Larry's Kidney: Being the True Story of How I Found Myself in China with My Black Sheep Cousin and His Mail-Order Bride, Skirting the Law to Get Him a Transplant--and Save His Life

by Daniel Asa Rose

  “You must have a gazillion question,” Cherry says.

  Larry raises a hand. “Where is the little boys’ room?”

  I help him to a bathroom that has extra-fancy bidets with automatic drying features on one side, but on the other loose rocks around the shower stall to keep water in. It’s like we’re in a time bubble somewhere between Stone Age and Space Age. When we’re all reassembled in the Family Crush Room, Cherry reinvites our questions while a nurse draws a blood sample from Larry’s arm and the residents take scrupulous notes.

  “Have you had Western patients before for kidney replacement?” I ask.

  “Oh, yes, many-many from Middle East: businessman, tycoon, such and such.”

  “What about Westerners from, like, the West?”

  “Just last year before Restriction, a seventy-five-year-old who was also from Florida like you,” Cherry says.

  “What a coincidence,” Larry says, “Not only do we come from the same state, but I feel seventy-five.”

  “But after surgery, eighteen!” Cherry says. We all laugh. Beneath his hangdog expression, Larry has a million-dollar smile when he lays it on.

  “I’ve never had anyone in America get my vein on the first try,” Larry says, amazed as the nurse deftly holds two Q-tips to his vein for a minute, making it stop bleeding without a bandage. “This is certainly a positive sign.”

  “Oh, yes, everything positive,” Cherry confirms. “Flying color for everyone!”

  “I know there are a lot of variables,” Larry says with a beam that everyone in the room mirrors, “and I won’t hold anyone to anything that would hold water in a court of law, not that I’m even thinking that direction, but can you give some sense of how much this might set me back cash-wise, because I am not a rich man, despite my esteemed title of professor.”

  Despite our best efforts, we cannot get the barest glimpse of how much a transplant might cost or when it might become available. The attempt goes on long enough for a couple of patients’ relatives to come into the room, slip off their shoes, stretch out barefoot on a plastic couch, and fall asleep. The one thing Cherry is unreserved about is that the hospital’s track record with this surgery is exceptional. “Hundred percent success rate so far.”

  “Is that possible?” I ask, skeptical. It hurts my eyes to widen them.

  “Oh, yes, we do over four hundred surgery last year, not so many this year because of Restriction, but many notable patients, including Saudi prince two months ago, Korean diplomat, also a very famous Chinese film star, but it is pity she is gone.”

  “Well, that seventy-five-year-old from Florida, for instance,” I ask. “Would it be terribly unethical to give an idea of what he paid?”

  “Oh, not the sort of question at this juncture,” Cherry says. “But in this particular field of organ transplants, we are considered one of finest hospital in all region.”

  “Really?” I ask. “By whom?”

  “This is the track record,” she says matter-of-factly. “First job now is to see about the patient’s condition. Already I can report from blood tests, he is viable candidate for surgery. During last hour I have been in consult with Dr. X over phone, and he say all system go. Hip hooray! So later when Dr. X assess situation with own eyes, then we discuss financial arrangement, so forth so on.”

  “Cherry, this is a city of nine million people,” Larry interrupts, cutting to the chase. “I assume you have some good food here?”

  “Oh, yes, we are renown for our fried scorpion dumplings.”

  “What I’m really asking is if you have any fast-food franchises?”

  In a minute the whole group of us has piled into a cab, and we are on our way downtown to a local Kentucky Fried Chicken. Larry is so buoyed by the prospect of an American meal, and a captive audience, that he takes the opportunity to unburden himself on various subjects: the American moon landing (never happened), health clubs (he’d visit them if they had couches to lie on), how to solve the organ-donation problem. On this last he suggests two options: (1) adopt the Spanish approach and make donating the default, so if you don’t officially opt out, you’re automatically an organ donor. With the proper incentives, “lifetime movie passes or what have you,” the problem of kidney donations would be licked within five years. And (2) make motorcycle helmets optional.

