After Luo ZeLuo Ze — Leader of a Doctors Without Borders team; Eden’s adoptive father and teacher. adopted her, Eden was finally able to receive proper, sustained medical care. Even so, nothing could reverse the paralysis of her lower body.
She was bright, quick to learn, and keenly aware of all she owed those who had helped her. Even Luo Ze—a cantankerous old physician who was hardly easy to please—could find little fault with her. Medicine gradually became the focus of her education, and Luo Ze naturally became her teacher as well as her guardian.
For the first time in her life, Eden began to understand what it meant to have a home—even if that home was far from gentle.
Luo Ze gave Eden her first anatomy lesson when she was eight.
It was a bright, mild day in early spring. It should have been a day for a father to take his daughter to a meadow to fly a kite—to watch it rise into the sky, their laughter ringing across the fields.
But the simple happiness of ordinary life had never had much to do with Luo Ze, and now his apprentice had to suffer for it too. In the clinic’s basement, the only light came through a narrow skylight, falling across the cold dissection table before them.
Luo Ze hid his concern behind demands and reprimands; Eden had long since learned to obey.
I remember an old man who used to sell ice pops from a pushcart beside Father’s clinic when I was little. His cart had a bell, and whenever it rang, children would gather around. They would buy their ice pops and sit on the steps outside the clinic to eat them.
And me? I would watch them from the second floor.
I envied them terribly, but Father would never let me have one. He was a stern man from the East, and he would not let children eat anything cold or “cooling.”
In the winter of 227, Luo Ze prepared to leave for an epidemic-stricken region on his own. Eden, however, insisted on accompanying him. She was driven partly by her attachment to him, but even more by a desire to prove that she was ready to become a physician in her own right.
In the epidemic zones, entire towns had been sealed off. The dead could not be buried quickly enough. Medical supplies were desperately scarce, and patients had to be triaged according to prognosis. Again and again, doctors were forced to decide who should receive the scarce resources still available: medicine, beds, and hours of care.
In other words, they were being asked to pass judgment on the value of a life.
Teacher, even if all these patients are destined to die, I don’t want to simply give up on them. At the very least, I want them to have the right to choose whether to go on living. And if we cannot give them even that, we should at least let them die in peace.
Eden could not accept such cold calculations. After all, years earlier, her own teacher had saved her precisely by defying that same logic—by choosing to treat a child already deemed “no longer worth treating.”
So she learned to push herself to the limits of endurance, again and again, simply to give her patients a few more choices than they would otherwise have had.
And somewhere along the way, beyond medicine and apprenticeship, the two became father and daughter in every sense that mattered.
Time flowed ceaselessly on. It could dry up seas and wear stone to dust. It could also turn a frail little girl into a beautiful young woman and bend a stubborn father’s back beneath the weight of age.
The old man had once taken that child into his arms—a child who could not walk—and pushed her wheelchair through streets and hospital wards. Now that child was grown. She reached out and drew her aging father into her arms.
Dad.
Her embrace was as warm and fierce as the first light of a newly risen sun.
