Dr. Xu: A Chinese Medicine Novel

The clinic’s latest misunderstanding calls for an explanation.

“I’m hearing things. I must be hearing things!” Clara told herself the voice was only in her head and went on trying to destroy the evidence with trembling hands.

Evan stared. She was still at it, for God’s sake?

“Hey. I’m talking to you. Don’t pretend you can’t hear me.”

Clara shook her head slightly and sighed. “I really haven’t been sleeping well. I’m hearing things more and more often.”

That did it. Evan reached over and snatched her phone.

Clara looked at her empty hands. “Oh dear. Now I’m seeing things too! I really am exhausted. I’d better get some rest.” She got up to leave.

“Come back!” Evan called, his face dark.

Clara immediately lowered her head and bent at the waist, her hands hanging in front of her. She turned back cautiously, not daring to look up, making herself look as pitiful as possible.

“I was wondering why the patients had been acting so strangely lately,” he said irritably. “So you were behind it all!”

She bowed her head lower and bent farther at the waist.

Evan glared at her. “So that’s why you’ve been staying up all night? Finding me girlfriends? This many? Are you putting together a harem for me?”

By now Clara was practically bent to the floor. Small, helpless, and thoroughly cowed, she said, “Have mercy, Your Majesty!”[1]

Evan had no answer. He was so exasperated he almost laughed.

“Go on, tell me off as much as you like,” she said timidly. “There’s nobody here. But stop when people come in, all right? I’m still the boss. I have my dignity!”

He shook his head, speechless. “Why? Why would you do this?”

Clara looked miserable. She still didn’t dare lift her head. “I couldn’t think of anything else. We really have no money left. Dad needs treatment… Mingxin’s about to close… It was the cheapest, most effective publicity I could think of…”

Evan pressed his lips together and let out a heavy breath. “How long has this been going on?”

“Since the day I took those pictures of you. Just three to five days…” she answered quietly.

He frowned. “If you want publicity, get publicity. Why drag my love life into it?”

“I didn’t mean to. But whenever I told them to come for treatment, they thought I was a scammer. They wanted to report me! So I had to be a little less direct. I never said I’d date them.

“I just said you were single, that you saw patients at Mingxin, and they could come in for their period pain and see whether you really were that handsome. I only flirted a little—no, I mean I sweet-talked them a little. You know how girls like to be sweet-talked.

“But after a while, they thought we had a connection. So they came to see a doctor, and to see you. The ones who got more carried away thought we were already going out.”

Evan shook his head helplessly. “How many women are we talking about?”

“Just this one!” Clara said, looking aggrieved.

He didn’t believe her for a second. “How is that possible?”

She looked up, aggrieved. “Really! There were lots before, but online love goes even faster than it comes. One day it’s ‘darling, darling,’ and the next she doesn’t even contact me. Probably calling somebody else darling by then.

“So there really isn’t anyone else. Once they’d come in, I stopped sweet-talking them anyway. They’d already paid, hadn’t they…”

Evan shook his head, at once speechless and disgusted.

“Out of all of them, only that one girl took it seriously,” Clara went on. “And I never even said I’d be her boyfriend. I don’t understand why her whole family thinks you’re her boyfriend either.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

“Besides… I haven’t chatted with her since her last visit. I thought she’d forget about you. But… how was I supposed to know this would happen?”

Evan rubbed his forehead. She was giving him a headache. “You didn’t know? And now you feel hard done by? This is all your doing!”

Clara edged over and tugged at his sleeve. “Don’t be angry. I was wrong…” she said coaxingly.

He frowned at her. That feisty woman had a side like this?

Clara studied his expression, then quickly turned to look outside. Only when she saw that nobody was paying attention to them did she relax a little.

Evan sighed, weary of it all. “How many are you still talking to?”

“None, really. Since that round of publicity on Weibo with Charlie Chen, we’ve had a lot more patients. And word’s spread about you. I don’t need to play those little tricks on that site anymore.[2]

“I haven’t logged in for days. Nobody’s been talking to me anyway. It’s just Little Octopus… I… I honestly didn’t know she’d get so carried away! She really is the only one.”

