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© ALS Independence 2003-10
Exclusive to ALS Independence
Marian Rosenberg
I wasn't looking for a job at a stem cell hospital. I'm a Translator.
They needed an English language website. The job found me.
I began to have my doubts when I got off the train in Shandong. They picked me
up in an elderly domestic minivan. I've lived in China the better part of a
decade, working for schools and companies, sometimes the government. I'd never
been picked up in such a decrepit vehicle.
Even the wildlife rescue center had a better van. In China the act of "giving
face" is very important. You put your best face forward.
This van either indicated that the hospital didn't have much money to spend or
that they didn't care about giving me a good impression as a potential employee.
I knew they had money. The hospital director's daughter was studying abroad at a
prestigious university in Canada and she was the one who introduced me to them.
There was a large new construction site for a new main building going up next
door to the main building of the hospital. The main building itself was in a
shockingly disreputable condition. I'd seen worse in impoverished rural areas
deep in the interior but never in a city as major as Jinan.
Discarded wooden
furniture was stored in one of the stairwells and all of the fire doors were
chained shut at night (some of them during the day as well). The inpatient
ward's door to the stairs was also chained shut so that the only way out was
either by elevator or by waking the on-duty nurse who slept on a cot in an
office.
Because two doors separated the nurse from the hallway I sometimes needed to
bang and bang and bang before she could let me out. They decided that putting me
up in the inpatient ward (for free) was better than a hotel.
Negotiating my contract, I drove a hard bargain. A base salary of CNY3000
(USD400) a month and a commission that started at 10% if I got less than 5
patients a month and went up to 20% if I got more than 15.
The hospital was charging USD20,000 per foreign patient. They had come up with
that number because another stem cell therapy hospital in China was charging
foreigners that much. The only difference, of course, between a course of
treatment for a foreigner and a course of treatment for a Chinese was the
translator (me) and the price tag.
Chinese people paid CNY20,000 or 1/7th the amount.
At twice the wage of a recent college graduate or three times what they paid one
of their nurses my base salary was more than enough to live comfortably. They
also arranged my Foreign Experts' Certificate, work permit, work visa, and gave
me a laptop.
I knew next to nothing about stem cells before I got the job. As a translator, I
specialize in sports and sporting event management.
I read everything I could find on the internet and made a nuisance of myself
asking doctors and nurses questions. The medical staff had great faith in the
ability of stem cells to cure neurological diseases but when I asked for medical
records (to be anonymized and used as testimonials on the website) I found them
shockingly lacking in real medical data. There were vague impressions of the
patients' condition and the records were rife with phrases like "patient seems
better" or "patient feels he is more able to" but simple things like response to
reflex tests or even blood pressure readings were missing. The more time I spent
asking questions the more the staff's faith seemed like nothing more than faith.
I was reminded of my missionary friends and their faith in prayer as a way of
curing things.
More doubts surfaced when I found out that all of the Korean doctors mentioned
on the Chinese website were not to be included on the English website as "we no
longer have an agreement with them". I tried to get a better photograph of one
of the three partner hospitals and found out they also "no longer had an
agreement" necessitating their removal from the site as well. I pared the
Chinese site down removing unnecessarily long medical descriptions of "what is X
disease" type until I had something sweet and simple.
I might have backed out but there was one relatively new nurse who hated her job
who told me that she hadn't believed in stem cells either but that she'd seen a
patient with Parkinson's come arrive in a wheelchair and go out on his own two
feet. And while some of the other stem cell hospitals I looked up, most notably
Beike in Qingdao, seemed to be claiming to cure everything under the sun, my new
employers were quite firm that they only did specific neurological disorders
such as Parkinsons and ALS.
Of all the stem cell companies out there my personal favorite was a company that
had about a dozen different websites for a dozen different stem cell related
things in three countries, none of which admitted to be connected, few of which
linked to each other, and all of which bore the mark of being coded by the same
programmer. If I hadn't been peeking at the source code, however, I wouldn't
have known.
This hospital claimed to be honest. They claimed that the other company was
fabricating their patient testimonials. They pointed out how that other company
made wild claims about conditions like autism.
They were giving me money rather than taking it from me so they had no reason to
be lying to me.
I love Shandong province. The weather is a lot like my home state of Maryland.
The capital city of Jinan, however, is a polluted canker sore. It's crowded and
dirty. The smog looks like something from pictures of Los Angeles in the 70s. My
job was supposed to be getting people from the US, Europe, Australia and so on.
The website was hosted in the US. It didn't really matter then if I lived in
Jinan or not. As soon as the preparatory work was done my new laptop and me went
home to southern China.
Within days of putting up an AdWords campaign I started to get emails from
patients. I asked them for more information about their diseases and conditions
and forwarded them on the hospital.
