A Life Shuttling Between Two Cities
The last two periods on Friday afternoon were anatomy. After the teacher finished lecturing, I went up to the podium and asked her a few questions, and along the way picked up, one by one, the bag of teaching bones she had brought into the classroom, getting to know the bones she had talked about in class. At that moment I felt nothing out of the ordinary. Only after I had finished handling them did it occur to me to ask the teacher whether these bones were real human remains or artificial models. Calmly she said: They are real human bones. Hearing those four words, I was suddenly filled with an indescribable sense of strangeness; it was the first time in my life that my own hands had touched a part of the "body donor teacher" (a human cadaver) used in medical teaching.
Class ended at 4:10 p.m. My train ticket back to Beijing was for 5:00 p.m. As soon as class was over I dashed to the dorm to collect my luggage and hurried toward the school gate. Another student in my dorm was also rushing home by train for the weekend, and we had agreed to travel together. He reached the school gate ahead of me to hail a taxi; his train left at 4:50 p.m. Friday. So as not to delay him, I moved in great haste, not even having time to wash my hands properly before carrying my luggage and sprinting to the gate.
The railway station was not far from our school; a taxi took about a quarter of an hour. But once we reached the station we split up to check in and board, because time was tight. On the train I hurried to the restroom to wash my hands; there was no soap there, so the wash was not thorough. Our anatomy teacher is a woman of around forty with rich teaching experience; she can lecture fluently, vividly and clearly without even bringing a textbook. Yet every time she enters the classroom she carries a bag of specimens — we are currently studying osteology, so the bag is full of bones from the body donor teacher — and every time she walks in carrying them, her face is utterly composed.
I feel ashamed: this was the first time in my life that I had examined the body donor teacher's specimens so closely in my own hands. After learning that these were bones taken from a human cadaver, a sense of discomfort lingered in my heart for a long time. Once settled on the train, I thought that I myself had already signed a body-donation consent form, pledging that after death the useful parts of my body would be donated to patients in need, and the rest to medical institutions for teaching and research. Deep down, I hope that future medical students will learn anatomy through specimens made from my body and thereby better relieve patients' suffering; and I imagine that the "body donor teacher" I touched today must, while alive, have made the same wish when donating their body.
Thinking this way made me feel a little better. Personally, I would not want the medical students who handle my remains in the future to feel any discomfort; I hope they can chat and laugh with my bones as if with an old, dear friend, so that I too shall not be lonely. As I thought this, my heart gradually lightened.
Just then a female passenger across from me noticed the book Human Anatomy lying on my tray table and curiously asked why I was reading it. I said I was a medical student, had just finished an anatomy class, and was reading it over several times to fix the knowledge points in my memory. The talkative female passenger immediately guessed which school I was from, because she had boarded the train at the same station as me. But, judging by my age, she guessed I was a teacher at that school. I did not correct her; I did not want to explain that I was an older medical student, so as not to draw attention.
She told me she had grown up near our school since childhood and was not at all nervous about things like body donor teachers. In the full flow of conversation, and to show her hospitable nature, she offered me sunflower seeds. I hastily declined, not even daring to hold out my hand. Although I had done some psychological self-reassurance, having me immediately use the hands that had touched the body teacher's bones to take sunflower seeds — my heart still felt too queasy.
She pressed me insistently, even grabbing a handful to press on me. I hurriedly said to her: I have just finished a human anatomy class; if you knew what these hands touched a few dozen minutes ago, you would lose your appetite for these seeds too. I am not just being polite; I genuinely have no appetite. She understood what I meant, laughed, and did not press further.
She was a stay-at-home mother with two children; her husband was a local civil servant. On Fridays she took the train to Beijing to meet her friends and go together to Tianjin to see a Sandy Lam concert. She was very talkative. Although I was not a good conversation partner, she, in high spirits, still found plenty to chat about. Thanks to her chattiness, she eased the discomfort I felt from touching a human skeleton for the first time in anatomy class.
When the train reached Beijing, we said goodbye. Along the way this stay-at-home mother had been pouring into me the idea that being an official has so many advantages, bluntly calling herself an "official's wife" and an "official mommy fan"; she hoped her husband and children would go into politics. I was completely unmoved by all she said, so I had long been looking forward to the journey's end, to escape the chatter of a housewife from a fifth-tier city whose husband is a civil servant.
The baby's mother picked me up at Beijing West Railway Station. We had not seen each other for a week, and not only did I miss her and the child — she had missed me too — so she wanted to give me a sense of "ritual." Coming back to the home I had left for a week, I was overjoyed and checked every corner to see whether my plants were still alive. Before leaving I had just planted some garlic, and now the garlic sprouts had grown five or six centimeters; when I return after the National Day holiday I may be able to eat homegrown green garlic.
The cat was also very affectionate on seeing me, rubbing its head against my leg and following me step for step. If I went to the bathroom, it went to the bathroom; if I went to the bedroom, it went to the bedroom; if I went to the balcony to fetch a book, it followed me to the bookshelf on the balcony and looked around. Cats have a trait: at home they mainly recognize one owner. I look after it the most, so it is only close to me.
Fortunately I can still come home on weekends and holidays; otherwise these close bonds would all be put to a severe test. I am very grateful to the teachers and school leadership; I am allowed to go home every weekend and every holiday, which is a special accommodation, as long as I submit a leave request each time before going home. On Wednesday evening I submitted two leave requests at once, asking off for both this weekend and next.
The round-trip fare is not expensive; the cheapest train costs only fifty-something yuan, and that is the one I take. But many passengers smoke in the carriage, and the smell of smoke is more than I can bear. So on the train I changed my return ticket to the kind that costs about a hundred yuan per trip; smoking is not allowed in that carriage. On that basis, the monthly commuting cost is around nine hundred yuan. Living expenses at school are around one thousand yuan, bringing total monthly spending to about two thousand. Adding the five-thousand-yuan tuition and six-hundred-yuan accommodation fee, a year costs a little over twenty thousand yuan.
