Zhou Qingshan
He was twenty-one then, standing on a mountain road and panting, his sweat-soaked white shirt clinging to his body. The sun was sinking behind the western ridge, and the clouds on the horizon had turned dark red, as if the mountains were on fire. A few wisps of cooking smoke rose from a distant village, faint and delicate, barely visible in the dusk. He thought, This place is so remote.
He didn’t know that he would spend thirty years in these mountains.
Thirty years were enough for a fresh-faced young man to become a middle-aged man with graying hair at his temples, for a muddy mountain trail to become a paved road, and for a clinic staffed by just two people to grow into a township hospital with more than a dozen medical workers. In those thirty years, he went from being the one who chased after others to the one being chased, from an apprentice to a master, from “Little Zhou” to “Doctor Zhou,” and then to “Old Zhou.”
