Glenn Washington (24:41)

Snappers Ping and her husband have been fighting all the way up this honeymoon mountain. Before we climb after them, we're going to take a short break. Stay tuned. You know, when your new jacket becomes your go to jacket. It dresses up, it dresses down. That's what happened after I picked up a few pieces from Quint. Now I'm wearing this double brush stretch overshirt jacket all the time because it's sharp and Quint has things you actually want to wear like organic cotton silk polos, European linen beach shorts and pants you can wear anywhere without worrying. And the best part, the best part, everything with quince is priced 50 to 80% less than you'd find at similar brands. Luxury pieces without the luxury markups. Yes, this is my Flowknit Breeze performance long sleeve polo from Quint's. Getting all the compliments. Elevate your closet with quince. Go to quince.com snap for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's Q U I N C E dot com snap to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com snap welcome back to Snap Judgment. You're listening to the Ping episode now. Ping just fought off a band of monkeys on her own. All the while her husband laughed in the corner and now she's headed to the hotel to spend the rest of her honeymoon with the man she just married. Snap Judgment.

Ping Wang (26:37)

So we got there and it was about the dinner time, but I had to clean up. My jeans were just like soaked in blood. So I took them off. Then I like soaked my jeans in the basin outside in the tap water and my husband came out and he looked a little bit sad. He looked as if he wanted to reconcile with me. He threw his dirty socks and his dirty underwear into my basin where my bloody son of jeans were, right. He said, wash it for me. And just something inside me just exploded. I understand his motive. It's an intimate gesture for traditional Chinese men for the wife to wash. My husband is looking for needed a woman who would quietly cook, wash, do housework and raise children. I always knew I wanted to have kids and taking care of my husband, but not in this kind of fashion. I said, why don't you wash your own socks and underwear? So I just take them out, wash my jeans and then went back to my own room with other women and spent a sleepless night. I could not sleep at all. We got up like 3:00, 3:00am we went to the peak. That was like the most glorious scene. So I was with one crowd and my husband was with another crowd. And we watched this magnificent sunrise, just the sun coming rise little by little out of this mist ocean. Then when it's all over, I walked towards him. I told him, I'm going down the mountain, I'm going back to Beijing. I am not going to Germany with you. And he thought about it. He said, you're probably right, we're not meant for each other. We're not made for each other. Then I said, can we just file divorce right now? And I can just bring that divorce paper down with me so I'm free again. And he thought about it. He said, well, when you go back as a single woman, you will encounter a lot of great difficulties. First of all, you don't even have a place to live. And you have no money, you have no food to eat because you lost your job already. Do you know where you're going to stay? I said, that's none of your business now. Right? I will figure it out. Then I turned and walked down the mountain by myself. And I was just sobbing all the way down the mountain and I was crying in the train and I was telling myself, you're such a failure king. Right? Loser, you know, and it's supposed to be such the ideal marriage and you messed it up and now you are homeless. You know, you don't have a job, you don't have a place, you don't have. You don't have money, you don't have food to eat. What are you going to do? You know? I got my baggage was not easy. They almost arrested me for trespassing. But I finally got my baggage and also my bike. I just biked around and I spent the winter in Beijing. From abandoned building to another. Every once a week I would go back to Beijing University to that concierge lady and ask her if I got mail. She would always grumpily gave me my mail. And one day I found this mail. I got this mail from German Embassy that I got the visa. You know, I was really hungry, I was very cold, and I was homeless. I had no future. And here the door to paradise is wide open to me. The normal people would say, yeah, I'm going to Germany. I didn't speak a word of German and without the language, I couldn't work right, I have to go to him, stay with him. But I chose not to go. So I chose homeless. It was my stubborn nature.

Glenn Washington (32:59)

So what happened to Ping? Everyone wants to know. Well, Ping did eventually make it out of that cold Beijing winter to cover poetry professor emeritus in cold snowy Minnesota. She's an award winning poet who's published 15 books.

Ping Wang (33:15)

And.

Glenn Washington (33:16)

And this next clip I'm going to play for you is Ping on stage performing a piece from one of those books. You might even recognize some of the elements from the story we just heard. But listen for additional details about what happened after she came down from the mountain. Ping Wang with the poem. A flash of selfish consciousness Flash of selfish consciousness.