  Two traffic jams later, our high-spirited group wades through a grove of eighty bicycles to gain entry to a KFC, the hottest spot in town. We wait in line to get served, and just as we’re about to order, a group of secretaries nonchalantly cuts in front and beats us to it. No one seems perturbed, not even Larry, who’s soon tucking into his mashed potatoes, reviving even more with tender memories of his first job ever at a KFC in Everett, Mass.

  “This was a part-time job?” Cherry asks. She puts a small chicken wing in her mouth and doesn’t take it out until everything that’s edible is gone and the bones are whistle clean. Despite her elegance and efficiency, she eats KFC the way the Chinese used to eat chicken twenty-five years ago, except for spitting the remains on the floor.

  “Goodness gracious yes, I was all of fifteen at the time,” Larry replies.

  I don’t remember him being underage, but I do recollect—and I assume it’s a good part of the tenderness he’s manifesting—that it was the locus of his first lawsuit. Slipping on water from a defective freezer case, he managed to spill hot chicken oil on his forearm and ended up suing the establishment, inaugurating him into a lifetime of litigation that has been a lucrative sideline ever since. “How much did you clear on that first one?” I ask him.

  “Around nine hundred dollars, as I recall. Not bad for a fourteen-year-old in the sixties.”

  “I thought you said you were fifteen.”

  “I’m cognitively impaired,” Larry shoots back. “I’m fuzzy on my details, but on my general outline? A hundred percent.”

  “Like our hospital record!” Cherry says.

  Neither of these boasts does much to allay my qualms, so I privately put the overriding question to Larry. Check in at this hospital or bounce to the Philippines?

  “It’s really all the same to me,” he says. “The motel you found in the Philippines is thirty-five dollars a day, and my room in Beijing is forty-four dollars, so it’s a difference of nine. I can’t go wrong either way.”

  This strikes me as an imperfect way to choose life-and-death medical care, so while Larry begins regaling the table with a description of how good American coleslaw tastes—and what a travesty it is that Chinese KFC swaps it out for bamboo shoots and lotus roots—I go to join Cherry at the communal washbasin outside the bathrooms, where she’s rinsing her hands.

  “Sorry for being pushy about this,” I begin.

  “No problem, I will talk hard balls to you.”

  “Great, because we’re at a crucial juncture right now. We have to make a decision tonight whether to cancel our flight to the Philippines tomorrow and entrust you with his survival.”

  “But impossible to know answers to your questions,” she says. “Every case different. The first important thing is healthy for Larry.”

  “Agreed, but is it at least possible to tell me if the price here is roughly comparable to the price in the Philippines? Because the only hard figure we’ve been able to get is that it’s around eighty-five thousand dollars in the Philippines. Is that ballpark?”

  “Maybe ballpark,” Cherry says.

  “Okay, thank you. Can you also give me an idea of where the kidneys come from? Because we hear all kinds of things in the West about prisoners and religious sects and—”

  Cherry cuts me off with a general answer about the condition of the kidneys, which, she assures me, will be top-notch. Dr. X is renowned for this sort of transplant. Medical colleagues all over the Third World send him their relatives to do.

  “Am I answer all your question?” she asks pleasantly. “Need more to pump my info?”

  “Well, the other main thing I need to know is, is it legal?” I demand.
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  “Hard to say that, because Chinese people don’t really know laws. But if doctors can get, is okay.”

  I look over at Larry, who appears to be demonstrating how he couldn’t eat lotus roots even if he wanted to, “given what condition my teef are in.” Reading my cousin’s lips is not an ability I ever planned on developing.

  “So what I’m sort of gathering,” I say to Cherry, “is that it’s official policy not to do transplants for Westerners—”

  “But only true so-so.”

  I incorporate her interruption. “Which only true so-so. Maybe it’s what’s known as a Beautiful Law, so-called because they look good on paper but there’s no enforcement?”

  “Could be,” Cherry says. “No one on the outside really knows, that’s the thing, all secret. You part of secret now, too.”

