The Loneliness of Living with Hemorrhoids, Part 2
No. 21
Hello from Chinarrative.
This week we bring you Part 2 of Su Zi’s essay, The Loneliness of Living with Hemorrhoids, first published in Chinese by The Paper’s Reflections Workshop. You can read Part 1 here.
We pick up where we left off, with protagonist Jiang Yijun still preparing for her third hemorrhoids surgery while reminiscing about her first and second, in particular her relationship with the doctor who performed the first two procedures.
Author Su then returns to the present, describing in detail the lead-up and aftermath of her third trip to the operating room.
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The Loneliness of a Hemorrhoids Patient, Part 2
Dr. Lu
Luckily these tasks that were way over Jiang Yijun’s head, that she was horrible at handling weren’t essential anymore. At this grade 3A hospital—one of the best in Beijing and even the entire country—she would barely be able to find the opening to pass on a bribe.
“I’m from out-of-town. I’m here to attend graduate school. My family is elsewhere.” Jiang Yijun’s reason for postponing her surgery for a week won instant sympathy from Dr. Li. His easy-going nature stood in stark contrast to her surgeon seven years ago.
Her doctor seven years ago had been Dr. Lu. A short fellow with parted hair, his cheeks were always blush because he was oozing confidence.
In the proctology department of a small-town hospital, he was the bedrock. Wherever he went he was trailed by a flock of nurses and students. His biography on the hospital’s official website listed seven titles.
“This Dr. Lu—look at him hopping around and running the show despite his short stature,” Jiang Yijun’s mother joked.
Jiang Yijun still remembers the time Dr. Lu lectured her as he pointed his small baton at a diagram that indicated the different levels of hemorrhoids.
“See this? This is Grade 1. Bloody feces but it doesn’t hurt much. By Grade 2, the hemorrhoid is protruding, but it still retracts into your anus. This is Grade 3. The hemorrhoid sticks out but doesn’t retract on its own. You need to do it manually. Grade 4 is the worst. You can’t even shove it back in.”
Then the baton landed back on the gory mess that was Grade 3. “This is your anus. And it’s progressing toward Grade 4. If the worst case is ‘king-size,’ then you’re ‘queen-size’ already. Do you follow?”
Dr. Lu stared at Jiang Yijun as if he were speaking to a primary school student. His height didn’t prevent him from projecting authority to the fullest.
Dr. Lu visited Jiang Yijun in her hospital room one last time the day before the operation. It was meant to be a routine drop-by, but lo and behold he started chitchatting with her mother.
At one point, he left the room, only to return shortly. After muttering on a few words of advice, he furtively shoved something under Jiang Yijun’s pillow, then bolted.
Jiang Yijun’s mother didn’t miss a beat and removed her daughter’s pillow immediately. It was the red envelope she had stuffed into Dr. Lu’s pocket the day before yesterday. She grabbed it and took off.
As Jiang Yijun observed these events, she realized that not only had things had spun out of her hands, the situation was becoming a bit incomprehensible. For once she was thankful that her mother was by her side. If she were on her own, she wouldn’t have the faintest clue on how to proceed.
“How can you return a gift?” Her mother said when she returned.
Whether it was her mother’s gregariousness or the red envelope, one of the two did the trick. Dr. Lu was most attentive throughout Jiang Yijun’s hospitalization.
Not only did he answer every question and respond to all her text messages, he even let a terrified Jing Yijun hold his hand while anesthesia was being administered before the operation. After the operation, he always greeted her with a smile when she showed up weekly to refill her prescription.
Yet events took another bizarre turn in a few months. Fully recovered and back at work, no longer needing to refill her prescription weekly, Jiang Yijun started receiving texts from Dr. Lu inviting her to dinner.
He wrote in a gentle and intimate tone, clearly crossing the doctor-patient boundary. At least he sounded nothing like the man who pointed his small baton at the photo of the “queen-size” anus.
Jiang Yijun rebuffed the first two invitations using overtime and business travel as excuses. But Dr. Lu stubbornly extended a third and fourth invitation. She couldn’t stonewall him anymore.
Her mother suggested why not humor him, see what he’s up to—who knows, maybe he genuinely had an issue to raise with her.
So, on an early summer night, sans make-up, Jiang Yijun donned an oversized Mickey Mouse hoodie, tied her hair up casually, put on a pair of thick-frame glasses and joined Dr. Lu for dinner.