But to be factual, this is the most cost-effective way to study; only a state-run public institution can provide such affordable education. Our school is a bit poor, yet the teaching conditions it provides to medical students are adequate, with all kinds of teaching aids in the laboratory and training buildings. In the last class on Friday, the anatomy teacher told us that we would soon enter the lab for our first experiment. The goal of this experiment is to pick out the various bones from a jumbled pile and, as far as possible, assemble them into a whole.
I am quite looking forward to this experiment. In the very first week of term the school has packed the schedule full. We have already begun the most basic professional courses, and I love them all; I listen so raptly that I feel it is a pity I did not start sooner. Although Western and Chinese medicine belong to two different systems, for anyone whose very first interest is in the mysteries of the human body and life, every discipline that studies the laws of the human body is fascinating; there is no mutually exclusive opposition between them.
Over a hundred of us attend class in the same room, and the anatomy teacher simultaneously teaches more than five hundred students. Under such conditions, if one wants to learn real things, one must proactively approach the teacher and use one's head to seek out all kinds of extracurricular teaching resources. On the weekend at home I downloaded more than a hundred gigabytes of professional course teaching videos; my only criterion for choosing courses was high view counts on Bilibili. I lack the ability to judge course quality, but I trust that the shared choice of medical students cannot be wrong.
During the first week at school, whenever I could not follow a part of the lecture, I used my mobile data to find teaching videos on Bilibili; watching them that way made my data quota ache. On the very day we arrived to register, a telecom company had set up a booth at our school to sell campus data cards: only 40 yuan a month for 280 GB of free data — a fantastic deal.
But the salesgirls had found the wrong target. They crowded around my son, calling out to him: "Junior, I'm your senior — want to sign up for a card?" My son, with a sense of humor, pointed at me and said to the girl: "He is your junior!" That line made me burst out laughing on the spot; the two data-card salesgirls looked at each other, utterly bewildered, not understanding what we were talking about, and at a loss. That is how we missed the chance to get the card. This week, while streaming classes on data, I have been quietly blaming my son's prank for spoiling my good deal.
Besides downloading a pile of teaching videos, this time I also brought half a box of books from home to school. These include the standard textbooks and exercise workbooks for medical undergraduates published by People's Medical Publishing House, which I bought, as well as a book on Neuroanatomy in which I am personally very interested. I have studied stroke sequelae and psychiatric disorders for many years, and I want to use the opportunity of being at school to teach myself Neuroanatomy as well, asking our easygoing anatomy teacher about whatever I do not understand. She never grows tired of my questions, even though she cannot answer some of them. Once she said to me: Your research is truly deep; you should go to a higher-level institution for further study; we here can only teach the most basic things.
But she can give me many good suggestions, which is enough for me. As long as she points me in the right direction and helps me find teaching resources smoothly, I am fully satisfied. Over these past few days, following the various learning materials recommended by the professional-course teachers, I have already collected enough teaching videos to study for a whole semester. These are lecture videos by the most famous professors at China's top medical schools, basically all selected as national premium courses; if I watch them carefully, there will be little difference from attending their classes in person.
Arriving home on Friday, I stayed up until 11:30 p.m. doing all this. The baby's mother said: Now that you've started school, you really are full of energy. Indeed, my energy has been abundant this week. At school, those classmates of mine, around my son's age, also say to me: Uncle, why are you always so full of energy? We young people cannot keep up with you. Even the PE teacher has started calling me uncle along with my classmates; seeing me look so vigorous, he reassured me when I worried about the physical fitness test: Don't worry, looking like you, you'll have no problem passing the fitness test; at most you just won't score high on a few events you are not good at.
The reason I am energetic is simply that the path I have chosen is the one I like. If I did not like this path, I think I would not only wilt but also find it hard to overcome the discomfort of touching the body donor teacher. In that case I would not be suited to studying medicine, at least not clinical medicine. Because I love medicine so much, even if I had not gotten into a medical school, at this moment I would still be reading medical books in the National Library. Going to school is merely changing places to keep on reading; and along the way I also get a medical degree — why would that not be worthwhile?
I am quite satisfied with everything at present. Although this two-city life brings some inconveniences, those difficulties are not hard to overcome. Living on campus is not without its good points: in the first week, I got to know eleven classmates, remembered their names, and joined them in at least one group activity. I have basically come to know everyone in our dorm and in the neighboring one.
Some classmates could not recall a certain student's name and came to ask me. My memory is actually worse than theirs; it is just that, after asking these students' names, I record them on my phone. After observing that they have a particular talent, I note it beside their name and look at the list from time to time; this way, when I next meet them I can call them by name and join them in sports we both enjoy. So this week I quickly integrated into this group of young people without any sense of incongruity, and they like coming to my dorm to invite me out to play ball.
Two more classmates like to follow me to the library, and one likes to sit with me in class; they hope to be influenced by my side and strengthen their own self-discipline. The greatest benefit of being with young people is that a simple friendship is quickly built between each other. The worry I had before starting school — that I might be marginalized — has vanished without a trace; when my classmates and I hang out together, we both forget the age gap. Living on campus is actually better than renting off campus: on campus it is easy to make new friends, while renting off campus is lonely instead.
From a rigid viewpoint, this two-city life seems to sacrifice many conveniences. But viewed another way, the two-city life has given me more in return: more opportunities to study, and many new classmates and new friends. Meanwhile, everything I already had has not left me: my family has not left me, and the cat has not left me. What is wrong with such a two-city life?