This entry is another look back at my life in JiangxiW, the southern province where I lived and taught English for two years before moving onto Nanjing and Beijing. It details one of the strangest occurrences that I encountered while living there. Let us go back now in time and explore this tale of mystery and science. Please note that all of the following events are true. Nothing has been altered for the sake of creative purposes. Carry on, dear reader….if you dare! (We hear the sound of creepy church organs in the background… a sinister laugh comes from the darkness… you open the dusty book and read the words you find below)
There’s a building full of corpses about 75 meters away from where I teach. Next to the Humanities building sits the Medical Science building. Due to my busy schedule as an English teacher of some 13 classes of more than 450 students, I don’t have much time to dwell on what goes on inside the building. Recently, however, my Swiss friend and colleague, Simon, has been prodding me to join him on a tour of their classrooms. Besides medical students, some of my own students have to take various classes there that have nothing to do with medical science (i.e. intensive reading, extensive reading, Mao theory, etc). I have one particularly innocent student whose English name is Elizabeth who skips class every time they meet in the medical building for fear of the corpses’ ghosts that are lurking in the hallways. Before I go any further, one must understand that Elizabeth is truly one of a kind. Sometimes this expression “one of kind” is trite and cliché, but I’ve never met anyone like Elizabeth before. She is the kind of girl who seems to be living in her own fairy tale. She cries at the slightest gust of wind, as if her entire body is made of tears. She enjoys drawing pictures of flowers and angels, and she often gives these to the foreign teachers (myself included) as gifts. She loves Korean culture “more than she loves herself.” She believes anything and everyone. I remember once some students of mine gave me a gigantic stuffed Santa Claus doll as a birthday present. Elizabeth asked me if she could have it after my birthday. I gave it to her, and she now sleeps with Santa every night (she is 22 years old now).
Six months after Christmas, Simon informed her that it is tradition to drink a bottle of beer with Santa at exactly midnight, otherwise “none of your wishes will come true,” (she often talks about wishes and falling stars, etc.). She, of course, ate this explanation up immediately, not once questioning how ridiculous the whole idea was. Nor did she question whether or not Santa actually exists. Still, I hold Elizabeth close to my heart. She brings out the dreamer in me. Besides Elizabeth, there are a handful of other students who are afraid of the medical building. I have heard rumors that the medical building’s human dissection labs simply leave the cadavers out in the open for all to see. Regardless of whether you are a medical student or not, you can roam the halls of the building and breathe in the smell of formalin and take in the sights of decaying bodies as you make your way to a Mao Ze Dong theory class.
I have a friend from Nepal named Dr. Jeet who teaches Medical Aesthetics at Yichun University. All of his students are either from Nepal or India; none of his students are Chinese. Yichun University and a group of about 200 or so Indian/Nepalese medical students made a deal this past year enabling them to use Yichun’s facilities for the next four years. Apparently these Indian/Nepalese students did not pass required tests to enter the medical university of their choice in their own respective countries (this is what I was told). Also, studying in Yichun is much cheaper than studying in India or Nepal. So, this year Yichun has had a sudden influx of students from these two countries. The students study in the medical building, but besides this fact, they have no other connection with Yichun University. They live in a separate dorm and take separate classes from their Chinese counterparts. They even have their own cafeteria and cooks. Dr. Jeet teaches them everything, including human dissection. My interest for the morbid piqued, I decide to ask Dr. Jeet if I can attend his course. With a pearly white smile, he agrees and I join him, Simon, Brandon (another American colleague), and Yolanda (one of our students) for a day in the lab.
Upon entering the laboratory, the first thing that I am struck by is the smell of chemicals, most notably, formalin. In order to keep the bodies from “going bad,” they need to pump them full of this stuff. There’s nothing else that smells like formalin, and after a couple minutes inside the laboratory, I notice that my eyes begin to itch and water. The room is full of about 40 or so Indian medical students standing around in white coats and masks. We are given white coats and masks as well. There are three tables with three separate cadavers displayed for the class to see. The bodies are cut open with their organs displayed. Today there are two male cadavers and one female cadaver. They all have the same slightly grayish hue that one associates with a winter in London. I’m told by Dr. Jeet that most of the cadavers in the laboratories were convicts in life. I guess they hadn’t finished paying off their debt to society during their living moments. As we watch the students handle the organs, with no obvious objective in mind, a film crew comes in to document the class. Apparently a journalism class caught wind of the fact that three white people would be attending the dissection course today. Nothing goes unnoticed in China. One of the Indian students hands me the convict’s right lung. I learn that while the right lung has 3 lobes, the left one only has 2. This discrepancy is due to the fact that the heart usually lies on the left side of the chest cavity, taking up the space where that third lobe would lie. I probably learned about this in high school, but it leaves a deeper impression in my brain after handling an actual human lung. I walk over to Dr. Jeet and see that he is now holding a human stomach in his hands. He turns the stomach inside out so that we can see what the inside looks like. As he does this, a small speck of stomach flesh flies out and lands on a student’s lab coat. Dr. Jeet stops talking for a second, there is a pregnant pause as all eyes look down on the speck of stomach flesh on the student’s lab coat, and then everyone laughs a silly doctor’s laugh together. He continues to talk about the stomach. We stay in the lab for a while, just staring at the bodies, learning bits of information about our own anatomy. From time to time, various students pass around miscellaneous human organs from student to student, as if they are handing a church donation basket from one member of the congregation to the next. After the itching in my eyes gets to the point of discomfort, I turn to Dr. Jeet, thank him, and we head back to the Humanities Building.