While she was still figuring out Dr. Lu’s intentions, she wanted to remind him of their age gap and prior doctor-patient relationship by obscuring her feminine qualities. Thankfully Dr. Lu didn’t make any untoward advances that night. But what’s even more mind-boggling is he didn’t have anything substantial to discuss either.
He drove Jiang Yijun to a steakhouse. Quite the gracious host, he recounted his student days and bragged about his academic achievements. He drove her home before 10 p.m. at her request.
At least for several years after the dinner, whenever Jiang Yijun thought back to that night, she replayed the entire evening in her head, pondering what she had missed.
The dinner was a turning point in her relationship with Dr. Lu. He never contacted her again, not even bothering to respond to her thank-you text, like a stone that had plunged to the bottom of the lake without a single ripple.
Even her mother was baffled.
“Did you overthink things? Maybe he just wanted to make a new friend. He couldn’t possibly have been interested in you romantically, right? You’re not pretty, plus he’s nearly 20 years older than you are, he’s married and his daughter is a teenager. You’re also a journalist. Doesn’t that make him wary?”
Her mother’s rapid-fire monologue was punctuated with this exclamation mark: “Unless I’m the one he’s interested in. Was he trying to get to me through you?”
Her mother’s brazen self-confidence left Jiang Yijun’s speechless. She also felt that she didn’t need to get to the bottom of every single matter in her life. There are some people you’re meant to cross paths with just once in life.
Until one evening a few months later, when she saw a pool a red when she got up from the toilet bowl. In panic, she called the elusive Dr. Lu. He answered coldly and asked her to stop by the next day.
Relapse
The examination room was a familiar setting, but the examining doctor had adopted a completely different attitude. Jiang Yijun tried to flash a “business as usual” smile, but it was quickly shut down by Dr. Lu’s drooping eyelids and icy facial expression.
The diagnosis was that Jiang Yijun’s external hemorrhoids had ruptured and needed to be removed.
“Then what was the last operation about?”
“The last time you had a PPH [procedure for prolapse and hemorrhoids] to deal with your internal hemorrhoids. Now your external hemorrhoids are acting up again.” Impatience was already written all over Dr. Lu’s face.
There was no other way. She had to take time off again, get the same tests and have herself admitted once more. Both her mother and her boyfriend’s mother offered to help again, but Jiang Yijun refused. She couldn’t handle the burden of continuously asking the same people for favors.
Jiang Yijun was hoping her boyfriend, who worked in a neighboring city, could step up for once. But he couldn’t, saying it was hard to take time off at his new job. Out of options, her boyfriend’s sister and cousin, who were idling away at home, were drafted instead.
This proved to be a rare combination at the hospital—the ashen patient Jiang Yijun and two unrelated women who were even younger than her were assigned to a room at the end of the hall.
Jiang Yijun had a hunch this would be a tough hospitalization. She just wanted to survive the week.
Lo and behold, removing her external hemorrhoids was even more painful than losing her internal ones—10 million times so. As the painkillers dripping through her IV waned, she felt like someone braving a winter storm covered in spiderweb.
Five p.m. marked the peak of her pain every day. On top of an already considerable baseline level of pain, her anal sphincter contracted regularly because of the surgery. She had to summon every last bit of willpower to counteract the additional pain. But it was all for nothing—no amount of adjusting her posture made a difference.
All she could do was imagine herself a dead fish on a cutting board and let the pain in her butthole radiate through her entire body. She couldn’t process any visual or audio information. Her brain shut down. Even the sound of TV ads from the corner of the room got on her nerves.
On a day of intense pain, she realized that banging her head against the wall was a welcome distraction, so she went all out. Her caretakers were terrified and scrambled to seek help. Dr. Lu rushed over and ordered them to buy painkillers from a pharmacy near the hospital.
But what blew her mind the most was when she finally got through the worst of the pain and had built up an appetite after sweating profusely, her boyfriend’s cousin shoved the same dishes in front of her over and over again—rice, fried water spinach and pork chop soup. It was the same menu the entire week, 14 meals in a row.
But she was in no position to be picky. Regardless of their standard of care, she had to be grateful to her two caretakers for dropping everything to be with her. They were total strangers who owed her nothing.