Evan shoved the phone into her hands. “You made this mess. Sort it out.”

“Okay,” she answered, looking thoroughly wronged.

Evan dropped into a chair and shook his head. He suddenly remembered the system’s strange behavior a few days ago, sending him one acceleration pack after another for no apparent reason.

He’d thought it was a bug. Now he knew: it had been Clara, up to her tricks!

He had to hand it to her. He’d worried that letting someone else handle his accounts and publicity might break the system’s rules, so it wouldn’t recognize the results.

Apparently, even publicity carried out behind his damn back counted!

It was damn ridiculous!

The system wouldn’t pass up a single chance to promote Chinese medicine. Wasn’t it supposed to be a respectable system? Did it have no shame?

Evan was at a loss.

Clara cautiously studied his face. “Are you still angry?”

“Yes.” He picked up a medical book and began leafing through it without looking at her.

“Please don’t leave, okay?”

“What?” Evan looked up in surprise, but she quickly lowered her head.

In that instant, he thought he saw a film of tears in her eyes.

He sighed.

Mingxin was beset by troubles within and without. Adam Zhang had fallen ill and lost his mobility. All that pressure rested on a young woman who hadn’t even graduated. She’d taken leave from college to look after her father and the clinic.

Evan softened a little more. When he’d been lost in the dark himself, helpless and abandoned by the whole world, hadn’t she been the one to take him in?

After he was fired, wherever he looked for work, people kept questioning him about a past he didn’t want to remember, reopening wounds he didn’t want to expose. Only Clara had hired him without asking anything. She hadn’t even looked at his diploma.

When Mingxin was struggling, he’d been no help at all, yet she had never thought of sending him away. She had shouldered everything herself. Back then, he too had been a heavy burden.

He sighed again. “No more of this nonsense.”

“Okay,” she said quietly.

“You caused this. Go and sort it out. Explain it properly. Don’t hurt anyone.”

“I know,” she said in a subdued voice. “So don’t be angry anymore.”

He looked at her helplessly. “You really are a publicity genius.”

How did Clara fit the system’s requirements so perfectly? Even a mess like this earned its approval. Evan was starting to wonder whether she’d thrown the system away and it had ended up with him. Why did it feel as though she was its real owner?

Then he remembered the ten-year wait while his third clinical mentorship buffered.[3]

“It’s easy enough to get me to stop being angry,” he told her. “First, deal with this properly. Second, help me promote knowledge of Chinese medicine. Get my followers across all platforms… above a hundred thousand. Then I won’t be angry anymore.”

Clara kept her head down, pressing two fingertips together again and again. “Do bought followers count?” she asked in a small voice.

Reader Notes

↩︎ “Your Majesty.” Evan’s complaint about selecting women for him invokes an emperor’s household of consorts and concubines. Clara answers in the same mock courtly register, asking her “emperor” for mercy. The exchange belongs to their modern clinic quarrel; neither the women nor Clara are being assigned actual court ranks. The historical background supplies the shared image, while the joke and its timing come from the novel. Source: The Palace Museum — Hall of the Supreme Principle, a former residence of consorts and concubines.↩︎ Publicity on Weibo. Weibo is the Chinese social platform used earlier in the story for public posts, comments, reposts, and building a following. Clara distinguishes the publicity involving Charlie from her private conversations elsewhere; this passage does not name that other service. Her claim that the Weibo attention and Evan’s reputation now bring in patients explains why she says she has stopped the private approach. Source: Weibo Corporation — Business Overview.↩︎ Clinical mentorship and the system’s wait. Gen shi means learning by following an experienced practitioner: observing clinical work and learning the mentor’s reasoning, methods, and experience. That educational practice underlies the novel’s term “clinical mentorship.” The ten-year buffering time belongs to Evan’s supernatural system, as do the acceleration packs that shorten its waiting period. It is not a real training requirement or a change in his physical age. Source: National Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine — Mentorship education measures, articles 3, 6 and 15–16 (in Chinese).