Of course, the amount raised this time was enormous. Besides Li Xiangyang, many other people generously opened their wallets. Even Shu Wen Ming and his wife donated fifty thousand yuan to the foundation to show their support for Jin Yue and thank her for curing Xu Wenli.
Shu Jin Yue was practically dazed with happiness at seeing so much money come in all at once. She had never imagined she could inspire so many people to contribute.
But wasn’t this also recognition of her medical skills?
Thanks to her, many people who might not have survived were still alive. They’d had the chance to attend her event promoting traditional Chinese medicine, and when they learned of the foundation’s difficulties, they had all done what they could to help.
Naturally, Jin Yue herself had donated the largest sum. In that respect, she had certainly set a good example.
After reviewing the detailed donation records, Jin Yue felt deeply moved. “We must use this money wisely. Every cent must go where it’s genuinely needed, to people who truly need it. We can’t disappoint the kindhearted people who have trusted us.” If the funds were misused this time, she would be too ashamed to continue the work. She couldn’t allow this reservoir of support to be ruined in her hands.
Anna nodded. “I’ve already compiled the full itemized accounts. Yin Yin helped me sort and organize some of the information. She used to work at a foundation, so she’s been able to draw on her experience.”
“By the way, I called Sister Hongping. She should be arriving within the next couple of days.”
“So that’s why my ears were burning! Someone’s been talking about me.” Her voice arrived before she did. Wang Hongping strode briskly up to the doorway of Jin Yue’s office. “Well, well. Director Shu certainly cuts an impressive figure these days.”
The two women had seen each other often over the years, so neither was unfamiliar with the other’s appearance. But Wang Hongping was still unmarried and had never had children, and she retained a youthful air. Every time Jin Yue saw her, she was struck anew by how beautiful she was.
“I’m nothing compared with our rich Sister Hongping. You’re the one who really has style. So many promising young men are waiting for a chance to have dinner with you.”
Wang Hongping gave her a reproachful look. “Nonsense! Speaking of which, if you know any suitable men, why don’t you introduce a few to me?”
Jin Yue knew plenty of people, but most were patients she’d met while treating their illnesses. She rarely interacted with them privately and couldn’t vouch for their character, so she didn’t dare introduce anyone carelessly. Still, having been asked, she promised to keep an eye out.
“And you’re calling me rich? You’re the real wealthy woman now.” Wang Hongping took out several documents. “Here. These are the figures for your stock account and your government bonds. Take a look.”
“If all that paperwork is too much trouble, just look at the final figures here.”
Following her slender, fair finger, Jin Yue saw two numbers. Her stock account was now worth nearly one million yuan, and she held another three hundred thousand yuan in government bonds. Yet all of it had started with a principal of just two hundred thousand yuan… Shu Jin Yue couldn’t begin to imagine how Wang Hongping had turned the two hundred thousand she’d originally entrusted to her into so much more, as though rolling a snowball downhill!
“Is all this money really… really legal?” she asked timidly. The returns were absurdly high. Wang Hongping shouldn’t try to fool her just because she knew little about finance.
Wang Hongping swatted her. “Oh, get out of here! Don’t talk nonsense. I’ve worried myself sick looking after this money for you over the past few years. I’ve kept such a close eye on it all day that my vision’s gone blurry. Do you think the figures could be fake?”
That was true. At first, Wang Hongping had reported developments to Jin Yue as they happened, asking for her opinion and authorization. Later, both women became busy, so she stopped asking every single time. She judged the situation herself, selling immediately when it was time to sell and buying when an opportunity arose. Again and again she bought and sold, sold and bought, and the principal grew a little with each round until it reached this astonishing sum.
Jin Yue suddenly felt a twinge of regret. If she hadn’t bought land and opened her hospital back then, and had instead entrusted all that money to Wang Hongping, wouldn’t she be even richer now…?
“Be satisfied. This is already a great deal of money. We’re seeing plenty of bull markets these years, so if you want to put in more, now’s a good time. But in a few years, who knows?”