By the time she was discharged, Jiang Yijun had lost 2 kilograms despite lying in bed for an entire week. It dawned on her then that pain can burn fat too.
Newly-wed Husband
Jiang Yijun kills time on her laptop during the first day of her hospitalization for a third hemorroids surgery while husband Dafei catches up on sleep. Courtesy author.
The Hemorrhoid Brothers preyed on Jiang Yijun’s increased physical vulnerability in her 30s, flashing their gnarly teeth as they caused both pain and bleeding.
The week before her third surgery could only be described as utter hell. When she took a dump in the morning, it felt like she was shitting glass shards whose sharp edges perforated her anal canal.
As the purple-red blood flowed, she’d be shaking and hugging her knees from the pain. Sometimes she’d have to press her forehead hard against the bathroom door to get through the ordeal.
After returning to her room, she’d have to wash her butthole and shove the protruding hemorrhoids back in.
This was a delicate task. It felt as if the act of defecation had dragged out part of her intestinal tract that flopped near her butthole and at one point it snapped back in. The moment made her entire body tremble, occasionally sending her tumbling against the wall.
The pain receded after she manually retracted her hemorrhoids and inserted a suppository, but her butt would still swell.
She wouldn’t be able to stand or sit for the next six hours—or do anything that required mental focus, or that matter. All she could do was lie face down in bed until the swelling subsided. After however many hours of sleep she could muster overnight, it was the same routine all over again.
She started counting down the days until her husband Dafei’s arrival in Beijing. She all but gave up the last two days, fasting instead—that way there would be nothing to poop.
Jiang Yijun’s heart leapt when she saw Dafei emerge from his taxi. In the few months they had been separated, he had gained more weight. His facial complexion was ghastly, as if he hadn’t slept in days. Pressed against his forehead in clumps, his hair looked like it hadn’t been shampooed for some time.
Novembers in Beijing weren’t that cold, but coming from the south, Dafei was paranoid about catching a cold. He had smothered himself in layers of the thickest winter clothing and didn’t have the common sense to shed a layer or two when he got hot. He was thoroughly drenched in sweat from the train ride north.
Lord, can I count on this guy? A year or so into her marriage, it hit Jiang Yijun for the first time even though she now had a husband, whether or not the person cast in that role could carry his weight was a totally different story. And the fellow she had landed didn’t inspire much confidence at that particular moment.
The couple met their two fellow hemorrhoids patients and roommates the day they made their way to the hospital’s admissions counter frantically, luggage of various sizes in tow.
Three women and three husbands from three different cities in three different provinces were bound together by fate briefly because of a single commonality, which was clearly marked on top of their respective beds: hemorrhoids.
There is no such thing as privacy in a hospital. The first day was devoted to pre-op. A resident showed up to go over their medical charts one by one while the other two patients pricked their ears.
Big Sister Luo, who was in her 50s, had severe internal hemorrhoids. They didn’t bleed, but they often protruded from her butthole. She used to be able to shove them back in, but now “they won’t go back in no matter what and the friction they create when I walk causes pain.”
Ms. Lin, who was in her 40s, had both internal and external hemorrhoids. They didn’t hurt but her feces was drenched in blood. She felt she was running on empty. “My blood tests indicated I’m becoming anemic. I can’t put off surgery any longer.”
Meanwhile, Jiang Yijun was in the worst shape. Not only did she suffer from severe internal and external hemorrhoids, she was also experiencing anal fissure. It was precisely this condition that caused the piercing pain in her butthole once a day.
The surgery posed a challenge for the husbands too. Big Sister Luo’s husband helped his wife unpack methodically and kept her company during various check-ups, then folded his arms and started dozing off in a corner. Ms. Lin’s husband was a flurry of activity, constantly brainstorming for additional items to buy his wife.
Meanwhile, Dafei was running around like a headless chicken. Initially he wanted to take a nap on Jiang Yijun’s bed, but was quickly busted by a nurse. He tried leaning against the bed but couldn’t fall asleep. When someone from the hospital cafeteria stopped by to take orders, Dafei realized he only had 17 yuan ($2.50) left in his wallet. He started asking around about an ATM.
“You traveled all this distance to take care of a patient with only 17 yuan?” Jiang Yijun wanted to break out laughing. As she scanned the three husbands in the room, she realized they represented different stages in a husband’s personal growth. Dafei was probably still on probation, she figured.
