Clarks:

Something unusual happened today.
Something very strange.
We don't know the outcome.
And we probably never will.
I even wonder, Should I be writing this? Should I tell the story?
Yet, it is the sort of event that you cannot let go of, that you feel you must share.
And that may forever leave you questioning.
How did this happen? Why were they out there?
Is he OK?
Is he alive?


The morning was heavy with fog and damp with a cold, wintry mist. Cars and buses sliced their way along the wet street below our home, their lights reflecting in a thousand directions upon the street and through the white, liquid air. People, like colored plastic bobbins, scuttled along the sidewalk and out into the day, wrapped in protective layers until stiffened thick, fuming spent air, grey and heavy as exhaust.
Into this day we ourselves went, bundled warmly, snug in our comfort.
We took a stack of 100-yuan notes, a tithe we had set aside, to buy gifts for some of our most helpful administrative colleagues. Something to say thank you for all they have done to make us feel at home, to help solve our problems, and to care for our needs.
I had been listening to a sermon the night before, about sacrificial living. About giving.
It felt good to be headed outside to buy something for someone, to finally be putting some of our ministry money to use.
I had wondered, though, in the night -- before falling asleep, cozy in our humble but restful bed, my head laid softly upon my pillows, the heated air wafting through the room -- I had wondered how, and where, and who we could possibly be helping. Where are the poor people? Where are the needy ones?
This is one of the nicest, most advanced, most civilized, and most prosperous cities we've ever lived in. As they like to say, Hangzhou is Paradise on Earth. It's a great place to live, and a pleasant place to work. People are kind, well-educated, and for the most part, it seems, well-off. Most of our friends drive cars. Some own multiple homes. No one we know lives without heat and air, and no one's hands are chapped and blistered with the chill of frostbite.


We had just left the IN-TIME department store's spacious, upper-floor Starbucks, having had a couple of drinks each, and carrying a couple of bags full of Starbucks' exquisite Chinese New Year coffee mugs -- some for gifts, plus a mug for each of us as well. We'd spent something like 600 yuan, I guess. I hadn't kept track of it; it was mostly ministry money.
Cecely had seen a hobo, as she described him, walking along the sidewalk below our view while we sat sipping coffee a few minutes earlier.
I didn't get a look at him, but his shoes, she said, were obviously something he had found, several sizes too large, clownish on his small body. He carried a bindle stick across his shoulder, his few meager possessions bound inside. "He was going that way."
I wondered if we might see him now, approach him, and buy him some new shoes.
But the only people we saw were middle-class, like us.
So we went on, looking in store windows, popping into a couple of places along the way, searching for some new corduroy trousers, or anything else that might catch our eyes.
And it was just about that time when we first saw him.
Not the hobo, but someone else.

We've seen so many bizarre things in our time here in China. We've seen so many poor, sick, bedraggled people. We've seen women throwing up out of bus windows; we've seen men in bloody head wrappings, the likes of which we had once thought only existed in old-fashioned cartoons with their violently slapstick plots; we've seen babies and toddlers with I.V. needles fed into their foreheads, watching those very same cartoons, old Tom & Jerry re-runs, on hospital televisions. We've been passed on the roadside by people on bicycles -- one driving, the other sitting side-saddle and holding on from behind, holding high his own I.V. drip bottle with his free hand. And we ourselves have collasped, more than once, from nausea and dehydration.
This is life in a developing country.
Some places, we know, have it much worse.

We'd never seen this before -- not this exact situation.
At first, it just seemed to be a young man holding a thick wad of tissue to his face, bent over, trying to stop up a bloody nose. In fact, I had gone right past without hardly noticing.
But Cecely stopped a few feet on, and then, as we looked more closely, we realized that this man -- supported at one side by an older gentleman whom we supposed to be his father -- was not well, not normal at all.
His lips were swollen, his eyes sunk-in, his whole face a horrible mix of pale and black and blue. He was a walking, breathing corpse.
He had collapsed to his knees upon the cold, wet sidewalk.
Although his hands were scabbed and painfully swollen, it was not as though he'd been beaten up and left for dead. It was, rather, as if he were dying from the inside out.

We asked what was wrong.
The answer -- mumbled in some unknown Chinese dialect by the whiskered old man, whose nose ran thick, down to his upper lip -- was unclear, but certain. His boy is sick.
"You need to go to a hospital. Do you have any money?"

Passersby puzzled at the scene as we pulled out a handful of left-over hundred-kuai bills and handed them to the old man -- We believe in Jesus; this money is from Jesus -- whose son was now standing, moving forward, and now, once again down on his knees, weak and struggling.
"Where are you from? What's wrong with him?" we asked. But none of the answers made any sense to us. And no one else stepped in to translate.

We continued, the four of us, down the sidewalk.
Every few feet the boy would collapse.
His father would then pull him to his feet and on we would go; a few more steps, and down; another few, and fall.
We might have helped, but we were afraid. Afraid to touch him.
Did he have AIDS, or some kind of cancer? Or was this the result of a communicable disease?
How could we know? How would we ever?

At one point we saw the old man, whom we had let get across the street ahead of us, asking directions from someone. We followed, keeping our distance. Partly due to fear, and partly due to pride -- his actually, not ours: Strangely, the boy, despite (or because of ?) the condition he was in, actually halted at one point, threw off his father's grasp, and refused to go any further -- apparently angry or embarrassed at our tagging along -- whereupon the father insisted that they should go ahead without us.
So, we stopped.
We stood still and watched from a distance as they climbed onto a bus.

The characters on the bus stop sign indicated a hospital just a few stops ahead.
We wanted to get on the next bus, go behind them, see what would happen.
But we didn't.
We walked away.
And as we left, I know, we both silently prayed.