The stock market was going wild. Prices rose every day, and seemingly everyone who entered made money; the only difference was how much. Nobody seemed to believe the market could ever fall. But Wang Hongping couldn’t shake a vague unease. “That’s why I brought these figures today—to remind you that if you want to add more money, do it now. Later might not be so favorable.”
Jin Yue remembered the worldwide stock-market crash she’d heard about, which she associated with around 1997. There were still several years to go. “All right. I’ll invest a little more. Sorry to trouble you again, Sister Hongping.”
“Why be polite with me? The commissions you pay me each year are hundreds of times my salary. How could I not give your money my full attention?”
Both women burst out laughing. Wang Hongping sat down with Anna and Yin Yin to discuss the foundation’s affairs. With nothing else she could contribute, Jin Yue went home early.
After all, she wouldn’t understand their discussion even if she stayed. She might as well finish work early and spend some time with her children.
With these two capable reinforcements joining the team, the foundation was soon running smoothly. It had oversight, compassion, and a group of kind, enthusiastic, hardworking young people. In just two years, the Hu Peiyi Foundation became widely known throughout the country.
Jin Yue used her network of contacts to distribute the foundation’s information to major hospitals across the nation. If a seriously ill patient met its criteria, the hospital could let them know there was another possibility of getting help.
Before long, the number of outpatients and hospitalized patients at Jin Yue Hospital began climbing rapidly. Patients from every corner of the country knew the Hu Peiyi Foundation’s name. They also knew that if other hospitals had no way to treat an illness, they might still have a glimmer of hope at Jin Yue Hospital.
Jin Yue treated most of these patients primarily with traditional Chinese medicine, occasionally combining it with Western medicine. The results were generally quite good. And Chinese herbal medicines really were inexpensive.
Even when long-term treatment was necessary, the overall medical bill for someone with a serious illness was surprisingly low.
Beginning the following year, Li Xiangyang, Wang Matte, Xu Wenli, and even Yamaguchi Sachiko, who had heard about the foundation all the way over in Japan, took the initiative in asking Jin Yue to hold a traditional Chinese medicine cultural salon every year. They wanted her to share health and wellness knowledge with everyone, and they wanted to keep donating money.
The foundation received donations every year, with the total increasing year by year. Because treatment costs per patient were not high, the money could help more and more patients. As the number of people helped grew, so did the foundation’s reputation.
At the following year’s International Women’s Day awards ceremony, Shu Jin Yue was chosen as one of Shilan Province’s March Eighth Red-Banner Holders. At the province-wide Labor Day awards ceremony in the third year, she was named a Shilan Province Model Worker… She was only approaching forty, yet had already won such honors. It seemed only natural that the provincial television station would interview her.
Meanwhile, after treating so many difficult and unusual conditions, Shu Jin Yue could clearly feel her medical skills advancing rapidly. She could now occasionally attempt to treat illnesses she’d previously been reluctant to take on.
For example, not long after the foundation was established two years earlier, a patient with stomach cancer had arrived. Western doctors had estimated that the patient had about six months to live. But after taking Chinese herbal medicine, the patient had survived for over two years and was still doing well, without surgery or chemotherapy in the interim.
But cases like that were far too rare to be persuasive. Jin Yue instructed everyone not to publicize it; she would simply continue her work. How much could survival be extended? How much could quality of life be improved? Only a sufficient quantity of data could answer those questions.
And she couldn’t obtain that “data” by using exaggerated claims to attract patients. That would interfere with their decisions. Better to let people who genuinely wished to try traditional Chinese medicine come of their own accord.
“Director Du really has a gift for writing! He wrote the news report about our visit to patients in need in remote areas last week. It was so good I nearly cried reading it—boohoo…” Li Xuemei praised Du Aiguo at length. “Nobody could object to making him office director. He’s earned it!”
“He’s brought us so much positive attention over the past few years. His articles are often picked up by newspapers and television. Thanks to those pieces, we have visibility in the mainstream media.”