Still, she felt more at ease with him by his side than she did six years ago. A husband was legally required to weather life’s ups and downs with her. Somehow she felt more secure in a family bond based on a legal contract than one rooted in blood.
What she treasured more was the test of adversity itself. Her boyfriend from six years ago broke up with her shortly after her second surgery. They had been together since their university days. They were gearing up to get married, even buying an apartment under both their names. In the end, the unit had to be sold in a hurry.
The seed for the tragic ending was probably planted by her ex’s absence during the second surgery. Jiang Yijun firmly believed in the saying that illness was the ultimate test of love.
But once you clear the three sets of doors that lead to the operating room, even your husband becomes an outsider. You have to face everything on your own.
When the anesthesia is administered through the spine, the patient is asked to disrobe completely. At most Jiang Yijun could cover her breasts and tummy with her hospital gown. She reluctantly unbuttoned under the looming beam lights in a room full of medical personnel. No one was looking at her, but undoing a single button felt like it took an entire century.
Thirty years of socialization, conditioning and gender education went out the window one after another. Jiang Yijun was reduced to a core, a lump of infancy. This was very hard for her.
The anesthesiologist took forever to arrive. People scurried about while an icy breeze attacked her from all directions, setting off embarrassment and panic. She wanted to grab something to cover herself with or bite onto something so she could anchor herself.
The inner turmoil resembled a thunderstorm. Meanwhile, the MO of the doctors and nurses was to objectify her—ignore the patient’s personality and treat her as a machine with damaged parts that needed to be fixed. That way they didn’t have to be sensitive to her nudity and need for privacy or empathize.
They chatted cheerfully about kids and real estate, not so much as casting Jiang Yijun a glance or offering a greeting, as if in tacit agreement she was a machine without a soul.
Jiang Yijun was terrified. As she did seven years ago, she begged a nurse who passed by: “Can I hold your hand when the anesthesia is being injected?” “No,” the nurse blurted without hesitation.
Luckily, the anesthesiologist finally arrived. He whispered a few instructions and started tapping on her spine with his fingers, like a cat scratching with its paws. Soon an injection of warmth started traveling down from her waist, eradicating discomfort and bringing peace wherever it flowed.
Goodbye, my brothers. Jiang Yijun secretly bid farewell the moment her swollen butthole, which had tortured her for the past 10 days or so, was enveloped in the same warm sensation.
The doctors turned her around so she faced down on the operating table and went to work. Soon she caught whiff of burned flesh.
“Something’s burning. Is that my flesh?”
“Whose else might it be, young lady?” It was Dr. Li, who promptly ordered her to stop talking.
The chilly breeze still flowed from different directions, but now it felt somewhat comfortable. She felt like one of God’s half-finished creations lying face down in the middle of a wild swamp at the beginning of the universe, awaiting a new pain-free existence.
When Dr. Li stopped by before the surgery, he said he would deal with both her internal and external hemorrhoids in one go. Jiang Yijun wondered how far along he was, but just as she shut her eyes the operation was done.
Jiang Yijun thanked the doctors and nurses from the bottom of her heart when she was wheeled out of the operating room. But the masked and capped men and women hovering above her were busy at work and didn’t seem to hear her.
New Challenges
Dafei washes his wife’s pajamas in a motel bathroom during her week-long recovery after a third hemorrhoids operation. Courtesy author.
The real trial began after the surgery.
The butthole was a tricky body part. Unlike wounds in other parts of the body, wounds located there couldn’t be wrapped in dressing and allowed to recover in a sterile environment.
Because feces has to pass through every day, anal wounds can’t be sutured. All you can do is leave them untouched and let them be repeatedly torn and contaminated. Recovery was naturally slow. And yet the area around the butthole happens to be very sensitive. You can only imagine the pain.
Jiang Yijun’s hospitalization ended the day after the surgery. There was a shortage of beds, so once she was given her antibiotics injections, she had to go home and recover on her own.
Dr. Li and the nurses handed down a slew of instructions, mostly about bathing frequently during the day, washing her butthole and applying medication after taking a dump and maintaining cleanliness all around.
Home in Beijing was a dorm room, so Dafei and her booked a room at a budget motel that cost some 400 yuan a night. The room had an east-facing window and the toilet was right next to the bed. Jiang Yijun felt that sufficed. Next up was an extended retreat in her “cave,” just like a spiritual guru going into hiding, and she would emerge a better woman.
