The Dream Factory
From Mourning a Breast, by Xi Xi, translated by Jennifer Feeley, published by NYRB Classics, July 2024
What do I have compared to others in this world? Wealth, good looks, knowledge, health? I have none of those, but I do have friends. In this regard, I’m truly more blessed than most. I have a circle of close friends, all of whom are wonderful to me. Some care about me but don’t necessarily show it on the surface; they’re more introverted, hiding their feelings inside, but I can feel their concern in many small ways, which is very moving. Some brim with enthusiasm both inwardly and outwardly; their personalities are more extroverted—if they see I’m having trouble, they rush to help. One such friend is Ah Zan. When I had my surgery in the private hospital, Ah Zan and a group of friends came to visit. After my other friends left, she insisted on staying. She was afraid that during the night, I might be lonely, sleepless, or in pain, so she rented a rollaway bed next to mine. It must have been miserable lying in that kind of bed in such a strange environment, staying awake all night to look after me, whereas I sawed logs until dawn. At five o’clock, the staff came to collect the beds, waking up any accompanying friends or family members. Fortunately, I didn’t need to eat, drink, or use the bathroom during the night, nor was I in any pain, so I didn’t end up causing Ah Zan any trouble.
How lovely it is for friends to gather. In the past, we often traveled in groups of five or ten to places such as Ürümqi and Turpan in Xinjiang, Harbin and Jilin in the northeast, Suzhou and Hangzhou south of the Yangtze River, the ancient city of Xi’an, and even other countries, including Turkey, Egypt, Greece, Spain, and Portugal. Ah Zan was part of this group. Sometimes we met at someone’s home, or went on a camping holiday, drinking red wine and eating, chatting about everything under the sun until dawn. Those were such blissful days. But now we gathered in the hospital, silent the whole night. Having Ah Zan with me there was truly a huge help. After my surgery, I didn’t eat, drink, or use the bathroom until noon the following day, when I suddenly needed to pee. However, I couldn’t get out of bed because of the bottles hanging above me, the plastic tubing still connected to my arm. I had to ask Ah Zan to find me a bedpan. To my surprise, just five minutes later, I needed to pee some more, so once again she went to fetch the bedpan. Five more minutes passed, and what on earth—how did I still need to pee? These disturbances continued for a full hour. Finally, I simply left the bedpan on the bed, afraid to remove it. It was extremely embarrassing to ask my friend to retrieve and empty the bedpan constantly on my behalf.
Ah Zan had the day off from work, so she volunteered to accompany me to Sha Tin Public Hospital. Early in the morning on the day of my appointment, she brought over a bowl of bird’s nest soup she’d especially stewed for me to drink before we set out. This time, I was going to the hospital for simulation. It was as though I were attending an art class where I could unleash my creative genius and imagination. Ah Kin had filled me in ahead of time on what the simulation process entailed. Symbols would be drawn on my body to facilitate radiation treatment. And so I didn’t panic, knowing that the process wouldn’t be painful, just time-consuming because it involved waiting in line and visiting various small units.
The hospital’s simulation unit was located in the basement of the specialty building. We arrived on time to find the corridor already swarming with people. Wow, so many people were undergoing radiation therapy, and they were new cancer patients. Was cancer becoming more and more prevalent? Of course, I always subtracted a few people when tallying up the number of patients, since most were accompanied by one or two family members. Along both sides of the corridor there were doors every few steps, and from time to time, a nurse would pop out, calling a name. The doctor who examined me turned out to be the same one who’d first diagnosed me in the oncology unit nine days earlier. He even drew my blood. This time, I didn’t see any medical students, only doctors and nurses. The doctor was studying some X-rays, the walls adorned with radiographic skeletal images.