The hospital didn't answer.
I got more patients. I got more patient information. I got repeat requests from
patients who had already been forwarded on the hospital.
And the hospital didn't answer.
Still more patients. One of them an autistic child. I talked to the hospital on
the phone, and after having been told that they didn't practice dishonest
techniques like pretending to cure incurable conditions they said "Oh yes,
forward her on". But, after I collected the patient information they, once
again, failed to answer.
Since the commission on one patient a month was about five times more than my
base salary I was understandably annoyed but I figured that I wasn't working
very hard to get my base salary and it was the hospital's loss more than it was
mine.
The first time my salary came late there was a reasonable excuse - the Chinese
bank couldn't deal with my foreign name.
The second time my salary came late there was a reasonable excuse - I was living
in another city and couldn't pick up my cash in person.
The third time my salary never arrived.
I waited over a week before I started to make a fuss. Besides which, I had their
laptop. It was worth close to one month's base salary.
By two weeks I started to ask whether or not they wanted me to still work for
them.
At three weeks it was Christmas and the person responsible for signing the bank
transfer form was on holidays.
Then it was New Year's.
I went from answering email every day to every third day.
I stopped checking the website back-end. I concentrated on other things.
The only times I called the hospital was to ask about my salary, to ask whether
or not they wanted me to continue working for them, and to ask why they hadn't
contacted a particularly insistent patient.
One patient that they failed to contact had telephoned me saying that he was a
businessman who already came to China on a regular basis. He was going to be in
China in early January and he wanted to accompany a friend of his with severe
ALS. He just wanted to do a check-up. They would schedule treatment after the
hospital said whether or not he could be treated. I couldn't get them to give me
a price quote for a check-up and the day came and went without my patient
coming.
Answers ranged from "we're busy" to "wait a few more days". They never contacted
the patients and I no longer got my salary.
When my salary was in arrears for a second month I stopped working.
I still checked the inbox about once a week but I did nothing other than ask if
they had any intention to keep employing me and if they were ever going to pay
me.
Nearly three weeks after I stopped work I was told to give them the password to
the backend of the website so that they could check on my work. Password and
Login given they told me that they didn't work.
Password and Login were reset and given again. They again told me it didn't
work. Then they told me a specific person had to check it and she was out of
town on business. Then that person said she'd checked it and it was fine but the
first person said that she hadn't and that they couldn't pay me until they knew
that the backend was working.
The bank card I was given to start the AdWords account started bouncing. When I
called the hospital they berated me for failing to get patients during the time
I worked for them. I berated them back and they claimed to know nothing of the
dozens of emails I had sent them (some of which had been answered). Other times
I would say "hello" and they would hang up the phone. They stopped picking up
any phone calls from landlines with my area code.
I called the hospital Director whose daughter had introduced me to the job. He
was about to be on holiday in my city and he suggested we meet face to face and
clear up these problems.
The hospital Director insisted that they still wanted me to work for them. He
wouldn't accept my returning the laptop. He took me out to dinner twice and
spent over an hour discussing a new contractual situation. I was supposed to
receive the new contract in about a week when he got back to his city.
Two months later I still didn't have it.
Four months after that the hospital contacted me out of the blue. As I was
planning on contacting them to get a statement that I officially was not their
employee (a necessary item for getting a new job in China) I welcomed their
contact.
They started by suggesting that they owed me one month's salary and that my
laptop was equivalent to that one month so everyone should be happy but
eventually they came right out and asked "how much money do we owe you?" and
"what can we do to get you to come back to being our translator and website
person?"
There was absolutely nothing they could do to possibly convince me to ever work
for them again but I gave them passwords to their email account and told them
how they could turn the website back on again.
The person hosting the website gave them a one week deadline after which they
would need to find a new host. My money was supposed to arrive that afternoon
(or the next day at the latest). Three weeks later it still hadn't.
To get my "she is not employed by us" letter, they insisted I sign a
confidentiality statement. One of their employees spent all morning trying to
fax it to me. It took over a dozen long distance phone calls to get the fax, and
nearly as many to send it back again. Five pages of legal Chinese! It was so
dense I needed help to read it, and my helper took a half hour before she was
sure everything in it was legit.
It was two more days before the letter arrived.
I went to the Employment Bureau and found out that, since the hospital had kept
my Foreign Experts Certificate, I also needed a second piece of paper from the
Employment Bureau in their city saying that it had either expired or they had
cancelled it. We called the hospital from the government offices and were first
told "I don't know what a work permit is" then "I don't know how to cancel a
Foreign Experts Certificate," and finally "If we go to cancel her Foreign
Experts Certificate I'm afraid the government will fine us."
Eventually we just demanded to talk to a responsible person like the hospital
Director but they told us he was in a meeting.
