Heng wore her burka as little as possible. Caring little for the restrictions imposed by interacting with the Saudis in the city, caring little to know any of the Saudis except those with whom she worked, Zhang Heng spent most of her time on the hospital compound when she wasn’t working. Almost all the nurses at the hospital were foreigners, many of them being from China or southeast Asia. With Peng Peng she spent hours together on their time off, playing cards, reading young women’s magazines, talking about boys, gossiping about the other nurses, and swimming in the hospital pool. At the pool, they could wear Western-style bathing suits and not worry about offending any of religious customs of their Muslim hosts.
Working on the medical floor of the hospital, Zhang Heng took care of patients with diabetes and heart and lung disease and cancer. She preferred taking care of medical patients to taking care of surgical patients like she had in the hospital in Urumqi. She performed their blood draws; she bathed and dressed them in their hospital gowns; she doled out their medications; she cleaned their bedpans. Months became years.
Though already proficient in English, her command of the language steadily improved with time. If she missed her family, she didn’t miss China.
t the same time, though she didn’t miss China, she didn’t care for the Middle East. Her nursing duties were far easier than they had been in Urumqi, but she had no desire to stay for more than a few years. The customs, the religion, the people were just too foreign to her. She continued to peruse the nursing journal ads looking for work in England or the United States.
The impetus that finally prompted her to leave Saudi Arabia and return to China was no less than a family cataclysm. It occurred when her father became ill. Although always a stout and hard-working fellow, Zhang Bo had the misfortune of contracting hepatitis when he was born. That stroke of bad luck he shared with one in ten of all Chinese. Eventually the hepatitis turned to cirrhosis, and the cirrhosis turned to liver cancer. Zhang Heng’s father retired from his job at the factory at the relatively young age of forty-nine. When she arrived back in Kashgar, after two and a half years in Saudi Arabia, Zhang Bo was just a jaundiced stick figure with a protuberant belly. The whites of his eyes were as yellow as the loess along the banks of the Yellow River. Taking a job at the local hospital as a nurse in the emergency department, where she worked nights, she spent her days nursing her father who grew weaker by the day. “Can’t you get him to eat,” her mother implored her. “Can’t you get him to take his medicine.” All Zhang Heng could do was shake her head. Her father was a strong-willed man who’d resolved in his own mind he was dying, and wasn’t for a minute going to follow the futile instructions of his family or his doctors. He refused to eat. He refused to take his medications. He lasted about nine months after Zhang Heng’s return to Kashgar.
Remaining in Kashgar for about a month after her father’s services, Heng then moved to Shanghai to assume a position as a registered nurse in a clinic that was designed to care for expats with medical insurance and the more well-healed Chinese who didn’t want to deal with the inefficiency, the ineptitude, or the filth of the Chinese clinics and hospitals. Aptly, the clinic was called the International Medical Centre. A clinic for foreigners, she was convinced, would be better than working in a Chinese hospital or clinic. Nothing could be as dreadful as working at the hospital in Urumqi. During this time, there was a recession in the West and nursing jobs were hard to come by for foreign nurses, even those who had extensive experience overseas. To Zhang Heng, the private clinic seemed like a reasonable compromise. The pay at the International Medical Centre was better than it was for nurses in the local hospitals and she could keep up with her English language skills. IMC, as the clinic was called by the staff and the patients, was housed in an enormous, modern stone and steel structure that contained a five-star hotel, a shopping mall, and an office complex. The clinic took up the better part of the third floor of the shopping mall overlooking the Pu River. For four years, she had worked at the IMC.
There were only one or two patients in the waiting room of the International Medical Centre. There were only three or four patients in the exam rooms with their doctors. Business at the clinic that afternoon was slow. It had been slow probably due to the rain. In the nurses’s room, Zhang Heng knelt on a chair next to the window, one arm on the backrest, the other arm holding back the drape, looking out at the street and river below. Rain continued to splatter on the street and river below her. “Still raining?” asked Xiao Chen, the chief nurse, sitting at her desk, her back to the window. JoAnne Wang and Gao Peng, two of the other full-time nurses, were also in the staff room. Some of the nurses went by their adopted English names, while some went by their Chinese ones. Zhang Heng went by Sarah, the name emblazoned on her name tag, though she preferred to be called Heng.
“Still raining,” replied Zhang Heng looking over her shoulder at Xiao Chen.
“It’s supposed to rain tomorrow, too,” replied Xiao Chen, without looking up from the nursing schedule that she was making up for the next month. Just then the phone rang. Chen picked up the receiver. It was the receptionists’ desk. “Hao da,” said Chen into the phone. Placing the receiver down in its cradle, she turned to the other nurses sitting behind her. “Dr. Abrahim wants some blood drawn on his patient,” she said. “He wants a blood count and coags. The patient’s in the treatment room.”
“I’ll go,” said Gao Peng, who started to stand up from the chair where she was sitting.
“No, I’ll go,” said Zhang Heng. “You did the last blood draw. It’s my turn. Besides, there’s nothing to see but the rain, and I’m getting bored.” Getting up from the chair where she was kneeling, she placed the drape back where it had been. She walked over to the shelf next to the back wall of the nurses’s station and reaching up took a phlebotomy tray from the shelf. On the metal tray were alcohol swabs, gauze, bandaids, blood tubes, a tourniquet, and a green, plastic Vacutainer holder with stainless steel needle for the blood tubes. Washing her hands with soap, she then walked down the clinic’s sole hallway to the treatment room. On the plastic paper holder on the door was deposited the lab request for the blood sample.
Zhang Heng opened the door. Sitting in a chair, the chair where the patients sat when the nurses drew their blood, was a smallish man, the heels of his shoes barely touching the floor. She looked at the blood order sheet for the man’s name: it was Rosenthal, Joshua Rosenthal. Inquiring if this was indeed him, he nodded as he replied amiably, “Call me Josh, everyone else does.” he said as he began unbuttoning the cuff of his right sleeve. “What may I call you?” He was a thin man, all sinew and bone, with a sharp protuberant nose and cheek bones that gave him the look of an exotic predatory bird. Thin wisps of reddish hair going grey hair stuck out from the sides of the crown of his head, the majority of his scalp being bald. He laughed jovially as he asked her her name. With his manner, with his red hair protruding from the side of his head, and with his twinkling eyes, he reminded Heng of a circus clown she had once seen in an old American movie about the Ringling Brothers. A big bulbous nose and over-sized shoes would have completed the picture. Though he had the enormous smile of a circus clown, his smile was the least bit crooked.
Slightly abashed, not knowing how seriously to take his jovial manner, she said. “The others call me Heng. You can call me Sarah.”
“No, I like Heng.” He smiled even more broadly. “Heng, that’s a pretty name I like
Heng well enough.”
“I need your left arm.” She set the phlebotomy tray down on the table next to the chair where Rosenthal sat and then took the chair facing him.
“Heng, you see I’m left-handed, so they always draw the blood from my right arm.”
“They do?...In China, they say that left-handed people are clever. Are you clever Mr. Rosenthal?”
He guffawed. “You tell me!”
‘If I had to