I lay on the bed so the doctor could examine me, and then the nurse sketched some symbols on my skin with a pen. After she finished drawing, she snapped an instant color Polaroid and showed it to me. It was truly the most extraordinary photo I’d ever seen. There was only a partial body in the picture, specifically the upper half: the right side of my torso and the front chest area. Because it was in color, I could see the red and blue lines crisscrossing my skin, and among these lines, there were grayish-brown surgical scars resembling railroad tracks. I was reminded of works of art known for their abstract lines, such as paintings by Mondrian, Klee, and even Miró. If the photo were a painting, it would have been a colorful feast for the eyes. I said to the nurse: This is really interesting. I think I caught her off guard, because she told me: You’re the only one who’s ever said that. The nurse was gentle and kind. She told me that after completing radiation therapy, everything would be fine.
What the nurse had drawn was only a rough sketch. I lay on the bed, the door to the room opening and closing every now and then. When it opened, a doctor would come in, or sometimes a nurse. Ah Zan sat on a bench in the corridor outside the room. When the door opened, did she see me lying on the bed? Did the other people sitting on the benches also see me? Did they see my naked body? Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t, because although the bed faced the door, it was right against the wall, and the line of sight of those seated outside wasn’t high. The doctors and nurses streaming in and out naturally paid me no heed, as they were used to seeing such sights day after day. One of my secondary-school textbooks included the Ming dynasty prose piece “The Peach-Stone Boat,” which contains the phrase “bare chest and exposed breasts.” The teacher glossed over this line, no doubt because everyone understood what it meant, but an even likelier reason was because it touched upon something taboo, causing the teacher’s voice to suddenly become muffled when reading the word “breasts.” The students covered their mouths and snickered. We were a bunch of girls, unruly-haired young things in our early teens, and the more taboo something was, the more sensitive and curious we became. Of course, now I was no longer young, but breasts were still a very private part of the body; however, in a hospital, is there any privacy to speak of? I had to repeat the same cycle over and over: unbutton, undress, and bare my body; get dressed, button up. Moreover, I had to do this in front of total strangers. In some rooms, I undressed as soon as I went in. In others, I first changed into a white gown, but since I had to open the front flap, there wasn’t much difference, except that when I walked around, I was dressed decently enough so as not to catch a cold. But eventually, I got used to it. An old moral code teaches us that the body is immoral and shameful, and to value the physical body is akin to spiritual degradation. As a result, the majority of people tend to overcorrect, feeling ashamed even to face their own bodies; when it comes to looking at other people’s bodies, they think it is obscene. When did our literature and art, and even our philosophy, begin to separate the soul from the body, placing content and form in opposition to each other? Did it begin when Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden?
Once the rough sketch was finished, the actual drawing took place in the drawing room across from the consultation room. Of course, upon entering, I once again undressed and lay down. Two nurses carefully drew heavy lines on my chest with blue and red pens, assessing and measuring as though they were drawing a precisely detailed map, the horizontal lines delineating level lines and contour lines, the vertical lines representing mountain chains and rivers. This map had to be as accurate as possible—otherwise, the radiation beam might zero in on the wrong target, harming my body or not effectively killing the cancer cells. They had a hard time drawing in my armpit region, as the surgical incision was long, sloping inward toward my concave armpit, but it was nevertheless a crucial site because the lymph nodes had been removed.
Coming out of the drawing room, I returned to the simulation room so that the doctor could check whether the positioning was mapped out correctly. I heard the person who drew it say, Oops, this part is too high. I also heard the doctor say, This part is a little bit low. Maybe it wasn’t easy to be precise, or maybe it was that my situation was more challenging. Regardless, in the end, the drawing was well-done. Before I left, the nurse handed me a stiff brown card to take to the registration desk to schedule my radiation therapy appointment. A small note was attached to the card stating clearly that the designed graphics shouldn’t be washed off; if the colors faded, I could come back to the simulation unit at a specified time for a touch-up.
