The Meaning of Three: The Mask

...One evening, while preparing for my teaching classes the following day, I heard the sound of sirens and saw flashing lights outside the window, followed by a knock on my second floor apartment door. Mr. Tang was standing straight and as tall as he could look, surrounded by a number of uniformed officers. I was told to come with them. Being in post-Tiananmen China, was frightening enough, but being taken by the police, without explanation, was even more terrifying. With flashing lights and sirens, the entourage of several official cars left my compound and drove through the streets of Baoji.

As we sped away, the professor explained that I was being taken to a large hospital where the police chief lay dying of cancer. He had been given Western treatment, followed by treatment from a long line of traditional practitioners and healers, and as a last resort, they decided to see if the foreigner could help.

We arrived at the hospital, unlike any hospital I had ever been in, in the West. Th e dimly lighted hallways were covered with dust and spittle; the smell of unfiltered cigarette smoke permeated the air. I was escorted into a room where a dozen or so family members huddled together to say good-bye to the beloved Liu Chin, while provincial officials waited in the background, perhaps anxious for the moment when power would transfer to the next in line. Liu seemed to have difficulty breathing. It was hard to comprehend that this man, just a few weeks before, had been a leader whose words could mean the difference between life and death to any who now stood silently at his bedside.

Liu Chin had been one of the most powerful men in Shaanxi Province, China but pancreatic cancer robbed him of his former strength, and impending death left him with little but memories of who he used to be. His skin was a sickly yellow, and his stomach was swollen so tight that it was apparent he was in excruciating pain. His yellowed eyes, though sunken in dark and shadowed sockets, were not at all empty. They seemed to be filled with the kind of quiet sadness that reveals both pain and acceptance of what is about to happen, a sadness that no longer needs to grasp at the hope in the eyes of others as a last frantic effort to cling to life. His legs and feet stretched beyond the gray sheets, and his body, though frail and thin from the months of struggle, seemed to fill the hospital bed indicating that he was a much bigger man, even in his dying, than most Chinese living in health. I didn’t know much about him, other than the fact that he was a very important government official, whose very name was both feared and revered.

Professor Tang, the only one who spoke English, cleared a space and signaled to me, indicating that I should come forward to begin using what the Chinese considered my special style of Qi Gong energy healing on this dying man. Fear of what might happen to me should I fail to bring healing to him dissipated as Mr. Liu turned his head and looked directly into my soul. I nodded to him and he to me, as if we had known each other a very long time. I closed my eyes and stood in the presence of Mr. Liu’s energy. I felt my
hands raise and begin to float, making infinity sign movements above him as if my fingers were communicating in some unknown language with his body.

So now, in China, in the hospital room of an important political leader, my hands were floating and I still had no idea what I was doing any more than the time I had asked my grandmother if she understood, when I didn’t. I felt like a fraud perpetrating some unholy hoax, wondering how I ever got myself into this situation—and then my hands stopped moving and dropped to my side.