Reflections After Returning from Bama, the Longevity Village

On September 17, 2016, the last day of the Mid-Autumn Festival long weekend, my wife and I, on a sudden impulse, followed a real-estate agent to look at commercial housing in Fangshan District, Beijing. House prices, rocketing all the way, had driven the entire property market into a frenzy. The several developments we saw were indeed selling like hotcakes; there were so many house-hunters that the sales staff could hardly keep up. Even in this suburb, reputed to be Beijing's price lowland, prices far exceeded our expectations. Houses this expensive were, of course, beyond our means.

The sales agent was a smooth talker; all along the way he kept telling us that if we didn't buy now, we would never be able to afford it later, and that if we bought a Beijing home now, we could just wait for it to appreciate. Although, from our many years of experience living in Beijing, what they said made good sense and was quite tantalizing, our financial means were limited, so we could only look on.

The next day, September 18, 2016, I flew to Nanning, Guangxi, then took a bus from Nanning to Bama Yao Autonomous County in Guangxi. After a day's travel, I arrived in Pozyue Village, Bama, toward evening. I had been invited by two of my patients who had come to Bama for health cultivation, to see them for a follow-up consultation.

Bama Yao Autonomous County has become a sacred health-retreat destination for many chronic-disease patients, including cancer patients. The whole of Bama County lies almost entirely among high mountains and deep forests. Bama ranks first among the world's five longevity hometowns. This small county of only some 200,000 people has the world's highest proportion of centenarians in its total population. Some of Bama's centenarians are still able to care for themselves and work; their physical condition is truly enviable.

Bama's elderly are mostly healthy and happy. In this way, they mock medicine and the doctors. As someone trained in medicine, I feel ashamed before the Bama people, who have no need of doctors. Our vaunted, advanced modern medicine is, for these local elders, utterly useless waste. They have guarded their health through the healthy lifestyle handed down from generation to generation, living past a hundred and finally passing away without illness, to the envy of the world.

Bama has a saying that it is "eight parts mountains, one part water, and one part farmland." There are more mountains than fields here. The Yao people living among Bama's rugged mountains lead lives almost cut off from the world, with very poor material conditions. By modern eyes, the poverty here was once unbearable. But in recent years, having been named a world longevity hometown, Bama has attracted many health-seekers from everywhere. These out-of-town health tourists have fired up Bama's local tourism economy; the Bama people have grown rich and gradually no longer need, like their ancestors, to survive through hard toil.

In recent years, under the impact of outside material civilization, many young Bama people have also walked out of these mountains, heading to various cities to seek their fortunes, bidding farewell to the habitat their ancestors chose and throwing themselves into China's red-hot urbanization.

I do not know whether the Bama people, now that their material conditions have improved, will still live as long as their forebears. The longevity of the Bama people is closely tied to Bama's natural environment and to the poverty of their material life. Precisely because material conditions were poor, the Bama people have long eaten very simply. People in Guangxi say the Bama people eat mountain corn at all three meals: cornmeal porridge in the morning, corn grits cooked as rice at noon, and corn as the staple again in the evening. They have long been mainly vegetarians, and river fish is the meat they eat most. This plain diet, together with the Bama people's lifelong hard toil and their simple human relationships, has allowed them to be healthy and long-lived.

Yet today's Bama is being changed bit by bit from the outside. Businesspeople from everywhere seek out every kind of opportunity here; high-rises have gone up in the ravines, and inns, restaurants, shops, wellness apartments, and health-cultivation centers have opened in the mountain villages. Health-retreat villages popular with visitors, such as Pozyue, are becoming as bustling as the urban-rural fringes of cities; the apartment blocks going up one after another, for lack of planning, look chaotic.

Local Bama people too can now survive without hard toil. Like most rural areas in China, the villagers here also like sitting around mahjong tables playing tiles; they eat better than before, and because of commercial development their social relationships are more complicated than before. The pristine Bama is gradually receding. Most people who come here for health believe Bama's water and geomagnetism have miraculous effects. Few think of living the simple, frugal life that Bama's ancestors led for so long—yet the health and longevity of the Bama people are greatly connected to that way of life.

The health and longevity of the Bama people confirm one point: health, happiness, and a high quality of life have almost nothing to do with wealth. As long as the Bama people can survive, they ask for no more. Yet we who live in modern cities chase intangible senses of achievement every day, guided by all kinds of ridiculous values and outlooks on life, tirelessly expanding our careers, only to end up far below the "uncivilized" mountain folk in happiness and health.