Coming out of the simulation room, there was yet another room I needed to visit, so I chatted with Ah Zan on the bench in the corridor. Whenever I came out of a room, I described to her what had just occurred. This happened four or five times. We both remarked how busy it was here, how the doctors and nurses seemed never to have a spare moment. But the nurses were extremely kind, just like the ones in the second-floor oncology unit. They never shouted at patients, and if there was something a patient needed to know, they carefully explained it over and over. Ah Zan sat in the corridor for a long time. On the wall opposite the bench there was a wooden rack with several pamphlets stuck inside. We pulled out a few to read. One was called RADIATION THERAPY, and one was DRUG THERAPY. Both were useful, so I kept them. There were two advertisements for nutritional milk powder. I was familiar with this kind of powder because I always bought it for my mother. There was also a pamphlet for END OF LIFE CARE, which I didn’t take because it was too depressing to look at. Another was for a CANCER HOTLINE which patients and family members could call with questions; it was a service organized by recovered cancer patients themselves. I took one. I didn’t think I’d need to call them because I already knew Ah Kin. Ah Zan had always been interested in medical matters, so she swiped a few pamphlets as well. She even planned to buy the nutritional milk powder for her mother.
The next room I went into was the mold-making workshop. The floor was blanketed with dust, much like a pottery studio. I changed into a white gown and lay down. A woman placed a piece of cloth over my chest, then smeared a white paste onto it. I only felt a warm sensation. Before long, the paste on my chest swelled up into a thick layer that turned out to be a plaster cast of my torso. I didn’t realize that a cast could be made so quickly, and the process was so fascinating. In just a few minutes, a plaster cast of my body shape had been molded. The mold-making workshop was actually one giant room. There was a small curtained-off corner with a bed, while the rest was a spacious workshop where people worked amid piles of plaster. The mold makers would also lift up the curtain and come over to retrieve the plaster casts. They must have been used to seeing naked people; as for me, I’d also grown used to exposing my naked body in front of strangers.
The woman who made my cast gave me a tissue to wipe the gypsum powder off my body before I changed. I wiped and wiped but couldn’t clean it all off. I didn’t dare rub too forcefully, as I had a large wound on my chest, with markings drawn around it—it would cause a lot of trouble if I erased them. When I arrived home, I carefully dabbed the area with a towel, but the powder still wouldn’t come off. As I couldn’t take a bath or shower, I was truly at a loss. Fortunately, it was mid-October, and it wasn’t too hot, so I didn’t sweat much. Ah Kin told me that her plaster cast and design graphics had been done in the sweltering August heat. To keep from sweating, she mostly stayed indoors with air-conditioning and rarely ventured outside.
The gypsum powder and colored markings accompanied me for so many days that gradually I felt I’d turned into Mad Monk Ji Gong—just by casually wiping my body, I could produce a shiny black mud pellet. If only it really were a magic cure-all! I was relieved that the colored markings were confined to my chest. The uppermost line only reached my collarbone, rather than climbing up my neck to my chin, so I didn’t need to wear high-collared clothing to hide the lines. Ah Kin said her case was different. The lines extended from her chest and crawled up her neck, creating minor inconveniences in her daily life. For instance, if she wore an open-collared shirt, the lines on her neck would be exposed. Walking down the street or taking public transportation, she always attracted curious glances. Those who didn’t understand would assume she had tattoos; those who did understand would know it was cancer. Whether it was tattoos or cancer, many people would find it frightening. In order to avoid arousing suspicion, she would cover up the lines. It was summer then, and Ah Kin had to wear turtlenecks to conceal her neck. Luckily for me, I had no colored lines on my neck. If my collar was open, you could see the colors on my collarbone, but as long as I fastened the buttons to the top, everything would be covered. In the early morning when I went to the athletic field to practice tai chi, I wore a baggy T-shirt and tied a silk scarf around my neck. It was only October, and I looked as though I were dressed for a chilly winter, but I was simply covering up a secret.
