On Chinese Foreigner Hospitals

Yesterday morning was our scenic trip to the Beijing International Travel Healthcare Center in Haidian – the (only) Beijing address to get one’s residency permit healthcare check completed. A 45-minute bus ride North in reverse-peak traffic brought us to the center, located in a new, fast-growing suburb of Beijing (half of the neighborhood was currently under construction, with similar-looking ten-story apartment buildings common to many new areas around the city). The center is only open 8:30am-11am during the week, and was correspondingly crowded with hordes of fellow 老外, despite our pretty early arrival at 8:45.

The center was an exercise in efficiency. Each part of the medical check (chest X-ray, EKG, vision test, blood test, weight, blood pressure…) was conducted at breathtaking speed in a different room, between which we shuttled with our paperwork, collecting stamps at each station. My longest stopover at any station was probably in the room of their ancient-looking EKG machine, in which the attending nurse had a quite difficult time ripping up my shirt to put voltmeters on my chest (I had a button-up shirt on over my t-shirt, and despite my repeated offers to take off the button-up (met with annoyed calls of 不不不), she preferred to just semi-violently push up my shirt until it was finally awkwardly bunched enough for her taste). Despite the power struggle between my clothes and the machine, I was still in and out of that room in roughly 90 seconds. Relatedly, EKG machines are weird as hell.

Now one thing to mention about this process and its efficiency – it was very clear that the focus of the process was primarily getting as many foreigners out with their documents as possible. Sure, the chest X-Ray, blood test, and EKG spat out results that are probably being analyzed right now, but the prevailing attitude seemed almost to be along the lines of ‘we need this done, you need this done, let’s just get it over with’. The eye doctor asked us to identify one letter each only (the letters were all either E, W, or M), and seemed to care incredibly little about the line in the floor marking presumably where one was supposed to stand for the exam. The Yenchinger after me barely got to the desk (three feet closer to the exam board than the line) before the doctor slapped his stick on a letter.

In the end, it was an interesting experience. It wasn’t really the ‘Chinese hospital experience’, since it seemed like the main purpose of this place, at least during weekday mornings, was to process as many visa health checks as humanely possible. To be honest, I’d probably be pretty happy if I don’t end up in any hospital, included cultural experience or not, over the next year. So, with my health checks in hand (or at least in four business days when I get them back), I’ll soon be off to the next step in becoming a (temporary) resident of China!

PS: Next blog post is gonna be fun – I’m going to dive a bit into the PKU graduate student handbook. We had to take a test on it.