Xiao bingle.” Little sick, not a correct sentence by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s the best I’ve got. I gesture with my thumb and finger. Little. Xiao. Something like that. What I want to say is that I’m sick in a normal way— sick in a way that I’ve been sick since I was three years old. It’s not a big deal. I just want medicine.

The sales clerk issues forth another stream of Mandarin, which ends with the word “Yi Yuan”. I know yi yuan! It means hospital. I break into a wide grin, despite the discomfort in my lungs.

“Yi yuan! Yi yuan!” I repeat. The sales clerk is telling me to go to the hospital and I understand her! This might be the best moment of my life!

The sales clerk laughs too. “Yi yuan,” she repeats, pointing towards the door.

————

When it comes to the Chinese language, I am determined to do things on my own, and I know just enough to get myself in trouble.

My friends Clarissa and Clara, two fellow newly-arrived foreigners with alarmingly similar names, are also feeling sick. There’s safety in numbers, so the day after my pharmacy trip, we decide to brave Renmin hospital together.

“I think I can do this,” I tell my friends as we enter. “I’m feeling good about my Mandarin today.”

I don’t mention that my Mandarin is the only thing I feel good about, after a sleepless night spent listening the rumbling in my lungs.

“This is all I’ve got,” says Clarissa. “Laoshi,” she points to herself. Teacher. “Laowai.” Again, she points to herself, because the word means foreigner. “He ma.”

Clara makes a face. “Hippo?”

Clarissa shrugs. We are all teaching first grade, and the kids have been learning a song about hippopota-happiness. It’s not a hard word to pick up. Unfortunately, it’s not especially useful, as there aren’t hippos anywhere in Wuhan, especially not in the hospital.

I know “sick”, “medicine”, and “doctor”. I can make this work.

Inside the hospital, I walk up to the first official looking person I see. Is he a doctor? A janitor? A deceivingly dressed fellow patient? I don’t know. “Wo men bingle!” I say, probably mispronouncing every tone. “Yi sheng! Yao!” (doctor, medicine)

The guy answers, but I don’t know what he answers, and no doctor appears, so we wander off to find somebody else.

“We’re sick. We need a doctor! Please give us medicine!”

Eventually we get herded into a room with a very nice English speaking doctor. I feel a little guilty about it. I don’t want to be one of those awful Americans who inconveniences everybody and expects to be spoken to in English after deliberately moving to the other end of the world. At the moment, however, I need my inhaler if I want to breathe. Even so, I can imagine a scenario in which roles are reversed. What would happen if a Chinese person wandered into an American hospital and simply repeated the words “doctor” and “medicine” over and over again, leading two Chinese friends who spoke even less than she did?

I come out of the hospital with a shiny new inhaler, which only cost me the equivalent of four US dollars. Clarissa gets antibiotics for a strep infection and Clara is given some kind of thick syrup that looks like honey and smells like bitter herbs laced with sugar. The doctor teaches us how to open an account with the hospital and apologizes for the two yuan (thirty US cents) that it costs us as foreigners. She teaches us about how to stand in one line at the back of the hospital to say what medicine we need, a second one to pay for it, and a third one to pick it up and take it home.

“My son lives in LA,” she tells us. “I can’t wait to tell him that I spoke English today. He says my English... sucks. The the right word, isn’t it?”

Clarissa tells her it’s the right word. I tell her that her English doesn’t suck, but she laughs me off, insisting that it does and she needs to improve it. The double standard strikes me. Surely my friends and I should be the ones improving our Mandarin, not the other way around.

humanity
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About the Creator

S Rose

I’m an English as a foreign language teacher who writes as a hobby.

Contact - [email protected]

twitter - @S_Rose_Vocal

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