Many years ago, a friend who lived in the dormitory of a movie studio often invited me to come hang out on set. She knew the directors and crew, so we’d stroll through the studio, watching as they filmed. Sometimes, while simultaneously watching various productions, it was like flipping through different books and glimpsing the authors’ writing processes beyond the pages. It always left me uncertain of whether what I saw was real or an illusion. The movie studio was just like the so-called dream factory of old Hollywood, a place where all kinds of daydreams were manufactured for the world. The actors dressed in costumes from various eras, repeatedly performing life’s joys and sorrows, reunions and partings. The courtyard corridor with which we’d just become familiar was suddenly dismantled before our very eyes, transformed into a winding alley. But the crew members behind the spotlights were very real, each facing their own realities. The simulation unit in the hospital basement gave me the same feeling as the dream factory, reminding me of when I used to wander around the movie studio. In those days, another friend created sets for the studio’s design department—painting portraits of actors playing chivalrous heroes, painting clouds on curtains, staging snow scenes using Styrofoam. Once the shoot was over, the designs were discarded, vanishing without a trace. If only the hospital’s simulation unit was the same, and the lines drawn on people’s bodies were just temporary tattoos for shooting a story about tattoos. After shooting ended, the colored lines would all be washed away, the actors resuming their original identities.
The plaster-mold room in the basement was just like the prop factory for a movie studio. It was the most wonderful place to shoot a science-fiction film, perfect for manufacturing freaks and monsters, and the effects were realistic, with dust floating about and sludge everywhere. The hospital and the movie studio were practically interchangeable. At first glance, the people shuttling back and forth in the corridor of the design room—some donning hats, some draped in long gowns—might have been mistaken for directors and actors. Was the large machine on this side of the drawing room a crane camera? And in the room where X-rays were scrutinized atop light, could it be that a director was working against the clock in the editing room? Wandering around the movie studio, I’d been an outsider. Presently, in the basement of the hospital, I understood that I’d awakened from a dream. This wasn’t make-believe. I placed my hand on my chest— I had indeed taken part in a performance, and I’d lost a breast.
During this period, I only occasionally flipped through books, watching more movies instead. No, I didn’t go to the cinema, but stayed at home watching videotapes. In recent years, I had enjoyed watching a lot of science-fiction and supernatural films. I still like watching anything that can fly: Peter Pan, Dumbo, flying carpets, flying saucers . . . It so happened that a series of science-fiction films were broadcast on TV in the middle of the night. My friend recorded them for me, and I became immersed in the world of fantasy. As for horrifying supernatural films, the one that has consistently captivated me is probably Nosferatu. My friend who loves cats and films translated Dracula and Frankenstein years ago. The latter was originally written by Mary Shelley, the wife of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. The earliest Dracula film perhaps dates back to Murnau. I watched it in Studio One. Back in my younger years, Studio One was a classroom for us film enthusiasts. We went there three or four times a week, as though attending classes; German expressionism, French New Wave, Italian neorealism, and Japanese Bushido, as well as various Swedish and Polish masterpieces—we didn’t miss a single one. Murnau’s Nosferatu is a classic, with a chilling, eerie atmosphere that sends shivers down your spine. The Count embarks on a long journey in search of the female protagonist, traveling by coach and by ship. Wherever he goes, however, he must always bring his own coffin. It is the source of the fulfillment of his desire. This is the past rejecting its own past, haunting the present. Our young people travel to the countryside, happily carrying bags on their backs; his burden, however, is like an odorous bag of bones he can’t get rid of. If this is also a form of “post-existence,” would you be interested? Later, Werner Herzog further developed the same theme, but it was obviously much more superficial; still, there are some notable parts, such as one scene, in the middle of the night, when the vampire runs around the square, his robe gently fluttering, like something out of a nightmare. When he first sees the female protagonist, Count Dracula says: “What a lovely throat.” Rewatching the Herzog version videotaped from a Hong Kong TV broadcast, the Chinese subtitles translated this line as: “What a lovely photo.” “Throat” was mistranslated as “photo.” Women have been the objects of the male gaze since ancient times, but one thing can be viewed in different ways. Most people look at a woman’s face; some, her breasts; some, her throat.