Shu Jin Yue nodded. “Being able to write well is a valuable skill. We can never afford to be without people who can write.”
Li Xuemei suddenly chuckled. “Director, you probably don’t know that young people these days are getting into something called feminist novels. I heard there’s a very famous author of that sort right here in Shu City.”
Jin Yue didn’t understand. “What’s a feminist novel?”
“I can’t explain it very well. That’s what the newspapers call them. There’s a bestselling book called *A Bed of One’s Own*, and apparently that’s the kind of novel it is.”
Jin Yue had never even heard of it. “What’s it about?”
Since there was nothing urgent to do, Li Xuemei sat down and explained. “It’s about a boy called Xiao Lei. Ever since he was little, he liked girls’ things—wearing dresses, tying his hair into pretty braids. He was gentle and sensitive, and everyone called him a sissy, but he didn’t care. Then, when he was thirteen, he actually started menstruating… That’s when they found out he was intersex.”
Jin Yue understood roughly what she meant. The example was extremely familiar: she had once treated a teenager just like that.
“Xiao Lei’s parents thought it was unbelievable and took him to the hospital. But the doctor discovered ovaries inside his pelvis.”
That was even more familiar to Jin Yue. Afterward, the entire family had come to Jin Yue Hospital because they suspected the first hospital had made a mistake. They’d heard that Jin Yue Hospital had the province’s most advanced equipment and highly skilled physicians. But the doctors here also identified ovaries. The parents became so angry that they caused a disturbance in the examination room. Jin Yue happened to be there that day and went down to handle it herself. The treatment plan had later been decided under her care too.
It was a pitiful story. The child’s mother had already given birth to three daughters, so the pregnancy with Xiao Lei was already well beyond the permitted number of births. But the parents were desperate for a son. A fortune-teller predicted another girl, so they recklessly tried to defy fate by having the pregnant woman take the legendary “sex-changing fetus pills” prescribed by a traveling healer. When the baby was born appearing to be a boy, the whole family rejoiced, thanking heaven, earth, and the wandering practitioner who had provided the medicine.
Little did they know that this “son” would never enjoy the things boys liked. The child wanted to wear flowered dresses and braid their hair. At puberty, there was no beard or prominent Adam’s apple; instead, breasts developed, and menstruation began!
“Don’t you think Xiao Lei suffered terribly? The parents wanted a son so badly that their greed and preference for boys harmed the child. Someone who should have been a girl was forcibly turned into a boy. Only when the truth finally came out did years of inner conflict and suffering lift. At last, she understood that this was who she truly was.”
And *A Bed of One’s Own* was about her inner thoughts, her struggles and confusion throughout adolescence…
Jin Yue knew the medical case well. Later, she had discussed it with the parents and asked the child’s own wishes. Considering both physical and psychological health, she had concluded that living as a girl would suit the patient better.
Menstruation meant the uterus and ovaries had developed sufficiently to function. Unless surgically removed, they would continue causing regular monthly bleeding for decades. If that blood couldn’t leave the body, it could cause abdominal swelling, pain, infection, and potentially life-threatening complications.
In the end, the whole family, including the child herself, agreed to travel to Haicheng for surgery so she could live fully as a girl.
The events had really happened, but the story had undergone so much literary adaptation that even the patient might not recognize herself in it. Jin Yue frowned. “Who wrote this book?”
“An author called Mai Dong! It’s wonderful. Director, you really must read it when you have time. It’s so moving, with so much struggle and uncertainty!” Mai Dong… Mai Dong… Jin Yue repeated the name twice, and her eyes suddenly lit up. Wasn’t that the pen name her eldest brother Shu Wen Yan had used in her previous life? So he had ended up taking the same path again, even using the same pen name.
However… “I have a feeling this author might be a man. What would a grown man know about feminism?” It wasn’t that Jin Yue simply disliked Shu Wen Yan. When he was at his most sarcastic and cutting, even Aunt Li was no match for him. Having him write feminist literature made Jin Yue wonder whether the more he wrote, the further he’d stray from the subject.
