Trip to China was the hard way to get a new kidney and a wife

Trip to China was the hard way to get a new kidney and a wife

01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, May 17, 2009

By Bryan Rourke

Journal Staff Writer

Larry Feldman found attentive nurses in a hospital in China.
Blame it on a bar mitzvah. Or call it familial guilt …

More about that later.

In his new memoir, Larry’s Kidney (William Morrow, 301 pages, $25.99), Daniel Asa Rose, a Rehoboth resident and a Brown graduate, recounts a recent trip to Asia. A typical vacation it wasn’t. The book’s ridiculously long subtitle tells you that:

Being the Story of How I Found Myself in China with My Black Sheep Cousin and His Mail-Order Bride, Skirting the Law to Get Him a Transplant — and Save His Life.

That’s a good summation of the book, and a good indication of its character — funny. Organ transplants tend not to be humorous occasions. But then most people don’t go halfway around the world looking for one, find a cast of colorful real-life characters in the process, and keep company with a cousin who might best be characterized as quirky.

“Larry is a trip,” Rose says. “He’s the best character I’ll ever write about.”

Rose is a writer. He writes books, including Hiding Places in 2002 about his family’s flight from the Holocaust, and he writes magazine articles – for the New Yorker, Esquire and GQ, among others. And he writes with wit.

But wit is not what Larry Feldman of Pembroke Pines, Fla., wanted from his cousin. He wanted a helper — more honestly, an accomplice. After all, they’d be committing a crime in China, where organ transplants to Westerners are prohibited.

And while Feldman was in China picking up a kidney, he thought he’d pick up a wife, too, and make the trip a twofer. So did Rose. He thought he’d help his cousin, and get an article out of it. He got a lot more material than he expected.

“I have never wanted to tell a story as fervently as this one. I want to tell everybody — my mailman, my mechanic. It’s such a wonderful story,” he says over the phone from his Rehoboth home.

Yes, there’s a happy ending. Larry gets his kidney. But there’s also a wild and wacky journey to its acquisition. What makes the story wonderful is Rose’s telling of it. He turns a case of medical tourism into a comical escapade.

It’s all very silly, except for the serious subtext: the American health-care system is failing Americans.

“I can’t resist irreverence. I love serious topics that I can investigate with humor and get at the seriousness through comedy,” he says.

The saga began very seriously indeed: Feldman was dying. He had lost one kidney to diabetes and was rapidly losing the other. He had been receiving dialysis treatments for two years, waiting for a kidney transplant, which in the U.S., Rose says, could take 7 to 10 years.

That’s when Feldman called Rose, out of the blue, breaking a 15-year silence between them.

“He called me because he had alienated everyone else in the family even worse than he alienated me,” Rose says. “Also I had the chops to help him.”

Or so Feldman thought. Rose had been to China before, but that was 25 years earlier.

“He figured I knew my way around. But I had no more contacts there. It was a case of the blind leading the blind.”

And one of these vision-impaired people, Rose, was still traumatized from his last visit to China, when humorless soldiers couldn’t take a joke and arrested him, detained him for three hours and blew cigarette smoke into his face — all because he asked for directions to the Dalai Lama.

“I vowed if I ever got out of China that I’d never go back.”

Well, Rose went back, virtually clueless what to do when he got there. From his home in Rehoboth he found people online who would give referrals to Chinese doctors who would perform transplants on Westerners. But there was no guarantee the referrals, which cost $10,000, were legitimate. And once in China, Rose was wary of searching on the Internet.

“I didn’t want to leave a trail. It was illegal. And they monitor the Web quite carefully.”

So the tactic Rose took was just to hit the ground asking: Where can I get a kidney transplant?

Rose asked a guide who turned out to be a little too forward; a waitress who turned out to be a spy; and a male taxi driver who turned out to be a female.

“That’s when I thought this was a book.”

That taxi driver, by the way, not only saw Rose and Feldman to their hotel, but to their hotel room where he/she got comfortable on the bed, grabbed the TV remote and took in some shows.

Another colorful character Rose encountered was Feldman’s e-mail-ordered bride, who was 15 years older and 50 pounds heavier than she claimed online; and she also had a mentally retarded son.

“I very much respect the fact that she misrepresented herself,” Feldman says in the book. “It shows a native cunning that I appreciate. Not once in our two years of e-mail correspondence did she tip her hand. Plus which, it’s flattering in a way. She made all that up just to impress me? Well, pardon me, but I am impressed.”

Rose was not impressed with China initially, which he says is polluted, congested and teeming with forged and plagiarized products for sale. But he did find the people very happy and hospitable. And, after asking congregants at a synagogue service in Beijing, he found a kidney for his cousin. The transplant was performed two months later.

This is unheard of in the U.S., Rose says. And the reason, he says, is in this country kidney availability is relatively scarce because you need to specify you’ll donate your organs at your death; whereas in China you specify if you won’t donate. And in China, prisoners don’t have a say in the matter.

“My moral is don’t let your organs die with you. Have a little immortality,” Rose says.

Now, regarding why Rose agreed to help a cousin that he wasn’t speaking with. It goes back to a bar mitzvah 40 years ago, Feldman’s. After the service in the empty synagogue, while everyone else went across the hallway to the reception room, Rose took the microphone and had some profane fun.

“It was piped into the banquet hall. Everyone was laughing except my father.”

Rose was relegated to the synagogue parking lot for the rest day. But Feldman visited him and brought him strawberry shortcake. So the China trip, Rose says, was belated payback, a kidney for a dessert.

“How could I not save his life after he did something like that?”

Daniel Asa Rose is giving a reading from Larry’s Kidney on May 20 at 6:30 p.m. in the Brown Bookstore, 244 Thayer St., Providence.

brourke@projo.com

http://www.projo.com/books/content/artsun-kidney_05-17-09_4UE99HP_v19.181b5e9.html