Murnau’s and Herzog’s female protagonists, driven by love, are willing to sacrifice themselves in order to eliminate Dracula. However, vampires are already dead. Their elimination in Murnau’s film is the dissolution of the physical body, which vanishes in an instant. Nosferatu is intriguing, as is Roman Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire Killers. The most interesting scene is the final one. The master and apprentice, who are determined to uphold truth and justice and eliminate vampires, end up turning into vampires themselves, bringing vampires out of the castle and into the human world. Do vampires advancing toward the human world symbolize a kind of blood cancer, metastasizing, spreading?
Although vampires can’t fly, they resemble bats. The one who is adept at flying is Superman. These characters have superhuman abilities, though one is righteous, and one is wicked. Superman comes from the planet Krypton, but even he can lose his powers at times. Vampires must suck blood, hiding during the day and emerging at night. Daytime vampires are the equivalent of a powerless Superman. Superman’s power lies not in boundless strength—mending fissures in the Earth’s crust, or lifting a frozen lake up to the sky and transforming it into rainwater—but in transcending space and even time. He flies faster than the speed of light. When his girlfriend dies in an accident, and he can’t save her in time, he flies around the Earth in reverse, turning back time to retrieve the past. In this way, he’s able to prevent the disaster from happening in advance. If only this method could be used to cure cancer. Most cancer patients are unable to predict the latency and activity of tumors, and by the time they find out, it’s often too late.
Another film with impressive special effects is Who Framed Roger Rabbit. It features a cartoon rabbit. What attracts me to this film is how humans act alongside the cartoons, a breakthrough in cinematic technique and animation. Can novels also do this? I’m not sure what method would be used to express it. In Who Framed Roger Rabbit, aside from Bugs Bunny, almost all the Disney cartoon characters return to their alma mater like old schoolmates: Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Peter Pan, the Three Little Pigs, and so on. Cartoons tend to end on a comedic note. In animation, no living beings die. Every life-form makes a strong comeback. Even if they fall from a high cliff into a deep valley, or are flattened into a thin sheet by a steamroller, soon they’ll stretch their limbs, move their eyeballs, and start running everywhere. There’s no old age, illness, or death in the cartoon world. Cartoon characters are like angels.
Alien is a film rich with feminist implications. It used to be that most of the strong characters in films were men, but gradually women have filled these roles as well. The female protagonist in Alien not only has a strong physique, resilient willpower, and the courage to shoulder responsibility, but she also has a maternal side. She’s tall and clean, her words and actions are those of the modern woman. This is a female heroine created by the dream factory. The alien creatures in the film, metamorphosed from cocoons, growing and bursting inside human bodies—are they not symbols of rampant cancer cells? The aliens are also quite maternal, with many legs and a hard exoskeleton on their backs, mysteriously appearing and disappearing; they have a silent incubation period and are incredibly secretive. Once they spread, they proliferate to other corners, capable of both shrinking and expanding, making them nearly impossible to eliminate. To deal with cancer, patients need to be like the strong heroine.
Carrots are said to help fight cancer, as if they were garlic or the peachwood swords used to subdue vampires. During this time, while I watched videotapes of science-fiction films, I drank a lot of carrot juice. At first, a friend gave me a juicer, then supplied me regularly with copious amounts of carrots, practically turning my home into a carrot warehouse. There are also many varieties of carrots. The ones sold in the market are muddy, fat, and difficult to swallow after chewing. They’re perfect for juicing—three of them can yield 250 milliliters of juice. The juicer squeals like a butchered pig when it’s powered on, as though it’s murdering some living creature. Does juicing count as an act of killing? A living carrot, shorter by a section in the blink of an eye, and in another blink, the dry dregs fly in all directions, a bloody river flowing out. Every time I eat carrots, I feel like Roger Rabbit, but when I drink carrot juice, I feel as though I’ve turned into a vampire.
