Queen Mary or Guangzhou Number 4
May 23rd, 2007This blog was honoured last week to be recognized by Hemlock’s Diary, www.geocities.com/hkhemlock/  the most savvy and sardonic blog in town –and in full colour. It was a glancing acknowledgement, pointing out that my presence on the internet, akin to a water droplet in the Pacific, was a sign of how alarming it was becoming.
Which is excellent and this caused me to read the whole diary for 13-19 May and enter the world of the ‘Big Lychee’ It memorializes the comfortable but cynical planet of the long stay British expat which has rotated in a unique fashion from Robinson Road up for decades but is slowing down as each Hemlock leaves for the Chilterns or the Cheviots or through Cape Collinson.
I found something there to take small issue with. He wasn’t being quite fair about Ma Lik.
Mr. Ma is troubled by a cancer and Hemlock suggested that he went to Guandong for treatment because he could not face being seen to in hospitals like Queen Mary, named after members of the British royal family. Princess Victoria Mary Augusta Louise, Queen Consort of the United Kingdom, Empress of India , Queen of Ireland and Princess of Teck in the Kingdom of Wurttemberg may be quite an awkward portal to walk through for one dedicated to the Motherland and closely allied to the CCP. However, as one who has his teeth pulled in Shenzhen, I think there may be other motives for Mr. Ma’s choice.
If you go to Queen Mary as a resident using a government hospital at a hundred bucks a day, waits will be long, attention will be impersonal and the wards will be communal. It will be uncouth; socialist but uncouth. If you use the wife of King George V as a private hospital- which you can do- then all that will be smoothed away but at a considerable cost. You would have to be wealthy or have armour plated insurance to meet it and many people can arrange neither.
One way between is to pay for yourself in China. You can buy treatment in China. Indeed its seems to have become the only way you can get it no matter how poor you are, though there are promises that will change. The Guandong option will cut out the waiting and the communism but it will not deliver the standards of Her Serene Highness the Princess of Teck. Indeed doctors I have talked to here are distinctly sniffy about standards over the stream but it will cost a lot less on the private than the Empress of India and may be affordable out of a middle class man’s own wallet.
There is another reason that patients might take the Guandong option. If doctors here wash their hands of you as beyond treatment, the Mainland can lure you with radical new procedures that have only been clinically tested on cockroaches in the corridors and could carry you off all by themselves. Hospitals up there can also play the Chinese Traditional Medicine card. Where something as critical as cancer is concerned its codswallop but I know perfectly sane and skeptical Chinese friends who tried it, out of last resort ,and died.
If you are in something of a medical corner then, whether it’s a hospital in Pokfulam named after a lady with a bustle and a tiara or one in a smoggy Chinese city numbered simply 4, it is what is giving you most hope within your means that counts. That is why, for the moment at least, my gums are very happy in Shenzhen.
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