Waiguoren's day out

I was surrounded by hordes of squirming, grimacing, guffawing children; half a dozen burly, unsmiling nurses; piles of syringes and rack upon rack of tiny vials of blood.

No, this wasn't a second round of cautionary Tory anti-drug ads. This was a day-long medical check-up for the students at a migrant elementary school in the far north of Pudong.

We arrived first thing in the morning after about two and a half hours in transit via subway and taxi, up past bizarre "free trade zones" and into the thick of an out-of-place residential laneway in the middle of an uber-industrial area. The place was a zoo of small children spending recess running around an open, paved yard and playing ping pong. They gaped, giggled and pointed at the foreigner--"Waiguoren! Waiguoren!"--which was awkwardly hilarious.

Our task was to oversee the children lining up to have their blood samples taken by a row of nurses parked at tiny, retro-looking metal-and-plywood school desks. The classroom itself wouldn't have been out of place in a 1950s Communist China PSA: the walls were whitewashed concrete (or something like concrete, but less dense-seeming); the metal hinges and fixtures on the windows were rusty; the miniature desks and chairs were an off-blue colour and deceptively heavy given their size; there were posters on the wall exhorting rules such as "Love life, love the Party."

The nurses were clad in long white coats and blue tissue caps; they were strong and unsmiling as they knotted taupe-coloured elastic tubes around the students' tiny arms and poked and prodded in search of a vein.

But the best part was the kids themselves: Dozens of students crowded in waves into the small room, clutching medical forms that invariably became crumpled and ripped almost in two by the time they were out. All the kids were handed glass vials with their student number the nurses used to put their blood sample--not the best idea, in my opinion, as the rascals spent the time waiting using the little tubes as pan pipes, mimed telescopes or fake swords. Given the number of times those things were dropped on the floor, I certainly can't attest to their sterility when the blood samples finally got put in them. But whatever.

For tiny children being poked with sharp needles and having their blood syringed out before their eyes, these kids were pretty brave. The little kids didn't seem to know what was going on, so they fidgeted in line, played with their vials and gaped at the weiguoren, whose words of comfort were limited to "Bu yao pa" ("Don't be scared") and who spent most of the day herding kids and handing the post-shot peeps candy to boost their blood sugar and staunch their tears (medical professional right here, everyone). The oldest children, who were around 10, jostled to see what was happening at the front of the line, and shoved each other dangerously close to the syringes.

This was one of the lucky migrant schools to have achieved the status of "ming ban," which means it's considered a privately run official school and gets government funding. But the teaching resources still aren't as good, and of course the kids don't get any medical care at all; these blood samples and eyesight tests could be their only contact with the medical system for years. The depressing part is, if the blood tests reveal something important about their health (one of the doctors testing the samples as they went along remarked she had already found several incidents of gastrointestinal issues, likely the result of poor hygeine and unsafe food), chances are the kids' parents won't be able to afford treatment, anyway.

These kids didn't give a shit about that, though: They were too busy scampering around, cheeks stuffed with candy, proudly displaying their now-illegible medical forms and cotton ball-bandaged inner elbows.