The philosopher Susanne Langer cites R.E. Jones to point out that moving pictures break free not only from spatial restrictions but also from temporal restrictions; moreover, they possess the uncanny ability to move forward and backward in time and space. Whether it be Superman, Roger Rabbit, or the astronaut heroine in Alien, upon closer examination, the character inevitably appears superficial and unable to withstand scrutiny. However, they represent a collective subconscious aspiration in ordinary people toward a dreamlike transcendence of this finite life.
There was a period of time when my friends often talked to me about Laozi and Zhuangzi, mentioning Laozi’s breadth of mind:
All things arise without rejection
Bearing without possessing
Acting without expectations
Achieving without claiming credit
Then we naturally transitioned to discussing Zhuangzi. Zhuangzi’s “Wandering Free and Far” elucidates the concept of freely wandering in the infinite. Isn’t it about transcendence from the constraints of the various objective conditions of worldly life, freely wandering through limitless time and space without relying or depending on anything? Zhuangzi wrote about the giant Peng bird waiting for a strong wind in order to embark on a journey to the South Seas, showing that the giant Peng bird was restricted by time; meanwhile, the smaller birds could take flight whenever they pleased, but they could only fly as high as the weeds and the elm and sandalwood trees, falling after just a few meters, revealing they were restricted by space. The former could wander “far but not freely,” whereas the latter could wander “freely but not far.” Zhuangzi starts with birds, then extends to plants, and then to human beings, explaining that all beings, whether large or small, have their own limitations and dependencies, inevitably constrained in one way or another. Among them, human beings have the most constraints. Time and space are obvious constraints, but our self-imposed shackles are even more numerous, such as the opposition between the self and other, the pursuit of fame and fortune, and the like. Of course, we couldn’t help but ask, was this realm of wandering free and far concrete and attainable? Zhuangzi’s answer is: “It’s a land where nothing really exists.” In other words, an ideal spiritual realm, a longing for and pursuit of freedom. Zhuangzi was the greatest dreamer.
Having simulation markings drawn on my body didn’t mean that the work was done—I still had to undergo a computer scan. A few days later, I returned to the radiology department. At eight o’clock on a Saturday morning, an hour before the official opening time, the staff in the scanning room was already on duty. Despite the early hour, I was still third in line. However, being first in line didn’t mean being examined first, as another bed from the ward upstairs was wheeled in, creaking and clanking. It was an emergency. Bottles hung on racks above the bed, swaying along the long corridor like lanterns in the wind. There was a frail old man with a pale, ashen face lying on the bed. He was rushed into the scanning room at once. Everyone else had to wait outside the door for an extra hour.
I was third in line, with two men ahead of me. Fourth in line was a woman who was hard of hearing and wasn’t originally from Hong Kong. Every time the nurse came out and said something, she couldn’t hear it clearly, and would ask me: What was that? I’d say, There’s an emergency case that went in first, or, They said, sorry we have to wait, but it can’t be helped. Sitting at the entrance to the scanning room, I unexpectedly ended up serving as a loud-voiced interpreter for half the morning. I’d brought along a book to read, just one, Legend of the Tattooed Woman, a Spanish literature annotated reader containing twelve short stories from Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean, with the Spanish and Chinese on facing pages. I focused on “It’s Because We’re So Poor” by the Mexican author Juan Rulfo, carefully reading the Spanish text and studying the Chinese word by word. The text was accompanied by notes on the Spanish words, which made it as useful as a textbook. I paid particular attention to this piece, as it was a story I’d translated several years ago, based on an English translation. Now, reading the original text, I could see the original sentence structures. Back then, why had I been so concerned with faithfully translating sentence by sentence? I was merely translating the writing style of the English translator. I have to agree that secondhand translation is by no means ideal, and as a translator, one can’t place complete trust in it. When translating this story, I was always perplexed by one character, a twelve-year-old girl named Tacha—was she the narrator’s elder or younger sister? In both English and Spanish, the term for sister does not distinguish between elder sister and younger