I opened a small clinic at Jiefangbei in Chongqing, specializing in the “strange illnesses” that modern hospitals couldn’t cure.
That night, in a torrential downpour, a Rolls-Royce screeched to a stop outside my door. A woman in high heels rushed in, carrying an unconscious child. “Save him!”
Three days later, the child was discharged, hopping around happily. But she thrust a lawyer’s letter at me: “Practicing medicine illegally. Get ready to go to prison.”
I smiled and folded my ancestral prescription into a paper airplane. “Could you settle the cost of the herbs? Three yuan fifty.”
Later, she got drunk in my clinic and murmured that her stomach hurt.
I handed her some hangover tea. “This time, the consultation fee is double. Seven yuan.”
She suddenly grabbed my wrist. “That child... actually...”
