Bound for Vietnam by Lydia Laube

English, examined my mouth and said that he would have to repair the tooth and replace the filling. He had a wonderfully gentle touch that told me he knew what he was doing. I said, ‘Go for it, son.’ He produced a drill, something I regard as one of the more fiendish and macabre instruments of torture at the best of times, but this machine was decidedly elderly.
    I think my dentist washed his hands, but he did not wear gloves and the same instruments and drill bits were used on everyone. They were only given a bit of a wipe with Metho. Enough to kill the AIDS and hepatitis viruses, I prayed.
    Each dentist’s chair was accompanied by a stand that had the operator’s pieces laid out on it. My stand had a white top that was stained and far from clean. The torture implements lay in old chipped enamel bowls and the drill – Oooh the drill! And without an injection of local anaesthetic! Never in my worst nightmares had I ever imagined letting a dentist loose on me with a drill without an anaesthetic. I am a devout, card carrying, professed and practising coward. But there was no way I was going to have an injection in China. Among the emergency equipment I never travel without was a disposable syringe and needle, but the local anaesthetic sat on the shelf before me in multi-use quart bottles that were goodness knows how contaminated, so the syringe stayed in my bag. The fact that the drill might pierce my gum was enough to worry about. The dentist wiped the pointy bit with something on a swab which may have been disinfectant, but it could have been poison, for all I knew.
    The performance began. Every cell in my body tensed, anticipating a slip of the instrument, as I dwelt on the knowledge that you only need a tiny unseen opening in your skin or mucosa to get infected. This gratifying thought did not make my stay in the chair a jolly or restful one, but it was certainly memorable. To take my mind off proceedings, I examined the window and the wall in front of me and concluded that the building had been hastily thrown together with a knife and fork. Everything was rough. The window ledge was crudely plastered, the window had been fitted crookedly and its wooden frame had had paint slopped over it haphazardly.
    The operation on my tooth took a very long time. The dentist was elaborately painstaking and he did not have a nurse to help him. But even when he used the drill, this marvellous man was so gentle that he only gave me a couple of stabs of pain. Finally he took a piece of glass, swiped it clean with a swab, mixed the filling and very carefully packed it into my tooth.
    By this time the dentist and I had become the best of friends. I was full of gratitude and admiration for his skill, and my tooth was feeling better than it had for a long time. Then, deserting his post, the dentist personally escorted me back downstairs. He led me into the registry office where I was hit a further fee, the special foreigner’s price of 300 yuan – fifty Australian dollars. When the four girls in the office saw the account that the dentist had made out they fell about laughing hysterically. I was sure that this was because it was for such an enormous amount of money. The Chinese only pay one yuan for everything.
    The bad news was that I was told not to eat for the rest of the day and to add insult to injury, on reaching my hotel I had to walk up nine flights of stairs to get to my room to recover. The lift was not working because the electricity was off. The light, power and hot water went off regularly in Chongqing and it often stayed so for hours at a time. Sometimes when I was walking around the streets or the market at night, all the lights would suddenly go out. A loud, ‘Oooh!’ would go up from the crowd, but kerosene lanterns and torches would be quickly produced and, unperturbed, it would be business as usual.
    Another companion moved in to share my room with me. Strangely, I knew him. It was Joe, the Englishman Susan and I