God Is Red Read Free

Christian, known among local villagers as Dr. Sun, a medical doctor. Following his conversion to Christianity, he quit his position as the dean of a large medical school near Shanghai and came to the rural areas of Yunnan, healing the sick and spreading the gospel. On that day, he was performing a cataract surgery inside my friend’s shanty house in Lijiang. The patient was an old lady who was too poor to pay for the procedure at the government-run hospital.
    The bespectacled Dr. Sun, in a casual green jacket and a white T-shirt, looked more like a schoolteacher than a surgeon. With thin hair on top, he reminded me of Xu Yonghai, a neurologist-turned-preacher whom I had met six years before in Beijing. Yonghai, an activist with the government-banned “house-church movement,” had been imprisoned a few months previously for preaching in the southeastern province of Zhejiang. On this particular day, Dr. Sun did not proselytize.
    To my surprise, he said he had read my books—pirated versions that he had managed to purchase on the street. As he politely complimented me on my literary efforts, I was beginning to wonder what it was in Christianity that had driven these successful medical doctors to abandon their lucrative careers in the big cities to pursue a life filled with risks and hardships.When I asked Dr. Sun for permission to interview him, he initially declined. “I’ve led an ordinary life,” he said humbly. “If you are interested, come with me to the mountains. You will discover extraordinary stories in the villages there.”
    Of course I was interested. I had spent the better half of my life capturing extraordinary stories from ordinary people.
    One year later, in December 2005, Dr. Sun and I met in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan and set out on a monthlong journey that took us deep into the mountains, first by bus and then on a small tractor, along perilous mountain paths paved with small rocks, which the locals call “hard candies.” We passed Fumin and Luquan counties, both of which I had never heard of, and then Sayingpan Township, where the paved roads ended. Trudging along on winding red-mud trails, we reached a cluster of small villages hemmed in by tall mountains. According to Dr. Sun, there was a vibrant Christian community there.
    The place reminded me of an old Chinese saying: “Heaven is high above and the emperor is far away,” which refers to regions that are so distant and isolated that they seem to fall beyond the reach of both divine and secular powers. I wondered how it was possible for Christianity, a foreign faith, to find its way and grow in such isolated locations, where the vast modernization that was sweeping other parts of China had not yet reached. Peasants still eked out a meager living by plowing tiny plots of terraced land with hoes and shovels. Television was still a luxury, and many had never heard of refrigerators, not to mention computers or the Internet. Medical care was almost nonexistent—for example, when one of the villagers fell sick, it took his relatives six hours to carry him to the nearest hospital. En route, on the bumpy road, he expired. The itinerant medical service of Dr. Sun was the only hope for the inhabitants of those remote villages.
    In the subsequent days after I started talking with some of the villagers, my initial assumptions gradually changed. It was true that people in the cold, high plateau of Yunnan were cut off from the developed urban centers and were destitute. However, on a deeper level, the region was never immune from both the political and cultural influences of the outside world. In fact, this region was well within the grasp of both divine and secular powers.
    In the village of Zehei, inhabited by China’s ethnic Yi people, locals led me to the muddy hut of Zhang Yingrong, an eighty-six-year-old church elder whose peaceful and benevolent looks made me think of my late father. Zhang Yingrong