If he stopped writing about what mattered and instead viewed everything from the perspective of a man who benefited from the existing system, what kind of feminism would that be?
But Li Xuemei passionately defended an author she’d never met. “Director, please read it! It’s really different. Several young women in our office cried over this book. It’s so beautifully written and so real, as though the things in it had happened to us. We’ve all experienced what the protagonist goes through. It’s very moving. You have to read it! I even heard that a Japanese director wants to buy the film rights!”
Well, there was no point arguing with a fan. Jin Yue decided she really ought to go home and read “Mai Dong’s” novel carefully.
No wonder, now that she thought of it, her eldest sister-in-law had bought a new car within the last six months. Even Mengmeng had bought an imported mountain bicycle that, according to Second Brother’s estimate, might cost more than a car despite being just a bicycle. And Yaya had upgraded to an expensive piano… Such extravagant spending suggested that Eldest Brother really had struck it rich.
That tightwad! His wife and daughters were spending lavishly, yet he’d shown his own father filial consideration only by giving him a case of Moutai. He still dressed like an impoverished elementary-school teacher too. He really was the stingiest member of the entire Shu family!
When Shu Jin Yue got home, she asked her second brother whether he knew about it. He thought for a moment. “I didn’t know before, but now that you mention it, I think it must be him.”
“Who? Who are you talking about?” Xu Wenli had just come home from work and caught only half the gossip. Her curiosity was driving her mad.
“Enough talking. Dinner’s ready. Come carry the dishes!” Teacher Shu called from the kitchen. Ever since the weather had turned warm, the family had stopped eating in the kitchen and started taking their meals outside in the courtyard beneath the grape arbor. It was brighter, the air was fresher, and most important of all, it was cooler.
“Where are the children?”
“Watching cartoons.”
Mengmeng and Yaya were now both in high school, already young ladies. Little Ping’an had also grown into a teenager. The television at home had been commandeered by the two younger children, the boy-and-girl twins Su Yue and Su Xing. Every day after kindergarten, they planted themselves in front of it to watch cartoons.
Jin Yue was about to go into the living room and collect the twins when the phone rang. Zhao Wan Qiu was cutting watermelon nearby and answered it. After exchanging only a few words, her face broke into a delighted smile. “Jin Yue, it’s for you! Lin Zhen!”
Jin Yue hurried over. Lin Zhen had already graduated, but because she’d become pregnant and given birth, she hadn’t returned to China yet. She’d been living in Country A these past two years.
“Are you coming home?”
“Yes. You really are my best friend.” Lin Zhen’s voice sounded strangely distant, and she seemed to sigh.
Jin Yue immediately sensed that something was wrong with her mood. “What’s the matter?”
“I… I’m all right. It’s Eric. He’s… not doing very well right now.”
Shu Jin Yue quickly covered the receiver. “It’s all right. Take your time. Tell me what happened.”
It turned out that ever since the outbreak of the K virus two years earlier, a pharmaceutical company had recruited Eric to work in its laboratory developing a special treatment. At the time, he would have preferred to research vaccines, believing prevention was more important than treatment. But vaccines took a long time to develop, required heavy investment, and offered smaller profits. The capitalists had no intention of running an unprofitable venture. All they wanted was a “miracle drug” that could make money quickly.
“They’ve spent two years on that special treatment and achieved absolutely nothing. Meanwhile, your Chinese medicine crossed the ocean, rescued so many people from desperate situations, and has been doing so for two years… Nowadays, you can walk into almost any pharmacy and find someone who hasn’t heard of aspirin, but nobody who hasn’t heard of your medicine. Sigh. I don’t think losing a job is the end of the world. You can always start again. But… oh, dear.”
Lin Zhen had always been an optimistic ray of sunshine. Jin Yue had rarely heard her sigh like this. They’d been friends for nearly twenty years, and this was a first.
“Was he fired?”
