Wang Dongxing made certain that we began our disgrace in style. We were greeted in Harbin by officials from the Heilongjiang revolutionary committee and taken on a grand tour of the city that lasted an entire week. We inspected the well-equipped local militia unit, watching them train in preparation for the coming war with the Soviet Union. We visited the complex underground air-raid tunnels that were being constructed. We saw a number of field hospitals that had been set up on the outskirts of the city. Their medical facilities were simple and basic but sufficient for the emergencies of war. My request to take a look at Zhenbao Island itself was turned down. The skirmishes there were continuing, and local officials told us the place was too dangerous.

From Harbin, we traveled by train to the small and orderly town of Mudanjiang, where we were taken on another sight-seeing excursion. We spent the night along the beautiful Jingbo Lakes, which sit in the craters of a line of extinct volcanoes, linked like a string of pearls. It was a wild and beautiful place, still inhabited by tigers and bears. Many White Russians had fled there after the October Revolution, making a good living hunting animals for fur. Only with the coming of the Cultural Revolution in 1966 had they fled, dispersing to other parts of the world.

Finally, after ten days of sight-seeing and banquets, hosted always by high-level provincial officials, we went to Ningan by car, joined by two other doctors from Heilongjiang. My life as a “barefoot doctor” had begun.

I lived in the offices of a people's commune, sharing a room with the medic Li. Li treated me as a father and took good care of me as well. The fields that surrounded us were huge, stretching beyond the horizon, so large the eye could not see their end—completely different from the small fields and clustered villages in the south. The soil in Heilongjiang was fertile and black, planted with corn and soybeans.

The peasants' homes were different too, constructed of clay, with thatched roofs. The interiors were dominated by the kang, the raised brick platform bed that was the source of warmth in winter, where families ate and slept together without much regard for differences of generation or sex. Unlike most parts of the country, Heilongjiang had not suffered major deforestation, so wood was plentiful and used as fuel for the kang, fed by the chimney of the cooking stove that ran underneath the platform.

Ningan county was populated both by Han Chinese and ethnic Koreans, who had different customs. The homes of the Koreans were neater, thanks to a kind of painted paper they glued across their kangs, which made the brick platforms look clean. The Chinese threw straw on the top of the kang, so their homes always seemed primitive and messy. The peasants in Ningan were not as impoverished as the ones in Jiangxi, but they were still very poor. The rural areas had no doctors, and if any of the peasants needed to see a physician, they had to travel to the city. But none of them had ever even considered visiting a doctor—it cost too much money, and the doctors were too far away. The concept of modern medical care simply did not exist. One day at harvest time an old village woman put an awl through her eye. I had neither the medicine nor the equipment to treat her properly and wanted her to go to a hospital in the city. But the trip was out of the question. The possibility never even occurred to her, and my attempts to convince her failed. She could not afford it.

We were the only doctors most of the peasants had ever seen, and we traveled every day from village to village treating them, using only basic medicines and the simplest techniques. I think Mao had sent me there thinking perhaps the peasants would see me as a “bourgeois remnant” and turn against me, but the peasants were always happy to see us. Whatever help we could give was always better than anything they had received before. Two diseases predominated—tuberculosis and tapeworm. The village pigs wandered free, and they invariably had tapeworm. While fuel was plentiful, the peasants still never cooked the pork well enough to destroy the tapeworm. I enjoyed treating the common diseases of ordinary people.

But I never got to see Lillian. Because China and the Soviet Union were on the brink of war, and Heilongjiang was the place most likely to be affected, she had been transferred to a May 7 Cadre School in Henan, thousands of miles away, just before I arrived. I missed my family tremendously. It was as though some evil fate was conspiring to keep us apart. From the rare letters I received, I knew that life for Lillian and my children was difficult. Rumors were circulating about why I was in Heilongjiang. Some said I had been exiled because I had political problems. Some said I had defected to the Soviet Union or been kidnapped by the Russians. My family was very depressed by such rumors, and so was I.

But my own life in the countryside was peaceful. News from outside rarely reached us. The Cultural Revolution may have been continuing in other parts of the country, but we never knew it in Ningan.

On November 6, 1970, four months after I had arrived, I was on a medical call to one of the local villages when a jeep driven by Commander Zhong, the local military chief who had showed us around when we first arrived, roared into the tiny square. He had been looking for me for hours, riding from village to village. The General Office in Beijing had called. I had been ordered to return to Beijing immediately. The matter was urgent.

I hopped into Zhong's jeep without even returning to change clothes, leaving Zhang and Dr. Niu in charge of the medical team. We raced toward Mudanjiang, which had the only airport in the area, arriving at about nine in the evening. Commander Zhong insisted on hosting a farewell banquet in my honor. I could not refuse. Good manners required such formalities. But I was anxious to be on my way, worried about what I might find.

I arrived at the Mudanjiang airport at about eleven at night. A Soviet-made IL-62—a medium-sized four-engine propeller plane with about one hundred seats—was waiting on the tarmac. It was empty. I was the only passenger. The plane took off as soon as I was on board.

We landed at Beijing's special Xiyuan airport at a little after two in the morning, where Mao's driver, Zhang, was waiting for me. We sped along the empty, darkened streets to Zhongnanhai. I was still dressed in my winter peasant garb—quilted cotton trousers and a heavy quilted jacket—and I was perspiring heavily by the time we pulled up to Mao's residence at the swimming pool. Mao's nurse, Wu Xujun, was there to greet me.

“He's waiting for you,” she said. “Go see him first. Then I'll tell you what happened.”