(18 of 29)
Starting the next day, the food got worse. Some days there was just a little dry rice with boiled cabbage, others just some boiled sweet potatoes. Hunger became a permanent state, an ever present hollowness. The flesh on my body slowly melted away, my eyesight deteriorated, and simple activities such as washing clothes exhausted me. From time to time, I was called for special indoctrination and questioning by militant guards. The guards used these occasions to abuse me verbally and to tell me I would be shot soon or kept at the detention house for the rest of my life. One morning, after coughing all night and being unable to sleep because of a headache, I could barely get out of bed. I asked for a doctor. The guard gave me two aspirin tablets and told me to drink plenty of water. I waited for the doctor, but he did not come. When I asked for him again, the guard said, ''The doctor has gone to the countryside to receive re-education through physical labor. I don't know when he will be allowed to come back. Maybe someone will come to take his place.'' Next day, a young man came to provide medical attention. After I told him I had a fever and had been coughing for nearly two months, he declared, ''You probably have hepatitis. There is a lot of it going around in this detention house. I'll examine a specimen of your blood.'' I was astonished. Any ignoramus would know that I had bronchitis, possibly verging on pneumonia, not hepatitis, an inflammation of the liver with symptoms entirely different from mine. What sort of ''doctor'' was this? When I looked at him through the small window, I saw a country lad, no more than 20 years of age, in a soldier's uniform. I realized he was not a trained doctor at all but had been given the job because Mao had said, ''We must learn swimming from swimming.'' Several days passed; my fever got so high that I no longer felt the cold in the cell. The guard told me to stay in bed. I slept most of the time, in a state of semiconsciousness, with fantastic dreams of myself floating in and out of the cell through the iron-barred window as if I were an ethereal spirit. One morning the young man came back and said, ''You don't have hepatitis. It's probably TB. A lot of prisoners have TB. You may go to the hospital to have a fluoroscope.'' The waiting room of the prison hospital could only be described as a scene of hell, full of emaciated human beings in tattered clothes, with pain and agony clearly written on their wasted faces, waiting patiently for the end. Besides the hunched figures on the benches, there were others wrapped in patched quilts lying on dirty canvas stretchers on the cement floor. When I was finally sent to see a doctor, she said I had high fever and probably had pneumonia. For the next few days, I drifted in and out of consciousness. When my mind came into focus again, I found my arm bound to the side of the bed. I was being fed intravenously. A woman in the ward came over to chat. She said, ''You were unconscious for six days. They thought you were going to die.'' She was as thin as a reed, with hollow cheeks, colorless dry skin, but burning bright eyes. ''Have you got TB?'' she asked. ''This is a TB ward. But I go back to the cell tomorrow because I no longer cough blood. When my condition deteriorates and I cough blood again, they will let me come back. They don't bother to cure us, but they don't let us die either.'' After another week, the doctor told me I could return to No. 1