Childhood, Hometown, a Life That Takes Dreams as Its Steed

1

My father was a talented and rather conceited countryman. Although, because of poor family circumstances and a bad family class background, he only attended elementary school and had no chance to continue his education, he was self-taught and knew a little of the zither, chess, calligraphy, painting, medicine, and martial arts.

As a child I very much wanted my father to teach me music, because in early childhood I had a very strong love of music. But my father felt that study was the most important thing; he believed schooling was the only correct path out for country people of our generation. So he did not want these miscellaneous arts to distract my energy and interfere with my becoming a success. The only thing he was willing to teach me was martial arts; my father hoped his two sons would grow up accomplished in both letters and the military.

My father was a practitioner of Yue-style boxing, which many people in our local area practice. Legend has it that after Yue Fei was killed, part of the Yue Family Army took refuge in our region, and the Yue-style boxing, used in real two-army combat, took root there, passed down from master to disciple and father to son for generations.

I remember that when I was very small, my father required my brother and me to follow him in practicing standing pole (zhan zhuang), training the strength of the lower body. Yue-style boxing especially emphasizes pole stance; its pole stance stresses "neither ding nor ba"—the two legs apart in a posture that looks neither like the character "ding" nor "ba," half-squatting without being a full squat. This standing-pole practice excellently trains the leg and waist muscles; when two armies face each other, a soldier with a stable lower stance has a great advantage.

From childhood I was weary of fighting and killing, so I had no interest at all in martial arts. But my father and fourth uncle were famous boxing masters in our area; the family-style transmission of Yue boxing rarely cared whether the children were interested, and if you did not practice, the elders beat and scolded you. This educational method was savage, but effective.

Two of the greatest benefits of practicing martial arts in childhood are, first, cultivating endurance, and second, forging a martial-spirit; those who study martial arts from childhood have exceptional courage and fearlessness.

In slack farming seasons, when my father had us brothers practice pole stance, he often practiced alongside us. If our standing time was too short, he would scold us for being lazy. And I truly did my best to find ways to slack off in martial arts; as soon as my father walked away, I would relax.

My older brother always practiced solemnly; as a child he was a martial arts fanatic. He not only practiced Yue-style boxing but also hard qigong, often using his head to ram walls or trees and other hard objects. Once when the two of us were at home, he knocked himself unconscious practicing hard qigong and took a long time to come to; it scared me badly.

He was also obsessed with "simulated combat" and often insisted I spar with him. The boxing my father taught us we actually did not know how to use in real fighting, so the so-called "sparring" was just wrestling and swinging wild punches.

When we were children, one family in the village bought a black-and-white television; at that time wuxia (sword-hero) dramas were being broadcast. My older brother had a wuxia dream; after watching wuxia TV dramas, he insisted I accompany him in practicing martial arts. He was a little over two years older than me and always used threats, coercion, and bribery to force me to face him.

Once we took up weapons—each a long stick—and fought each other. Sticks have no eyes; I landed one on his eye and nearly blinded him. Even injured, my brother's interest in martial arts did not wane. When my parents came home and saw I had hurt him, they gave me a severe beating, lecturing me to know my strength in the future and to know forbearance in life. Of course, at the time I felt wronged, thinking my parents favored my older brother; he had clearly been the provoker, yet in the end I was the one punished.

Now I often think: if my older brother, as a child, had had more martial arts teachers, he might now be an outstanding martial artist. Only in the countryside does no one value a child's interests. Just as my parents did not take my dislike of martial arts seriously, they did not take my older brother's love of them seriously.

My older brother fit my father's expectations perfectly: not only did he love practicing martial arts, but his grades were excellent from childhood. From elementary school in the village through high school, he basically always placed first; on the national college entrance exam he was even our region's top liberal-arts scorer.

But I was unruly beyond bearing. When my father taught me martial arts, the moment he looked away I would not practice seriously. Although my father had my older brother supervise my standing pole, my older brother did not have the deterrent effect my father had. Sometimes I lay on a broken crock, rocking back and forth like in a rocking chair, watching my brother practice martial arts with sweat pouring off his head, muttering to myself: "This crock is so comfortable." Later I even gave that broken crock a name, calling it "Shufu Shufu" (Comfy Comfy). When we grew up, the two of us brought up this old story several times, and each time we laughed together.

But as I said earlier, practicing martial arts in childhood did indeed forge my "martial spirit"; for most of my life I have been fearless. My older brother also has this "martial spirit" in some ways; in middle school he often fought, and in junior high he already dared to defy his teachers. Only after he grew up, because he was too smart and skilled at analyzing the downside of everything, he became over-cautious in doing things. I am sillier than he, with fewer considerations, so when making decisions I am freer than he.

