The summer of 1997 in Northeast China was as hot as a giant iron wok. The ruins of the state-owned factories rusted at the bottom like scrap metal, while the stink of street toughs and the greasy smoke from barbecue stalls rolled through the streets on the wind.
Yu Bei huddled in a back-alley clinic in the urban village, thin as a bamboo stalk left to wilt in the sun. His peeling gold-rimmed glasses slid down to the tip of his nose as he counted painkillers cut with starch. These hands were supposed to hold a microscope. Now they prescribed anti-inflammatories for prostitutes, concocted "miracle drugs" for gamblers, and guarded a medicine shelf cleaner than his own face whenever thugs came to smash up the place. He kept remembering what his medical school teacher had said. Only when shards of glass pierced his palm did he understand that, these days, the words "saving lives" were cheaper than expired glucose.
Then Song Yiren arrived.
A seventeen-year-old nursing school intern, dressed like a cream cake fresh out of the fridge, she frowned at the moldy herbs as soon as she walked in. "This stuff isn't even fit to feed pigs." Nobody knew that she was an intern veterinarian from 2024, with one clear goal: finish her internship and go home to lie flat.
But her plan to lie flat hit a snag on the very first day: she saw Yu Bei crouching on the floor, picking up pieces of his broken microscope, with disinfectant and blood still on the back of his hand.
"Hey," she said, nudging his bamboo-stalk leg with her foot. "If you don't treat that hand, you won't even be able to cure pigs someday."
So when the thugs came back to collect protection money, they got tossed out with a dose of "tranquilizer for rabid dogs." Fake medical records started to feature scrawled notes saying, "Recommend three days of rest."
The wind in 1997 was still hot, and life was still rotten, but when someone else was splashing around with you in the mud, it somehow felt a little harder to drown.
(Inspired by Teacher Han Zhouyuan's kid: Yu Bei)
