[Excerpts] ...

[...]

Still, there was a gentleness about these steely teachers.

On my birthday, my teacher created a celebration - with an apple - just for me. The apple itself wasn’t so important as the delicious feeling that I had a “mother” all to myself in a private celebration - just my teacher and me - behind the hospital.

In the cutting of wondrously thin, translucent apple circles, she showed me that I could find the shape of an apple blossom. It was pure magic.

On a tiny tin-can stove fueled by twigs, she fried the apple slices for me in a moment of wonder.

Even now, after 40 years, I still look for the apple blossom hidden in apple circles. No birthday cake has ever inspired such joy.

[excerpt]

Weihsien was a society of extraordinary complexity.

It had a hospital, a lab and a diet kitchen. It had its own softball league, with the Tientsin Tigers, the Peking Panthers and the Priests’ Padres playing almost every summer evening.

Though we young ones never knew it, Weihsien also had its prostitutes, alcoholics, drug addicts, roving bands of bored adolescents, and scroungers and thieves who filched extra food from the kitchens and stole coal balls left to bake in the sun.

Compressed into that 150-by-200-yard compound were all the shames and glories of a modern city.

[excerpt]

IT WAS FRIDAY, AUG. 17, 1945.

A SCORCHING heat wave had forced the teachers to cancel classes, and I was withering with diarrhea, confined to my mattress atop three steamer trunks in the second-floor hospital dormitory.

[further reading]
http://www.weihsien-paintings.org/Mprevite/inquirer/MPrevite.htm

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