Of course, my so-called slacking off could only be occasional. My father was strict; in the countryside there was nothing to do at night. My father worked by day, and we brothers went to school by day; when we came home at night, father was at home supervising our martial practice. So although as an adult I have basically forgotten all the Yue-style boxing I learned from disuse, we are still very capable of enduring hardship.

In my teens and twenties I fought a few times, but I won not by the martial arts my father taught but by a kitchen knife. I never took the initiative to provoke anyone, but I was bullied a few times; each time, fearlessly carrying a kitchen knife, I directly frightened the other side into backing down. Although my self-control was very good and I never actually cut anyone, no one knew whether I really would.

This life experience taught me that martial force exists to stop fighting; armed strength is an important guarantee of peace. Enemies are not docile; only when they fear the force in your hand will they become docile. So negotiations with anyone are carried out with real strength.

It is so between people, and so between nations. Although we infinitely long for all people in the world to treat each other kindly, in real life the law of the jungle is everywhere. Weak nations have no diplomacy; the weak are bullied; if you fall behind, you will be beaten. However free of desire we may be, we must still strive unceasingly and constantly improve our own abilities to avoid various natural or manmade disasters.

It also taught me another truth: no matter how high your martial skill, you still fear a kitchen knife. No matter how fierce primitive martial arts are, they are not as fierce as a weapon. The human hand has very limited ability; only with science and tools do we possess all possibilities.

2

I do not know how my father spent his childhood and youth. Although he often told me stories of his era, I have no intuitive feel for the social environment of the Cultural Revolution, so I cannot understand everything he experienced growing up.

My father was thirty when he first had a son; I was born when he was thirty-three. After my father learned to read, he himself read some books, so he named his two sons after Zhuge Liang's saying, "One's aspiration should be lofty." Compared with other same-age peers in our village, our brothers' names were not vulgar.

Not until my thirties did I understand my father's state of mind after having children. My father always felt his talents had gone unrecognized; he always felt his life had been delayed by the times. He longed for more education, but the times deprived him of that opportunity.

As a child, a phrase often on my father's lips was: "When it comes to investing in my children's intelligence, I am willing to spend." He scrimped and saved—my father's frugality reached the point where it could be called stingy—and every cent he saved he used to send his children to school.

My father projected his own unfulfilled life wishes onto his children; he hoped we would have lofty aspirations and become pillars of society.

In my memory, when I was small my father was a man of outstanding ability and also a just and selfless man. Because he was shrewd, capable, and upright, he was trusted and respected by the villagers; in the Mao era he was one of the leading figures in our village. Clan disputes and conflicts between villagers liked to come to him for arbitration.

So as a child, villagers who were bickering often came to my home to ask my father to judge and resolve their conflicts. My father always mediated their disputes justly yet flexibly. If it was an internal clan dispute, father would often even take a small loss himself to settle it. Father was like a judge in our village and clan; the reason everyone pushed him into this position was entirely due to his character.

Overall, my father was full of masculine vigor—even overly masculine. In dealing with his own family, he often appeared overly willful and domineering. My father had great endurance for poverty and toil. Because he poured all his strength into supporting his children's schooling so they could escape the peasant life, our family was one of the poorest in our village, but my father seemed to have strong immunity to poverty.

A large part of the reason was that he harvested enough respect in life, so he never felt inferior because of poverty. Only for a time did he feel that after we brothers went to college, we had not amounted to much, had lost face for him, and diminished his prestige; that was when he always looked crestfallen.

This family ethos led by my father gave me strong immunity to poverty as well. In the first few years after I decided to study medicine, life was extremely hard—hard to a degree my family could not bear—yet I could still take it calmly.

I think that if I had not married and started a family, if I had not been, as the Buddha said, "bound to wife and home more tightly than to prison—for prison has an end, but wife and home have no thought of leaving," I might have lived contentedly in utter poverty all my life. Because what I lived as a child was precisely a life of utter poverty.

Now people often flatter me that I have a boundless future. Actually, purely from the perspective of life, what I now pursue is not a future but a homeward road—a return from my present state of life back to the impoverished life of my childhood. The heavy burden of fame and gain has already stripped much joy from my life; I hope to return to a state of having nothing, quietly reading, writing, and treating patients.

But this homeward road is one I will sooner or later walk. Now most of my life responsibilities are fulfilled; in a few more years my son will also graduate from college and support himself. Once he comes of age, I will abandon the fame, wealth, and status I have gained today and live the simple, impoverished life my father lived all his life—quietly pursuing scholarship and educating people.

But no matter where I retreat to in the future, I will keep sharpening this weapon of ability, for it is the capital of my spiritual independence and constant self-improvement; once I lose it, I will become a useless person. It is just that I will also learn to hide its edge and blunt its sharpness, dissolving it all into the formless and traceless. It will not show itself until the moment when it is needed for self-protection.