Ping Wang (33:41)

This poem is for the memory of cultural evolution. I grew up there since I was nine. Yeah, eight. Eight years old. And for 10 years I have to write self criticism every day in my family, at home and in school, or wherever I was at that time. And since I came here, I never had to do it. And sometimes I did feel kind of nostalgia. It's easy to do a good deed here and there, but a different matter to keep it up daily. For evil has many faces, and we must dig into the bottom of the soul to catch flashes of selfish consciousness, as Mao urged us in his Red Treasure book. It hurts, but it's good to be heard from time to time, says my Chinese doctor, digging, elbowing and kneeing into the acupuncture spots of the body. The body twitches and arcs and screams with a serene smile on his face. The doctor says pain awakens the heart and keeps it in good shape. When I was seven, I became crazy about Wu Xiang double five spiced beans. My grandma would give me only two or three each time, five if I was good. So I began to steal coins from under her pillow, one at a time. When I got 57 coins, I went to the store and bought half a kilogram of the beans. I took the bag to the kitchen and poured it onto the greasy table. I put my arms around the pile. This was all mine. I didn't have to share it with anyone else. I didn't have to pretend to be a selfless daughter or an elder sister. I could eat it quickly or slowly, standing or sitting or lying down. Any manner I fancied I could throw or give it away. I was the master of these bees. The kitchen was dark. The sun was shimmering in the sky of the summer noon. The beans smelled seductive. I filled my mouth with a handful and chewed until my jaws ached and numbed. Tears rolled down as I thought, ah, life is so good. And wouldn't it be better if no one ever woke up from their nap to interrupt my happiness? Happiness is, as much as anything, an illusion, a hypothesis, or a process of overcoming a series of pains. The sensation of feeling uprooted and floating, or stuck in the present, unable to move back or forward. You said, too bad women don't give you a chance. But do I really want a chance?

Ping Wang (36:46)

You.

Ping Wang (36:46)

You placed your hand on my shoulder. Your eyes the look of an animal. One day I asked mother, something is wrong with me. I feel dizzy and nauseous. My joints hurt like hell, my face burns and I'm pissing blood. Too much sex My dear daughter. Mother, I just got fired from my job, my writing rejected, and I might lose my apartment in the summer. What's going on? Sex brings bad luck. How many times do I need to tell you, Mother? My days are now filled with despair and my nights taken over by fever and bouts of sweat. I can't make friends with women. Men dump me for lack of tenderness. Mother, I think I'm going insane. This is the last time I say this, Daughter. Sex is the root of all sickness and evil deeds. Look at me. Since your father's death, I got my health back and my eternal happiness.

Glenn Washington (38:10)

That was poet Ping Wong performing an excerpt from her award winning work. Thank you so much, Ping, for sharing her story. We'll have links to Ping's work on our website, snapjudgment.org that original score was by Daniel Riera. It was produced by Annie Nguyen. Now in just a moment, the serenade of a lifetime. Stay tuned. Welcome back to Snap Judgment. My name is Glenn Washington. Now our next story comes to us from our friends at the Nocturnist. And in it, family medicine physician Katherine Forrest tells us about a hospital experience that transported her back to her childhood.

Katherine Forrest (39:22)