“Yes. First, because there’d been no progress after two years of research and the boss thought the team was useless. Second, his views clashed with the company’s, and there were several confrontations at meetings. You know how blunt he is. He doesn’t always consider how other people will feel when he speaks.” Of course, Lin Zhen sincerely loved that talented, highly skilled, straightforward man with a sense of justice and a youthful spirit. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have had a child with him so far from home.
She herself had stayed on at the university as a teaching assistant. The pay wasn’t particularly high, but the laboratory she worked in was among the best in the world. She’d returned to work only a month after giving birth, and she’d heard that one of her team’s results might even compete for a Nobel Prize in the next round… Yet none of that could weaken her determination to return home.
“Our original plan was to wait until our child was ready for kindergarten. By then, my current project would have wrapped up properly, and we could return to Dragon Country. Eric would have some research results under his belt too, which would give him an advantage in finding work there. But who would have thought…” He’d achieved nothing on the project before being dismissed.
“We’ve never bought a house. We’ve been renting the whole time because we expected to go back to Dragon Country. There was no point keeping a house here and taking on a mortgage when we might be gone for years… As for his parents, they’re reasonably well-off. We don’t need to worry about them.”
Lin Zhen sounded so dejected that Jin Yue was getting anxious herself. “So what you’re saying is…?”
“Could you help us ask around? In Eric’s situation, would he be able to find work in Dragon Country?” Being a doctorate holder who had been fired without producing any results wasn’t exactly something to be proud of.
Shu Jin Yue laughed. “What are you talking about? You’re Harvard postdocs returning from overseas! You have no idea how many organizations would compete for you. I bet if I put the word out, within three days I’d be answering so many calls my hand would go numb.”
Lin Zhen was uncertain. “Are you sure? He really hasn’t produced any research results over the past two years.”
Of course Jin Yue knew that he’d hardly been likely to achieve anything. Finding gold in a pile of dog shit was hard enough. What about a lump of gold the size of a fist? Was that even possible?
Perhaps realizing that she sounded overly desperate, Lin Zhen explained, “What I mean is, we really don’t have much money left to keep making fresh starts.”
Although Eric’s parents were comfortably off, theirs was a large family. After divorcing, both parents had formed new families, and Eric’s father was even busy preparing for his fourth marriage. There were plenty of siblings hoping for financial help from the parents, and Eric was nowhere near the front of the queue.
Besides, the two of them had their pride. They were nearly forty years old and didn’t want to rely on their parents anymore.
“When have I ever lied to you? Just come home. If you don’t believe me, give me a moment and I’ll make a few calls.”
Shu Jin Yue called Mo Shuyi, who knew people at several domestic biopharmaceutical companies. As soon as he heard about these highly trained specialists, he told her to wait. It wasn’t long before a biotech company called her directly and said they were desperate for talent of that caliber. If Eric was willing to come, the pay and benefits would be good.
Jin Yue also checked with Old Wang. He received the same answers, and because he was a senior figure with connections to people who actually made the decisions, the salary packages he heard about were even more generous.
“Do you believe me now? Come home. Your family misses you too.” After the Spring Festival the previous year, Jin Yue’s family of four had traveled to a neighboring province and stopped in to visit Lin Zhen’s parents. The six elderly relatives were all in good health, but they missed Lin Zhen terribly.
She was their only child, and there were no other children within three generations of the family.
Thinking of her family, Lin Zhen began to cry. “I… All right. We’ll come back immediately. It doesn’t matter if our lease isn’t up yet. That’s it. We’re going home.”
Originally, they had planned to stay another two years, until their child was ready to start school and the couple had saved enough to settle down in Dragon Country. Who could have expected the layoffs to come so soon?
Jin Yue didn’t think too much of it. To her, losing a job was just losing a job, not the end of the world. They could rest and regroup for a while, and perhaps find their footing again. At that point, whether they stayed in Dragon Country or returned overseas would still be up to them.
She certainly hadn’t expected Lin Zhen to call only a week later and announce that they’d landed in Haicheng. They would first go back to their hometown to settle some matters, then come to Shu City to see her.