  “So it’s sort of an open secret, but no one knows the details. Made trickier by the fact that the central government makes the laws, but it’s up to the locals to carry them out.”

  “So not very transparent situation,” Cherry confirms. “Also liquid all the time.”

  “Okay. So even though it’s officially illegal to traffic organs to Westerners, if a well-placed surgeon has a way of procuring an organ for a Westerner, he’s not questioned.”

  “Yes, of curse,” she says kindly.

  “And Larry and I won’t land ourselves in jail?”

  “Jail? No, I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t think so?”

  “Of curse not,” she clarifies patiently. “Rest easy. You are in good hands.”

  Well, all right then, that’s what I wanted to hear. I’m partial to those five words. We are in good hands. It’s such a human expression, so reassuring on a primitive, tactile level, that I surrender. We don’t know the cost, we don’t know the time frame, but in the end it comes down to hands, and something about Cherry’s makes me trust them. Competent, strong, maybe even wise hands. It’s a leap of faith, but here we go, crossing the Rubicon, making the emotional commitment to put our fate in the hands of this capable young lady. Larry is in my hands, and I am in Cherry’s hands, and Cherry is in Dr. X’s hands, like a series of nesting dolls with Mama Mao at the end.

  Our business concluded, I duck into the bathroom to rinse my contacts, and while I’m doing so, the right one shreds in my fingers. The pollution’s eaten it away. My teeth taste granular; when I blow my nose, it feels like the Great Wall. Also, I make out a smudge mark in the middle of my forehead like it’s the beginning of Lent, only I got this from banging into the cab’s ashtray. Scrubbing it off, I wonder how many hours I’ve been wearing this mark of penitence, and no one thought to tell me?

  I emerge from the bathroom to a blurry scene. With only one contact lens, I can’t immediately locate our party near the windows. Then I spot Jade, a figure of clarity in a fuzzy, fast-moving space. Seeing me emerge safely from the bathroom and begin to pick my way across the noisy room, she raises her hand in a victory salute to me. I can’t quite make it out, but is she, are her…?

  Yes. Those thin fingers are crossed.

  CHAPTER 8

  Anaerobic Memories

  Once on a tiger’s back, it is hard to alight.

  So we’re moving our little opera to the city of Shi. We’re canceling the Philippines and committing ourselves to Cherry and Company. One little glitch: Before we can install Larry in this hospital, we have to return Jade to BJ, check out of our hotels there, then scoot on back. Should be a snap—in our minds we’ve already moved.

  Round-trip, however, is going to require two separate journeys.

  Our faithful cabbie’s waiting outside the hospital when our party returns from KFC. He’s used the hour to play games on his cell phone rather than catch up on sleep. Making our farewells, Jade, Larry, and I exit the city the same way we entered, via a series of medieval ramps and pulleys, but things look different this time. When we arrived in sunlight, Shi appeared bleak and grimy, a grim town of harsh angles. But with darkness it’s transformed itself into a neon wonderland: sprays and spoutings of illuminated fluorescents. Sidewalk trees, storefronts, and a bonanza of billboards are adazzle with flashing bulbs. I can’t say for sure, because my one remaining contact lens is smeary, but there even seems to be a nighttime amusement area not far from the hospital, where a series of colored fountains provides a blinking liquid backdrop to a promenade on which couples seem to be…figure-skating? Whirling each other round and round?

  I’m a sucker for neon, especially when it’s in a language I can’t decipher, and am cheered by its fluid warmth. But a few blocks on, Larry thinks he reads messages in the garish squiggles.

  “Did you notice all the massage parlors in this town, Dan?”

  “Where?”

  “There! There! We just passed another one! You’re going to have a good time in this town.”

  It’s like a Rorschach test, I think. He’s managing to read into these foreign graphics every kind of fantasy vision. And just like Larry to use such a grandmotherly word as “parlor.” Well, I suppose there’s something to it. If I squint, I can see some of those letters looking vaguely like a woman’s legs. Or hips. Wiggling hips, because the neon’s moving. Wait a minute—those are breasts being advertised there! The target of neon squirts and spumes. Larry’s right: There are massage parlors all over the joint! With real-life hostesses in ankle-length gowns beckoning real-life customers, all washed in vivid, reflected color.

