In Memory of Gao Yaojie

Andrew J. Nathan in New York

03-13-2024

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So many memories come back when I see Dr. Gao’s life laid out in this book in photographs and their captions and in emotional and reflective poems.

 

Some are memories of stories she told me: medical school, a happy marriage, children,and the intense urgency of her work in the obstetrics department. Then, the horrible years of unjust suffering during the cultural revolution, when she was beaten and a subtotal gastrectomywas performed to stop the bleeding. She was never able to eat like a normal person after that,surviving on repeated small meals of bland food. Next was the life of labor reform at the Xing Mountain Quarry. Then came three years in labor re-education camp, and finally in 1973 the satisfaction of having the Zhengzhou Municipal Revolutionary Committee formally state that the sentence was in error. She was exonerated and her reputation was restored. From there she returned to her Important clinical and teaching work, where she longed to go.

 

The 1980s were a period for Dr. Gao of great professional success and distinction, with nationwide recognition as an outstanding doctor and teacher. Yet always, saving the patients who were most ill was her passion and commitment. Even after retirement, she continued to lecture and write in her mission of teaching rural women how to avoid sexual diseases.

 

In 1996, she had an encounter with a woman with a mysterious and incurable illness. It turned out to be AIDS. This encounter set her off on a search to find out how the woman got sick, and this led her to the rural villages, where she discovered the blood scandal that was spreading the fatal disease among the men and women of Henan villages. Working with her friend Du Cong, she visited the villages tirelessly, attended the dying, held the sick children in

 

her lap, delivered medicine paid for with her retirement money. One family at a time, she sat in the village houses and watched people die, comforted the babies who were infected in the womb and their grieving mothers. At the same time, she distributed booklets on how to avoid AIDS to the villagers and lectured widely on the problem in Chinese universities.

 

In 2007, Dr. Gao came to the United States to lecture, and I met her at Columbia when I served as the host for her lecture. A photograph in this book reminds me of this, my first meeting in what turned out to be a long friendship. It was also on this trip that Dr. Gao met Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—a relationship Dr. Gao treasured deeply.

 

In China, Dr. Gao’s fame continued to grow, as she spoke and wrote on the AIDS issue and continued to visit the villages and care for the AIDS orphans. But pressure on her grew, and in 2009 she had to leave China for the last time. After spending a short time in Texas, she came to New York in March 2010 and soon moved to apartment C8D at 3333 Broadway, where she spent the last 13 years of her life.

 

Pictures in this book show her apartment and how hard she worked writing many more books, some on her life, some on China’s recent history, some on sexual health. Seeing pictures of her on campus, taking a walk around her building, on the subway station, caring for her beloved plants in her apartment – these remind me of some happy times she had when her health was still good, even though she had now become an exile and could no longer serve her beloved patients in the Henan villages. She was still very popular in China – with the people, not the government. Students and visitors from China would come by the apartment to help her with her writing or to take her out for a walk.

 

But sadly, the pictures show us her declining health. In 2013, she began to need part-time home health aides. Then she was hospitalized for pneumonia, one of several hospitalizations, and then needed full-time health aides. Still, she was thrilled when Hillary Clinton came to visit her at the apartment in 2019. A photograph in the book reminds me that I was there on that happy occasion.

 

Dr. Gao continued to write, up to the very end. She had finished one more book, which as I write this is due to be published in the near future.

 

This book of photos, captions, and verses reminds me of the rare privilege and pleasure that came to me, when Dr. Gao came to New York. I was fortunate to know her better and better as the years went by, and to experience her strength, determination, moral clarity, and her love and care for the poor, the weak, and those who suffer.