Jin Yue clicked her tongue in amazement. It seemed the capitalists had really broken Eric’s heart this time!
But what surprised her even more was what Eric said when they finally met.
“Shu, I have a secret to tell you. The K virus outbreak two years ago was a conspiracy—a conspiracy involving capital and politics.”
Jin Yue froze. Investigators had already come close to uncovering the truth about this matter, but how could Eric, someone personally caught up in it, know?
“They didn’t just fire me. They fired our entire team, because in March we accidentally discovered the truth about the K virus. To sell their so-called special treatment, they developed the K virus in a laboratory and released it. But they lost control of what they’d started. They hadn’t expected that there really wouldn’t be any special cure.”
They should have prepared the “antidote” long before. But they’d been so arrogant, convinced that with their world-leading technology, they could develop a treatment whenever they wanted. Instead, research failed to keep pace with the virus’s spread. Eventually, the situation spiraled out of control, and their scheme destroyed them… And, as it happened, Shu Jin Yue’s medicine appeared out of nowhere and made an enormous fortune, taking the “piece of the pie” they had planned to keep for themselves and enjoying every bite.
As for how much Jin Yue had earned in those two years, she hardly dared say. Even an “initial target” of a hundred million yuan would amount to little more than spare change by comparison.
“They’re the embodiment of evil—Satan, devils! I was afraid the phone at our house was being tapped. Jenny didn’t dare tell you the truth.”
So that was it. No wonder Lin Zhen had sounded so strange at the end of their earlier conversation. She’d discovered a secret of staggering proportions.
A thought flashed through Jin Yue’s mind. “How many people on your team found out? Do you have evidence?”
“Yes. I have documents about their research bearing their handwritten signatures. Some people also say they found records of the laboratory cultures and data from experiments on human subjects, but I haven’t seen those two kinds of records myself, so I can’t be certain.”
“Are you absolutely sure the documents were signed by them personally?” That would be evidence—solid proof that the tragedy had been a conspiracy.
“I’m certain. I’ve seen documents personally signed by those monsters, documents they only managed to destroy halfway. I know their signatures very well. They shouldn’t be forgeries. We found them in a storage room inside the company’s underground laboratory. That lab was guarded by heavily armed mercenaries1 year-round, but there was a mysterious fire there two years ago that reduced nearly everything to ashes. Fortunately, the storage room deep inside the facility was only half burned.”
Shu Jin Yue’s eyes lit up. “Wait here a moment. I need to make a phone call.”
She called Xu Duan home. This matter was far too serious to ignore. As soon as Xu Duan heard the account, he also recognized its importance. He immediately contacted Jiang Weidong, who sent people to collect Lin Zhen and Eric. The two needed protection at a very high level.
What they had might not yet constitute conclusive evidence. But even the beginnings of such proof were enough to make the world suspect that the outbreak had not been an accident, but a disaster deliberately created by people.
Of course, Jin Yue was thinking a little further. If someone else on Eric’s team could uncover even stronger evidence, wouldn’t that be an unexpected gain?
As for how to find it or convince those people to come forward, Jin Yue knew those weren’t things she needed to worry about. She only had to concentrate on doing her own work well.
Exactly how much money Shu Jin Yue now possessed was known only to herself and Xu Duan. If the number got out, it might frighten people.
Having earned so much foreign currency, she promptly bought an entirely new set of cutting-edge equipment for Xu Duan’s factory. The automobile plant they’d purchased from the Soviet Union years before had already begun production, and before long cars manufactured by Xinghua Factory itself could be seen driving along the streets.
She also funded a computer and semiconductor-chip project for Li Si. Whatever advanced equipment he needed, they could buy from overseas—they had the money. If Jiang Weidong or Hu Guizhi needed something purchased with foreign currency, she would buy that too. Importing technology-intensive products now was bound to pay off. They could dismantle the machines, learn from them as they took them apart, then reassemble them. After practicing a few times, they would soon be able to make something respectable themselves.