Let's get out of Weifang City

Weifang looks like many other cities, but Weifang has an operation going on that would shock and scandalize the public. Weifang is the city where I went to to have my medical exam done, so I can "technically" get off quarantine and start teaching. That medical exam was a strange and sobering experience. It was a little clinic, very dark, and there were four different rooms where different tests were done. The first room was to draw blood. I walked in and there was a very young woman behind a plate glass window, wearing a blood-smattered lab coat. Not promising, no, not promising at all. I was instructed to stick my arm into a hole in the glass, where the young woman proceeded to poke me with a needle three times, unsuccessfully. "Blood cannot be drawn from these veins", Flora translated, forebodingly. It was vaguely reminiscent of the Asian doctor at the plasma clinic where a friend and I went to donate blood to get money for weed when I was in college. "Your friend has no veins", he told her, like I was a vampire, and I went to wait in the car. So we proceeded to the next test, hoping, I suppose, that time would fill my bloodless veins.

The next room was very dark and very cold. A woman indicated that I pull my shirt up over my breasts, which I thought was a bit slapdash and unprofessional, instead of just asking me to take it off. Then she smeared goop on my breasts, and clipped five little pincers in a row, from one nipple to the other, across my chest. After that, she put cuffs on my wrists and ankles. At this point, I realize that I have allowed a total stranger in a cold, dark room in a strange land to tie me to a bed and put clamps on my nipples without a word of complaint or protest. There was obviously no explanation for this "test" other than that it was some kind of sadistic sex ritual, which I had unwittingly lain down and accepted. But no, a few tense minutes later, the "results" of said test were printed out, and I was uncuffed from the bed, and unclamped at the nipple. I can only surmise that what was being tested was my obedience to bewildering instructions.

The next room was an x-ray room, and it was pretty simple. All I did was stand in front of a large machine and breathe in noxious fumes. Then I went to a room where they did an ultrasound. I don't know what they were looking for, but I guess it wasn't there. And then, the grand finale, back to the blood test. They had called in a "more experienced" nurse (who looked about five years younger than me) and she searched in vain for a vein in my arm. She finally settled on my wrist, where there were plenty of juicy veins from which to draw blood. I intended to jerk my arm away in horror, but thought they might revoke my passing grade on the obedience test. The reason this made me uncomfortable was that same Asian doctor at the plasma clinic. Being so desperate for weed money, when he rejected the veins in my arm, I suggested, "Can't you just take it out of my hand?" And he looked at me like I was some kind of barbarian and said disgustedly, "We're not that kind of establishment." So, upon discovering that in Weifang, they are that kind of establishment, I suddenly questioned my ability to cheerfully and helpfully allow young girls to do whatever they want to me. I looked at Flora with all of my burgeoning doubt and confusion, and I think I must have looked like a lost child, because she grabbed my free arm and looked at me with great concern and said, "This is going to hurt!"

I did not feel greatly comforted.