Life for me began on the afternoon of August 21, 1990 in the Beijing Marine Hospital (北京海军医院). I was the only boy born in that ward on that day. One could imagine how happy my parents were over the fact that their first and only child was a boy. It certainly made my grandmother happy, as she immediately rushed to the hospital the moment she heard I was born. My mother later told me that she was the one who carried me home from the hospital. Boys certainly are well regarded amongst Chinese families. They are the ones who preserve the family title and because of the one-child policy in China, the birth of male babies certainly carried with it a lot of importance.
My parents named me 方舟, which are the Chinese words for the Great Ark that Noah built in the Great Deluge. My friends nowadays often ask me whether my parents are Christians or not for naming me after one of the most famous stories in the Genesis portion of the Bible. But no one in my family is a Christian and I was named after Noah’s Ark due to the belief that it meant good fortune and future to my parents.
Many years have since passed and memory fades a little. Yet there are select moments from my early childhood that are still retrievable from the archives of my memory and play like a grainy silent motion picture from the early 1920s. Piecing those together with accounts and memories from my family and one gets a clear picture of those early years.
I was frequently sick when I was an infant. My mother often jokes about me attending the hospital more than a doctor does for work. I would spend weeks in the hospital, where my aunt came to look over me like a guardian angel when my parents were busy. My frail health led to one crucial incident that nearly killed me. I was slowly recovering from fever and that was when my parents took me to the serene Beihai (北海) Park one warm spring day for a walk. Afraid that the gentle breeze would exacerbate my fever, they wrapped me up in layers and layers of clothing like a stiff mummy. The heat produced by all those layers of clothing stifled me. This took a turn for the worst when I slowly lapsed into a seizure. Frantic, my parents rushed to the roadside to call a cab. Alas, there weren’t a lot of cabs back then. My parents finally hitched a ride on a small minivan or 面包车 which drove me to the hospital. My life was saved right there and then by the engine of a kind stranger. The incident led to another extended stay in the hospital. The incident took a toll on my health and I would remain a sick child in many years to come. I attended hospitals so often that I started to have a phobia for doctors. Once a good doctor tried to fix my dislocated arm but I resisted him like I was fighting for my life. My mother told me that I fought so hard that I tore his watch right from his wrist. Thinking about these stories nowadays, I often thought that it’d be a good idea if I had tracked down the identities of the kind stranger who drove me to the hospital and this good doctor whom I treated like a Gestapo officer, repay the driver for his kindness and apologize to the doctor for my abhorrent behavior (maybe buy him a nice watch too).
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