3

Although my father forced me to study martial arts, overall he did not put too much pressure on me. Every day, apart from an hour or two of martial practice, I was basically free. At school I was probably the wildest child; I cannot recall any childhood friend more naughty and mischievous than I.

Country life was also very happy. In that era without cars and telephones, rural children's entertainment unfolded in the fields and gardens. Tadpoles, frogs, and fish and soft-shell turtles in the ponds; dragonflies and bees among the rapeseed flowers; snakes and fledglings in the hills; mantises and cicadas in the trees—all became objects we caught and kept as pets or played with. The free-range Chinese rural dogs in the village were also our playmates. But the ones we played with most were peers of the same age.

Our village was large, one of the three largest in our county. The villagers prized martial valor; in slack farming seasons many practiced martial arts—originally perhaps for self-defense, but later it became a capital for bullying other villages. Growing up in such a village, I am not surprised by the rivalry between China and the United States. Human beings, after all, have not yet stepped out of the limitations of the tribal age; to achieve a world of great harmony will take many more generations of effort.

War-averse as I am, I disliked the way our villagers so often bullied the weak. But I can also understand that humans, as a species not yet fully evolved, still find it hard to restrain many primitive desires and impulses.

Country life gave me a relatively deep yet tolerant understanding of human nature. Rural life is transparent; family gossip, rumors, and street-corner news are naked human nature, with little disguise. Which man liked to lust after his daughter-in-law, whose wife had an affair, whose child was a thief, which families bore deep grudges—all were clear.

Perhaps precisely because of this, country people like me hold a relatively tolerant and patient attitude toward human weaknesses. In the village there are no purely black-or-white people; everyone is basically a gray person, black and white mixed together. Everyone has a bit of the good person's color and a bit of the bad person's color; blowing a person up into a saint only invites everyone's laughter.

A large village is a rich and complete interpersonal ecosystem; people living in it are quite tempered. I think the reason my own mindset is basically calm may be thanks to this kind of ecosystem in which I grew up.

Especially as a child, watching my father arbitrate so many civil disputes gave me a subtle, in-depth education in society and human nature. The overall principle by which my father mediated these disputes was to strive for peaceful resolution, never letting anyone escalate a conflict to the point of no return.

So most of the time my father did his best to persuade. If one side felt "unbalanced" or "unable to let the matter rest," father would help them assess the whole affair, persuading the side in the wrong to apologize and persuading the wronged side to show generosity. After striking a balance, he would persuade both sides to reconcile, let go of resentment, and achieve an outcome that pleased everyone. It is truly a waste of my father's talent that he did not become a diplomat, because most disputes were successfully mediated in his hands.

My father's role as a reconciler influenced me inadvertently. Now that I study and practice medicine, what I must reconcile is the deep contradictions in patients' hearts and the suffering in their bodies, and beyond that, the contradictions between patients and me. As a reconciler, my habitual approach is forgiveness, forbearance, and yielding; only when unavoidable do I resort to force—and even then, a reconciler's use of force is never to kill or wound, but only to make the other lay down his fists or his sword and spear.

Personal pride and pique are what a reconciler must most guard against, and also what a doctor must most give up. Emotional conflicts rooted in pique often lead to a splitting of the self and to rifts between people and between the individual and society. Tolerance also requires training. The ancients said: "When the spirit arrives, the writing is mature; when learning is deep, the pique is calm." They also said: "Worldly understanding is itself learning." Calmness of pique is built on a person's clear understanding of affairs, worldly sophistication, and study that cultivates character.

Learn to resolve contradictions within contradiction; learn to escape suffering within suffering; learn to let go of troubles within trouble. Wisdom is not rootless water; wisdom comes from lessons, from lessons repeated countless times.

My son could not learn to swim in the swimming pool no matter how long he tried. Later I directly pushed him into the deep end to learn, and in basically one afternoon he got it. Because if he did not swim out desperately, he would choke and suffer the agony of suffocation.

Nature has endowed humans with innate learning ability; it is just that some people's ability has not been developed.

4

Ten years ago we could not see the future. I told my child's mother, "You must believe in me as always; I will achieve certain accomplishments in medicine." At the time she was both pessimistic and anxious about my prospects. In fact, the me of today has already exceeded what I originally expected of myself.

I am not good at setting short-term life goals. After thirty, no matter what my life encountered, I remained unruffled; a large part of the reason is that my present life is something I spent many years striving to achieve.

This year I told my child's mother: in another ten years I will lay down many of the things that now weigh on me, treating patients on one hand and devoting myself wholeheartedly to academic research on the other. From now on I will also keep writing without a single day's interruption (unless I am gravely ill and bedridden) for about ten years, maintaining extraordinary perseverance and resolve in study, practice, and writing. In ten years, perhaps I will prefer standing on the three-foot podium, taking joy in cultivating talented people for the world. I will spend ten years putting this life plan into practice.