Clearly she was overly optimistic.
She took a hit the first time she pooped in this temporary shelter. She forgot to bathe her butt afterward. The moment she stood up she was overwhelmed by acute pain. She staggered toward her bed, collapsed and started twisting and howling.
All a panicked Dafei could do was offer her his hand while watching her roll in bed. His wife’s grip was so tight his knuckles went pale and her fingernails left deep impressions on his hand.
Jiang Yijun was forced to take one of the five remaining painkilling pills the hospital had prescribed. Ten minutes later the excruciating pain started to recede. She was covered in sweat. It vaguely struck Jiang Yijun then that she must have looked like a train wreck.
Yet fate already had a new challenge in store: the endless desire to poop.
Jiang Yijun didn’t know that even defecation could become addictive. She’d yearn for the toilet bowl again less than a minute after her getting up from her last visit.
Each sitting would indeed yield a tiny piece of output slightly longer than her little finger. Sometimes it would come with a bloody liquid. But every visit meant her wounds were contaminated once again, which meant another wash, another bath and another round of searing pain.
The sixth day after the operation was the scariest. Jiang Yijun pooped nine times, with the occasional case of constipation and diarrhea mixed in. Overnight she suffered an unexpected case of acute edema. She felt so bloated she was forced to stare into the dark.
Amid the measured breaths of Dafei’s sweet slumber, she felt an army stampeding down her intestinal tract, only to hit a bottleneck at her butthole. Her anus felt so jammed the veins on her butt were bulging. It felt as if a jet stream was imminent, but when she got to the toilet there was nothing to shit.
Only then did it strike her that apart from pain and itchiness, there existed a third extreme sensation: bloatedness. It’s a slow, blunt force that breaks the human spirit by expanding from the inside out. It showed no mercy in wringing the life out of a person.
She was out of painkillers. Jiang Yijun simply couldn’t find peace. She tumbled on bed, panted, stood up, squatted and repeatedly rushed to the toilet bowl. She was exhausted—and yet she couldn’t find a position that she could maintain for more than a minute without pain.
It only dawned on her then that the anus was the true center of the human body. When the butthole is breached, any semblance of balance and equilibrium is impossible.
The aftermath of the third surgery was a brand new experience for Jiang Yijun—a brand new type of pain, a brand new type of fear. She didn’t understand why the same condition was handled so differently at different hospitals and why her body responded so differently after her third surgery, so much so that she couldn’t draw from the experience of her pain seven years ago.
After barely making it to the next morning, Jiang Yijun had no choice but to return to the hospital, Dafei serving as a human crutch. The doctor at the outpatient clinic examined her wounds and said severe swelling was normal.
“The first week after the operation is the worst. The edema at the wounds stimulates the entire area around the anus, which deceives the body into thinking it needs to poop. The swelling will eventually subside.”
He cleaned Jiang Yijun’s wounds, prescribed new painkillers and ordered her to “get some quality sleep after taking the medication.” The absurdity of that comment hit her hard, prompting her to break down in tears immediately.
Yet after she returned to their motel room, she started feeling perky. Free of pain thanks to the painkillers, she felt somewhat invincible in broad daylight. She completely forgot the fact that she hadn’t gotten a good night’s sleep in days, the fact that just last night she felt life wasn’t worth living and wanted to jump out the window.
She even found the energy to tease Dafei. Her childish husband seemed to have matured in the past few days. He no longer complained about Jiang Yijun’s slow recovery nor grumbled about wanting to go back to work, instead learning to read between the lines.
He knew to start filling a basin with water and add the necessary medication the moment Jiang Yijun stormed into the bathroom. He also set aside his own work, swallowing his pride as he washed his wife’s bloodied pajamas.
You had to allow a husband “on probation” the time to improve and grow, Jiang Yijun thought to herself. Just a few days ago, when her anal sphincter was contracting frequently, inflicting unbearable pain each time, even a wayward glance from Dafei felt oppressive. Every glare would induce a fresh contraction.
Now that she had transcended the pain, Jiang Yijun found herself back in touch with human nature. She suddenly felt secure spending the rest of her life with Dafei. She even felt pity, which prompted her to lug Dafei’s bulky skull over and plant a long kiss on his forehead.