  “Let’s just call it Massage Central,” Larry suggests. “The real city name is too hard to pronounce anyway.”

  Larry is still coming off the high of mealtime. The attention of so many female medical residents at dinner has apparently made him feel munificent toward womankind. He directs his attention to Jade in the front seat. “What do you do, dear? Dan tells me you’re a grad student. What are you studying?”

  “Foreign relations.”

  “From what I can see, I’d say you’re already very successful at foreign relations,” he tells her. “As Dan may have already told you, I am a professor. Here I’m just a poor schmuck of a patient, but at home, if I ever manage to get back there, they call me sir.”

  “What you professor of?”

  “Customarily I teach negotiation, which I can tell Dan thinks is just a fancy term for haggling. I also teach mediation from time to time and as such am called upon to mediate complex legal cases. High-status people from the top echelons of society come to me for advice.”

  “Is that true?” I ask.

  “Moderately,” he says. “Have you ever been to America, dear?”

  “I have never been on a plane,” she offers.

  The more we drive, the more Larry’s good mood drains off. Soon munificence gives up the ghost. He has cycled through many moods in the hours since Mary left, trying to find equilibrium, and now he has to add fatigue to the mix, as well as nervousness about moving into the darker reaches of China. He’s finally allowing it to hit him that Mary’s gone.

  “I don’t feel very well,” he says, commencing a series of wet hiccups. “Usually I would go to bed after exerting myself as I have today. I don’t take a car ride like this ordinarily.”

  “No one takes a car ride like this ordinarily,” I say.

  It’s rush hour now, so the breakdown lane also contains shards of cinder block, wrecked dishwashers, and the occasional vehicle driving the wrong way. We seem to have mistakenly gotten onto a secondary truck route, a dusty road with a red light every half mile or so, squashingly full of thirty-six-wheelers, none of which keeps our driver from nodding off for four and five seconds at a stretch. In order to find the correct highway, for a time we’re the ones driving the wrong way in the breakdown lane. Eventually we find the right road, but this presents us with a new issue.

  “May I ask why they’re erecting tents in the breakdown lane, with women standing by them waving flags?” Larry asks.

  “Overnight restaurants,” Jade says. “Not very clean.”

  “Do tel
l,” Larry says, bringing his palm to his brow. He now has a migraine on top of everything else. “You have no idea how bad this feels,” he reports.” Everything itches. Feel right here,” he says, offering the raised scar on his forearm, the fistula.

  I make a conscious decision to suspend my policy of not touching him in order to put my index fingertip on the glazed lump. I get a buzz like a soft version of those shockers you conceal in your palm.

  “Aches like hell,” he says.

  Jade frowns with sympathy for his pain. “Larry is biting bullets,” she says, reaching around and taking his hand.

  “I’ve had a lot of bad moments in my life, but this is the worst I’ve ever felt,” he says, chewing on a handful of anti-nausea pills. “This has me thrown, I have to say. This is the most nervous I’ve ever been.”

  “Look, all you have to do is get through tomorrow and you’ll be in one of the best hospitals in China,” I remind him. “Movie stars. Saudi royalty. Maybe they’ll fix you up with some Chinese herbs.”

  “No thanks. I’m a purist: straight pharmaceuticals for me.” His effort at a smile dies on his face. Between the driving conditions and being abandoned by Mary, he’s not far from having a panic attack.

  “More and more bullets he bites,” Jade says, squeezing his hand.

  “Oh, I miss my mutha. I miss my sister,” he says, rocking with anxiety.

  To take his mind off the present situation and remind him what he’s accomplished in life, I try to get him talking again. “Jade, this is a guy with a heart a mile wide. Wait till you hear his saga about how he saved his twin sister from epilepsy.”