sister, unlike in Chinese, where the clear differentiation of kinship titles reflects our feudal traditions. The art historian E.H. Gombrich was correct when he stated that one benefit of learning to translate another language is that it teaches us that beyond certain superficial common understandings among humans, there are deeper aspects that cannot be translated, reflecting the communication of cultural traditions that stem from different roots. I had pondered over this character for a long time, translating her as the elder sister. Now, upon rereading, I realized she was actually the younger sister. Alas, I’d mistranslated a crucial relationship between the characters. The number of people waiting in line grew, until more than ten people were sitting on the long benches. As nine o’clock approached, the little rooms along the corridor began to open up one by one as the staff trickled in. A woman unlocked a door, retrieved a teacup, washed it clean, then brought it back. The doctors’ names and department designation were clearly written on the doors. The names of foreign doctors were listed in both Chinese and English, side by side, their names translated in a lively and joyful manner, like model characters in government announcements reminding people when to renew their ID cards, bestowed with names such as Brilliant Brocade or Youth Evermore . . . Many people walked past us, including an elderly white-haired foreign gentleman holding a leather bag, wearing charcoal-gray tweed slacks, a thick cotton shirt with dark red stripes, and brown suede shoes—I mistook him for an artist. As he passed slowly through the corridor, he nodded at us and greeted us good morning in Chinese. He opened a door and went into his room to work. The door didn’t shut all the way, leaving it ajar. I could see the lights were on, and I glimpsed him sitting in a swivel chair with his back to us, examining X-rays. I didn’t know whose medical condition appeared in the images. I envied the doctor for being so old yet so healthy, and for being able to put his knowledge to good use.
An elderly lady also came down the corridor, her stride brisk and her back straight, her spirits high, all by herself. She must have come for a scan too. It was hard to tell what ailed her, as she didn’t look one bit sick. Many elderly women her age walked with a faltering gait, always supported by a family member on either side, their faces filled with worry. Next came a younger girl and a middle-aged woman. Since it was Saturday, the young ones didn’t have to go to school or work, so they tended to accompany their mothers. Whether they arrived early or late, everyone had to wait an hour or two.
I was third in line. After the hospital bed was pushed out of the scanning room, to my surprise, some men were next to undergo the scan. First, of course, were the ones who were first and second in line, and then, unexpectedly, the ones who were fifth and sixth in line. They all went in ahead. Perhaps they were separating men and women, or maybe sorting by case type. Finally, the nurse called out a string of names and told us to go and change our clothes. Fourth in line again asked: What’s going on? I said, We’re going to change our clothes. There were two changing rooms. Fourth in line and I went to change first. When I came out, I was slightly taken aback to find that it was the young woman who’d gone into the changing room, not her mother. She emerged with the ribbons of her gown tied behind her. I said, You have the gown on backward. But she said, No, it’s supposed to be worn this way. I didn’t know what illness she had. Maybe there were different ways to wear the gown, depending upon the illness.
Three white-gowned angels. Later, I came to hear their names every day. Fourth in line was Lee Ping, the elderly lady was Wu Man-kuen, and the young woman was Zong Suk-man. Fourth in line took a while to come out of the changing room. She said to me: Ah, next time, I’ll remember to bring a big plastic bag—look, now I have to carry around this pile of clothes I’ve changed out of. The computer scan didn’t take long; it was probably just capturing images of the part where the design had been drawn. The doctor who first examined me in the oncology unit also came to take a look at the results of the computer scan. I supposed each patient’s case was handled by a dedicated doctor. I used to think that doctors simply sat in the consultation rooms seeing patients and made their rounds in the wards, but it turned out that their workload wasn’t light at all. For example, this doctor saw patients in the oncology unit’s consultation room, designed markings in the simulation unit, and also monitored the progress of the imaging and scanning rooms. He could only be described as hardworking and high-achieving.
If this is too much mumbo jumbo, and you want to read about breast cancer treatment, please turn to “Magic Bullet” on page 162.