Breaking the Shame Barrier
Screen capture of social media post showing Jiang Yijun waving goodbye to husband Dafei from above. The caption reads, “We endured another ordeal together. Love you!” Courtesy author.
A week into her hotel stay, everything had exceeded Jiang Yijun’s expectations, including the level of pain and the slowness of her recovery. When she finally felt well enough to sit upright, she pulled out her calendar and phone and started asking for extensions or simply passing on assignments.
She pulled no punches when it came to her explanation. “I just had hemorrhoids surgery. My wounds are swollen. I can’t stand right now.” Fifteen years of living with the condition had made her quite thick-skinned. Hemorrhoids was no longer a sensitive topic, nor did she feel much shame about it.
Seven years ago, she was too embarrassed to reveal her condition to her colleagues and refused to let them visit her at the hospital. When pressed, she said she was having rectal surgery.
Her anus is connected to her intestines, so she figured it wasn’t a flat-out lie. Although she too was puzzled as to why somehow rectal surgery sounded so much more presentable and less exotic than hemorrhoids surgery, even though her butthole was linked to her intestines.
Still, word traveled fast. Toward the end of her recovery, her boss called, ordering her to attend a department meal. Jiang Yijun couldn’t refuse and had to suck it up. The moment she entered the room where the gathering was being held she was the center of attention, which prompted her to take a deep breath.
No one asked her about her condition, but the fact they knew was written all over everyone’s faces. Recalling the moment, she felt as if a butthole had sprouted on her face, just like mushrooms on a wilting tree after rainfall. And someone couldn’t keep a straight face halfway through the meal.
She heard the soft yet crisp voice of a female editor sitting at the adjacent table. “Her butt exploded!” she said to a chorus of laughter. Jiang Yijun turned red, lowered her head and chewed hard on the stewed pig’s foot in her mouth.
But now she was at peace with her condition. The butthole was a human organ just like any other. When it was damaged, it needed to be repaired.
What’s the big deal about piss and shit? They’re all part of the circle of life. Everything paled in comparison when the integrity of the human body was at stake. Didn’t human dignity hinge on a pain-free existence?
Jiang Yijun sometimes wondered if the doctors and nurses in the operating room objectified their patients because they were fed up with folks who refused to remove their pants because of pride.
The Chinese question-and-answer website Zhihu was filled with questions about how female patients could bear letting a male doctor examine their anus. The most liked answer was posted by a proctology specialist. He was probably sick of questions along the same lines. His angry answer read: “What about us male doctors? All we see at work all day is filthy butts. Shit. More filthy butts. More shit.”
The folks who posted the initial questions probably haven’t experienced genuine pain, Jiang Yijun thought to herself.
In the past week, Jiang Yijun had survived enema, urinary retention, edema, pus and alternating constipation and diarrhea. As long as her filthy butt healed quickly, she didn’t give a damn about anything else.
Excessive shame definitely isn’t a good thing. In its early stages, hemorrhoids can be contained and managed. You could live with them peacefully for the rest of your life and not suffer the way she did.
But due to taboo, people more often than not skipped anal examinations during their physicals and missed out on the chance to get ahead of the problem. Or they waited until the last possible minute, when the situation was already dire.
Nowadays Jiang Yijun has absolutely no qualms about discussing her 15 glorious years of living with hemorrhoids. Her openness has a disarming effect on people who are initially too embarrassed to discuss the topic. Some folks even ask for advice on maintaining anal hygiene. It turns out quite a few people have their own Hemorrhoid Brothers.
Jiang Yijun was determined never to let the Hemorrhoid Brothers back in her life again. Nine days after her surgery, she and Dafei checked out of their hotel. Before they left, they took out the garbage and meticulously scrubbed the bathroom floor and the toilet bowl, lest they give the cleaning lady a scare.
Jiang Yijun joked:
Dafei, look at this blood spatter. Doesn’t it look like you murdered someone and dismembered the body?
Jiang Yijun knew she had arrived at a watershed moment. She had overcome a major challenge with her husband, without alarming her family. They survived drawing on their own strength.
She drew the curtains and opened the window in their hotel room. The chilly winter breeze of November, mixed with warm sunlight, gushed in.
How lovely a new lease on life felt.
Translator: Min Lee