Modern people's gluttonous, sedentary lifestyle and immense mental stress are destroying our happiness and health. Under the pretext of survival, we endlessly engage in possession; our greedy desires inflate all too easily. We keep expanding our relationships to advance our careers, while spiritually becoming overwhelmed by forced smiles, swallowed grievances, and playing along. Few have thought that we could step out of this foolish human game.

After treating a great many cancer patients, I have felt deeply that most cancer patients are in an unhealthy state of body, mind, and spirit. To truly cure them almost requires a complete reorganization of their lives. Driven by desire, long-term depletion of the body, mind, and soul is the root cause of most patients' disease.

In recent years, the patients I have treated who have survived more than five years have depended to a large extent on treatment beyond medicine. On my advice, they changed their lifestyles, took up strenuous exercise, stayed away from overly rich modern diets, lived on plain food and simple fare, adjusted their psychological state, and completely changed their attitude toward life and the world. These changes have played a role in treatment that even far exceeds that of medicine.

Having life pursuits too high, possessing too much, eating too well, and indulging too much are all a huge burden. As Gibran said: "Possession beyond need is a disease." Having everything one wants is not as good as having nothing one needs. Plain food and drink, diligent limbs, peace and contentment, and choosing a place to dwell—these simplest of common senses are precisely the basic guarantee that a person can survive in health.

When we complain that the medical burden is too heavy, have we considered that it is our own ignorance that has sent us into the hospital and into the hands of doctors? If we had chosen the right lifestyle, we could utterly defy hospitals and doctors, never needing to pay a cent in medical fees. Do not say no such person exists—those Bama centenarians have done it. We cannot do it only because we are ignorant and lack willpower.

The road of life is chosen by ourselves; when a wrong choice costs us a price, we need not blame heaven or others. We greedily possess and pay the price for it, while at the same time hoping for health and longevity. Nature is silent, punishing us only through its omnipresent rules. When illness comes, blaming heaven and earth is useless; birth, aging, sickness, and death cannot be borne by anyone else. Only repentance and reflection, examining one's own shortcomings and sincerely reforming, can more or less help us prolong our years.

Scientists' studies of the world's longevity hometowns show that the secret to their longevity is in fact just some simple common sense; it is not complex at all to speak of, and anyone could do it. It is only that we have lost ourselves in life and violated these basic common senses.

The day after returning from Bama, I learned that my son's math Olympiad teacher—a young man in his thirties—had developed lung cancer and just undergone surgery in the hospital. This once-outstanding young man's life had suddenly plunged into an abyss of suffering. For me this was nothing new, because I have encountered more and more cancer patients even younger than he. Before the cruel reality, I have moved from initial shock and grief to gradually growing accustomed to it.

Human society as a whole is still in its impulsive, restless, childish adolescent stage; we do not yet know how to treat our own lives and the lives of our fellow human beings with kindness. War, poverty, hunger, and disease have long plagued humankind. Although we come empty-handed at birth and leave empty-handed at death, during our time in society our minds still hold far too many desires and ideas that are little more than encumbrances. We desperately hoard wealth against misfortune; we are captured by various ideologies and behave with bigotry and arrogance. In reality, when true misfortune strikes, all the defenses we have built prove almost as useless as waste.

Since taking the road of anti-cancer work, I have seen too much human misfortune, and, summoned by patients from all over to make house calls, my horizons have widened enormously, showing me a life far broader than before. If my former knowledge and experience were only a river, now I have gradually come to see an endless ocean.

While helping patients relieve their suffering, I also bear the expectations and pressure from patients and their families. Honestly, there have been many times when I have wanted to retreat from this road and live a quieter life. It is only that I cannot bear to see the scattered patients occasionally snatched back from the hands of death plunge once more into great terror and struggle, so I still walk on along this daunting road. Gradually, the years have tempered me into increasing composure.

I do not know where fate will take me next moment, whom I will meet, or what I will see. Staring every day at the death of my fellow human beings, my heart has long been tempered to extraordinary strength, and I have let go of attachment to all worldly things. I can hardly be drawn into the world's various disputes, nor will I again be anxious day and night over fluctuations in urban housing prices. I am quite willing to live the pristine life of the Bama people, not pursuing comfort, letting everything follow its natural course, not seeking a long life but only hoping for less illness and pain, more healthy happiness, and a simple existence.