One Week Later
Yolanda comes running up to me, a look of panic on her face. One of her classmates is hot on her trail. “Jeffrey, Jeffrey, you have to come quick. We found a human face next to the #1 cafeteria,” she says.
“What are you talking about? That’s impossible?”
“No, I’m serious,” she insists. Simon has come out of the Humanities building. She explains to both of us that in the grass next to the #1 cafeteria she and her classmates found a dead man’s face lying facing up. I look at Simon in disbelief. To provide us with evidence, she shows us a picture of the face on her cell-phone. We both look at the picture, but it’s not a very clear shot. We decide that Yolanda needs to take us to the #1 cafeteria immediately.
As we walk to the cafeteria, Yolanda fills us in on the details. Apparently at 3pm she and some other students noticed the face outside the cafeteria. I look down at my watch. It’s almost 6:30pm now. It’s hard for me to believe that, with so many Chinese people walking to and fro on campus, a human face could survive, untouched, in the grass for more than 3 hours.
When we arrive outside the #1 cafeteria, Yolanda motions in the direction of the face, but she refuses to approach it. She, too, is scared of ghosts. Simon and I walk towards what appears to be a small brown lump of coffee grounds. The cafeteria’s windows are on our right. The staff has begun to take interest in what we are doing, and they peer out at us. It’s not common in these parts to see two white people poking around in the grass for a human face. As we approach the brown lump, the mass begins to take shape. It is indeed a small face. The face is smaller than a regular human’s face, and its color is an abnormal brown. It appears to be the face of a man, as I notice some mustache stubble poking through the upper lip. I stoop down and look at it more closely. Simon refuses to believe that it is a real face and insists it is a mask. But as I approach the face, I notice the distinct scent of formalin that I know all too well from the laboratory. I can only assume that the face has shrunk in size and changed in color due to exposure from the elements.
By now quite a crowd has gathered by the windows in the cafeteria. The staff continues to stare at me, becoming more and more suspicious by the minute. I look at them and decide right then and there that I’m not leaving here without taking the face with me. I can’t just leave a face in the grass by a cafeteria! “Do you have a plastic bag?” I ask one of the cooks. She searches for one and gives me a small bag a few seconds later. With the bag in my hand, now comes the tough part. I don’t really want to pick the face up, but I know I have to do it. Still, the thought of feeling the face in my hand is not something I want to keep with me throughout the night. Instead of directly picking the face up with my hand, I pick up the face with a small stick, inserting the stick through its empty eye socket. I then gingerly place the face into my bag. With witnesses all around, we leave the cafeteria and head back to the Humanities building.
In the evening I find a Chinese medical student named Lewis and take him to my office to view the face and confirm that it is in fact from a human being. He looks at the face for a few seconds and then glances at me inquisitively. “Where did you find this?” he says. “By the #1 cafeteria.”
Later, hordes of students stop by our office so that they can see the face. They all want a look at the oddity that has creeped into the halls of the Humanities building. I feel like Indiana Jones returning from an archaeological dig. As I am surrounded by my fans, I look up only to see Elizabeth standing in the doorway, white as a ghost, with a look of horror on her own face. She refuses to look at the face for fear of having nightmares for the rest of her life. By now, the medical building has been closed and I’m sure Dr. Jeet has gone home. There’s nowhere else to put the face but have it stay in the office for the night.
I look at the face and wonder about his story. Who was this guy in real life? Was he a murderer? Did he ever get this much attention while he was alive? Was he lactose intolerant? Maybe he was in the Red Army. Maybe his children are wondering what happened to him. Maybe he never had children. There are so many things I’ll never know about him or his story… so many questions, and not one answer. I decide that the only thing to do is to put him inside my desk for the night and leave the questions to my imagination. I close the drawer, say goodnight, turn off the light, and leave the office.
In the morning when I return the face has once again changed in color and there is mold growing on his cheeks. So this is what happens, I think to myself…all part of Mother Nature’s course. I give Dr. Jeet a call and tell him the story. He seems puzzled as to why the face was where it was, but this puzzle is a mystery never to be solved. He agrees to send one of his students out to meet me in between our two buildings to retrieve the face. Despite a slight impulse to keep the face as a kind of mascot for the foreign teacher’s office, I know I must return it to medical science. I take one last look at the face and seal the bag tightly shut, never to be seen by my eyes again. Outside there is an Indian student waiting for me to return the specimen to the greater good. Without any fanfare or ceremony, I hand the bag to the student and head back towards my office. Silently, I say farewell, wondering what adventures lie in store for him in the medical building. I head back to my office and make a pledge to myself to never eat in the #1 cafeteria again.