Of course, it was the ER nurse that figured it out. This motherly Ukrainian woman sidles up to me and pats my belly. I have his child. No, she says. How did she know? Only two days before, I'd been hiding in the nurse's bathroom in the er, propped up in the stall with pregnancy tests in my hand, waiting to see what I was going to find. And when that second pink dot lit up that I was pregnant, I practically screamed holding it in. But that was going to be a secret. You see, this was the 1980s, and to my knowledge there had been only one woman at my university, which shall be named unnamed, that had had a baby in training and hadn't dropped out of medicine completely. The nurse promised me she wouldn't tell anyone, but whenever I came into the emergency room, she gave me that knowing look. This was Mount Zion Hospital. It's in a neighborhood that is at that time was largely Eastern European and Russian. We had mostly immigrants for our patients. I remember this one feisty older Hungarian woman who had life size posters of the 49ers in her room and would page me overhead excitedly when she found out that I was from Hungarian heritage. And when I got there, you know, we were all about Roger Craig and Joe Montana's latest play. But mainly she just wanted to pinch my cheek. She would say, just like my Hungarian grandparents. It was really A sweet and wonderful time in so many ways. The morning I found out that I was pregnant, I had admitted a 92 year old Russian woman to our service. I was a third year medical student on the team and she'd had a stroke and was in a coma and unresponsive. And her son comes walking up and tells me and the intern, we want her to have dignity, he says. And the intern like, looks blankly at him. Keep her this way, he says, we want a friend to come visit Zegzis. And he's like, the intern's like completely clueless. But I could hear English in any one's speech. In fact, when I was nine years old is when I figured out that my grandparents didn't speak English like other people. I thought that's just how older people spoke, you know, like my friends would come over and I'd be translating English into English. So when this 92 year old woman was there and her son was trying to speak with us, I could step in and translate. And I did. I was able to say that this woman had a living will, the family wanted her to live, and that a special guest would be coming that evening. It is Isaac Stern, he says, Isaac Stern, only the greatest violinist of that time. My jaw drops, but my classical musician's heart leapt two octaves. So later that night, quite late, this older, balding, thick man comes striding up to the nursing station with his worn violin case. And I go to meet him. I would like to find Ms. Bina, he says. Mrs. Bina. I'm making up her name. And I'm completely speechless because I recognize Isaac Stern. So we walk down the hallway and a nighttime hospital is a sacred place and really quite odd. There's that blue light from rooms for people watching tv, and there's the sound of, you know, canned laughter and mechanical sounds of respirators. And the nurses are all different places charting, but there are no visitors. So together we walk down the hall and he says, maestro taught me everything I know about music. Everything I know. And she was like a mother to me. And I say, well, she's not awake right now, but we know that hearing is the most primitive of the senses. And if you can communicate with her, she will. You'll be able to connect. You should feel free to do that. And we arrive at the door and he says, it is okay if I can if I play violin? Absolutely, I say. Absolutely. And then I realize, is it okay if I listen? And he says yes. And I take his hand and we walk into her room. Together. And there's my patient with her head on the pillow, her face sagging, looking ashen. And there's Isaac Stern, transparent with emotion. I say, isaac Stern is here to play some music for you. He takes his violin out of the case and begins to tune up. And I step out of the hallway and I sink down onto the floor, hands on knees, to listen. When I was just a kid, my brother and I used to climb under the piano of my grandfather. My grandfather and my father were playing four hands piano versions of symphonies. And we felt like we were inside that piano, like the music was part of us. So as Isaac started to play this Tchaikovsky violin concerto that I know so well, but never have I heard played.

Ping Wang (45:36)

Like this.

Katherine Forrest (45:40)

Tears are just streaming down my face and I feel my grandfather actually with me. Beautiful, he says. Beautiful. I'm just crying. After about 30 minutes, Isaac Stern comes out of the room with wonder in his eyes. And he says, she opened her eyes. She looked at me. I looked at him, he looked at me. We held hands. I looked in his eyes and he knew that I knew what had happened. I stepped inside to see my patient, Ms. Bina. And there she was, peaceful looking. And a couple hours later, she died. That night as I climbed into my bed, I felt actually completely at peace in the universe. I had heard celestial music being played, and I was very excited about this life inside me. And I just hoped with all my heart that my child would be able to experience music the way I had that night, just coursing through my body. The next morning, I get up, put on my lab coat, get off to morning rounds, reach into my pocket, pull out those index cards. Yeah, index cards. And Miss Venus is blank. She died in the evening, I said. But what I longed to say was that I learned something really important about human connection and that Isaac Stern's music had made the most beautiful death possible for this person. Sun.

Glenn Washington (48:02)

That story, dying to Tchaikovsky, came to us from the Nocturnist podcast. It was told by Kathryn Forrest, M.D. the Nocturnists are a vibrant community of healthcare workers who are celebrating their humanity through storytelling, deaf live performances, a podcast, and so much more. The Nocturnist is hosted by Emily Silverman, produced by Emily Silverman and Marina Poole, story development by Adelaide Papazzolo, sound engineering by Alberto Hernandez with assistant producing by Kirk Klocke. Original theme music by Yossi Munroe. Additional music by Blue Dot Sessions. Learn more about the Knockers on our website snapjudgment.org yes, yes, you've just walked a mile in someone else's shoes. How does it feel? Like you want more journeys, right? Like whose life you get to live? Next, here's what you do to be the most interesting person your friends know. Follow Snap Judgment on any podcast platform for more incredible stories from all over the world. Snapjudgment.org Snap is brought to you by the team that greets each day with a smile. Except for the Uber producer Mark Ristich. He greets each day blaming random people for hiding his keys. Check your pants Pocket Mark, Nancy Lopez, Pat Messini, Miller, Anna Sussman, Renzo Gorilla, Shayna Shealy, Teo Ducat, Flo Wyllard, John Fascinating Seal, Marissa Dodge, Regina Berriaco, Davy Kim, Bo Walsh, David Exime, and Amy Nguyen. Wow. This is not the news. No waste news. In fact, at the kids party you could pull a rabbit out of a hat only to realize this is not a hat and that certainly isn't a rabbit. All of this and you would still still not be as far away from the news as this is. But this is PRX.