So I called his cell phone. He wouldn't pick up when I called so we used another
phone. That time he picked up and he told us he couldn't deal with it because he
was away on business. Mentioning that we'd just been told he was in a meeting
there was silence on the other end.
He suggested that the best way to deal with them not cancelling my Foreign
Experts Certificate would be for me to MAIL MY PASSPORT to their city and let
them get me a new visa; in that way I could work for my new employers and the
hospital at the same time!
Notwithstanding the fact that I had no intention of working for the hospital
again, can you imagine living in a foreign country where you are required by law
to carry your passport on you at all times and then being asked to mail your
passport to another city?
The next morning we had to threaten them with legal action to get them to agree
to cancel my Foreign Experts Certificate. That afternoon I received a phone call
from an Assistant Director asking, once again, if I could confirm how much money
the hospital owed me. I told her, but I also told her that right now the most
important thing was getting them to cancel my Foreign Experts Certificate so
that I could get a new one. She didn't understand what a Foreign Experts
Certificate was and eventually I gave her phone number to a colleague to
explain, yet again, what the hospital needed to do.
Thirty minutes of long distance and all the Assistant Director would talk about
was what kind of paperwork she needed from me so she could pay me the money they
owed me.
When the hospital couldn't find the number of the employment bureau in their
city I had to call directory assistance and get it and call the hospital and
give it to them.
Then the hospital couldn't find what they did with my Foreign Experts
Certificate. It must have been lost when the Assistant Director who did my
paperwork left to start his own company.
I called the employment bureau and found out that if they provided their
business name they could find out my Foreign Experts Certificate number and
either confirm that it was expired or cancel it that way.
(Unfortunately, their computer systems could not look it up by using my passport
number. Otherwise I could have confirmed on my own that it was expired.)
The hospital was supposed to cancel my Foreign Experts Certificate the next
morning. We were supposed to hear from them by 10am that it had been done. At
ten past we called the Assistant Director's office. A voice that sounded just
like the Assistant Director's voice picked up the phone. The voice that sounded
just like the Assistant Director's voice apologized and told us the Assistant
Director was sick and hadn't come in to work today. Four hours later I
eventually got her mobile phone number from someone else at the hospital and
called her.
She wouldn't pick up until we called from an unfamiliar number.
More reasons and more excuses were given. Two more days went by. Now they didn't
like the way I had a witness sign the line that said "witness" on my
confidentiality statement. They didn't know who this woman was. She couldn't
witness the document. If we faxed it to them again, without her name as the
witness, then they would think about cancelling my Foreign Experts Certificate
the next day.
By the next afternoon, when they finally got around to going, the Employment
Bureau had already gone on holiday. The holiday was real. Lots of government
offices were closed. We waited two weeks before calling them again. Wait until
tomorrow, that's when everyone in our offices comes back to work.
Tomorrow was a Friday. Wait until Monday, that's when everyone in the government
offices comes back to work. On Monday morning we were told it would be done
Monday afternoon.
No one called us Monday afternoon but we didn't want to be too annoying. We
waited until Tuesday morning to call them and were hit with a new and inventive
excuse.
I had threatened them almost a month ago "if you do not do complete this simple
piece of paperwork that it is your responsibility as my former employer to
complete then I will need to hire a lawyer." Now, they wanted to talk to my
lawyer.
In 7 years of living in China I have never needed a lawyer. The only lawyer I
know is one I met on a cycling trip and he lives in Beijing.
Even my boss didn't know any lawyers. China is probably the only country in the
world where there are more judges than lawyers.
Calling some friends who had legal trouble with an employer four years ago I got
the number of a lawyer about 200 miles away. This lawyer then called me back
forty minutes later with the number of a classmate of his living in my city. By
3pm Tuesday afternoon I had an appointment. By 4pm Tuesday afternoon he was on
the phone with them.
By 5pm Tuesday afternoon I had received a fax confirming the expiration of my
Foreign Experts Certificate.
In 7 years of living in China I have had a wide range of employers.
Most of them, including all of my government jobs, have been off the books. Even
when I had an employer who disliked me it has never taken more than 30 minutes
to finish confirming that I don't work for them.
Although they were unfailingly polite throughout it all, it took the hospital
over 30 days to do. I needed to get a lawyer. Not counting the USD 600 in salary
that I never expect to see I'm out around USD 200.
To put this in perspective, although I charge USD 75 an hour as an interpreter
(or a USD 500 per diem), I currently work for a sea turtle rescue and
rehabilitation program for USD 550/month. The average waitress makes USD
110/month while a nurse at their hospital makes around USD 150.
* A BIG Thank You to Marian for sending me this story.
"Every living soul ought to always keep it in mind that they are more than their destiny." Dumisane Mvelase
MGM
© ALS Independence 2003-10