A China Story from Hospital – biscuits from heaven

Coco came from China to Ireland three years ago looking 10 years younger than her actual age of 35. Speaking very little English, her parents let her go to find work and improve her language skills before she would return to her home in Tangshan, an industrial city of a million people.

As a skilled nurse she found it difficult to get a job in a hospital in Ireland because of the language barrier, but through the growing Chinese community in Dublin she found work as a nursing assistant and as a cleaner. For the first year or so she concentrated on improving her English until she found a job in cardiology in the Mater Private Hospital , which is where I met her.

She still looks ten years younger than her age and walks with an elegant step, and a straight back, always carrying a smile. She is held in great affection by all the staff from the cleaners (none of whom are Irish), to the senior surgeons, and all speak with admiration of her grace and determination.

I spoke to her about China one afternoon when things were quiet. She told me of Tangshan, and her earliest memory of home. In July 1976, when she was six years old, Tangshan was hit by what is widely regarded as the worst earthquake of the 20th Century.  Initially the Chinese government reported the death toll at around 700k people, but this was later reduced to 250,000 – one quarter of the population of the city and its region.

Coco spoke of how her father went out in an ox drawn cart to hunt for food. How the neighbouring homes on her right and left collapsed, killing whole families, though her home remained untouched.

But the memory that has stuck with me since that conversation, for its poetry and innocence as much as its horror, was her joy, as a six year old, playing the ruined streets. As part of the relief effort, the government sent helicopters to drop supplies on the stricken city.

Coco said that she didn’t understand what was happening, all she was doing was running through the streets catching the biscuits that fell from the heavens.