And in terms of economic interests, I will gradually practice subtraction rather than addition—year by year reducing what I take from society, as much as possible lightening the financial burden on the patients I treat, from consultation fees to medicine costs, decreasing year by year rather than increasing.

Because my task of feeding my family is gradually being completed. I do not, like the Buddha, believe that "wife and home" are a burden "worse than prison," but I am also very clear that once a person's basic needs are met, he should not demand too much from society. All frantic accumulation will eventually brew disaster for oneself.

My father tempered my endurance; my mother taught me generosity. I often sigh at the hardship borne by cancer patients and their families; watching them fight with all their might to save a life, my heart is filled with compassion—all the more because my own mother also died of cancer, and we suffered the same life difficulties as other cancer patients and their families.

Actually, starting this year I have already begun implementing this subtraction of mine. Although in the past I waived fees for some impoverished patients, I did not extend this to all patients; starting this year, I will extend it to every patient who comes to me.

The root causes of doctor-patient conflict are, first, the doctor's service attitude, and second, economic factors. To stop boiling by lifting the pot, better to remove the firewood. A doctor's best self-protection is to restrain his own pique, improve service quality, and lower his material desires. A doctor must always think of danger in times of peace, be cautious and careful, in order to remain safe.

So my future direction will be to improve efficacy while striving to lower patients' costs. In my past practice, I have never made things difficult for patients of limited means; whenever they have difficulty paying, I have always waived their fees.

Moreover, crucially, the essence of medical care should be technical aid built on humanitarianism and humanistic care. The doctor's calling is to care for the sick; medicine is sacred. This is not moral kidnapping; this is the collective expectation of the human group, and it is also the original aspiration of many doctors, myself included, in taking up medicine.

No matter how much we emphasize reason, if a person fails to recognize that reason is not omnipotent and that humans are actually often emotional, then he is quite irrational. The medical profession needs an emotional component; patients need spiritual comfort, families need to release their tension and grief, and the destitute also have a right to live—when this right is taken away, they develop a hatred for society. So a doctor must understand and sympathize with all patients and must not label anyone morally.

Admittedly, in many doctor-patient disputes the patient and family are at fault, but blaming patients and families for their irrational acts does no good. People are not black or white; without exception, people are gray, black and white mixed. Others are not spotless, and we ourselves have our dirty corners. Confucius's way of loyalty and reciprocity, applied to dealing with the world, is an unrivaled treasure.

The wisdom and magnanimity that come from overcoming one's own desires and emotions are a doctor's true amulet.

6

How does a person achieve self-growth?

Good family education and good teachers and friends all greatly help our growth. The happiest time of my life was during my school years, when following several beloved teachers I broadened my horizons enormously and read many good books that other people might never read in a lifetime.

But the more decisive factor in a person's self-growth is dreams. Only by taking dreams as one's steed can one live up to the springtime of life.

A few days ago, an elderly Chinese doctor practicing in Switzerland returned from Switzerland to seek my treatment for her illness. As a TCM doctor with extremely rich clinical experience, after she herself developed cancer, she decided to entrust her life and health to me. I was moved by her trust and also felt the responsibility on my shoulders.

After diagnosis and treatment, we had many topics in common to discuss. In conversation, she told me that the reason she chose to come to me was that her observation of me over several years had led her to conclude that I was an idealist in medicine, not someone just scraping a living. So she entrusted her trust to me.

Yesterday, the director of the medical insurance bureau of some place in our Hubei Province came with his elderly mother to seek my treatment; we also had many topics in common—about modern medicine, about the conflict between the traditional TCM practice model and modern social institutions, about human self-growth. Set against social reality, perhaps all my expectations are somewhat idealistic.

This is an age of ideal desertification. Although I have my own dreams, I do not consider myself an extraordinary idealist; still, many people think that idealists like me are already rare as phoenix feathers and unicorn horns.

The expectations my father placed in me at the moment he named me have, at my current age, concretized into achieving something significant in medicine.

What does it mean to achieve something in medicine? My complete interpretation is this: to constantly refine one's scholarship and clinical skill, to cultivate talent who will carry on, to write medical works that later generations can draw on, and at the same time to exert a certain innovative influence on the current state of medical care.

I am dissatisfied with the current state of medical care; neither humanistic literacy of medical workers nor medical technology is satisfactory. As a member of this group, I have a responsibility to change this state of affairs.

But I also know deeply that social progress is a slow process, human nature is very complex, and medical workers are people who also find it hard to overcome their own flaws. To grandly talk of influencing society is sometimes easy to mock as overreaching.

Yet as a forty-year-old adult, I know that if I keep walking forward in this field as I always have, I will not come away with nothing. I will not be cowardly or lazy; with my actions and my words, I will change what I think should be changed.

Though the moss flower is tiny, it too blooms like the peony. However small an individual, when he runs after his dream, he emits his own light.