After being separated from my family, I became a darling of the military region thanks to my medical

The photo in the hallway made the front page of major foreign media outlets three days later.

Early in the morning, Gu Zheng brought an enamel mug and slammed a stack of compiled reports and overseas faxes bearing the red header of "Confidential Internal Reference" documents onto Ye Zhen's dining table. He had used his military region authority to obtain these documents overnight from the Information Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The briefing sent back by Reuters was titled "The Corridor Ceremony".

The composition of the photo is simple: Ye Zhen, wearing a faded green scrubs, stands in the corridor, accepting a red folder from Mahler with both hands. Behind her are mottled white walls and exposed water pipes. In the lower right corner of the image, a thin, rural woman squats, holding a worn-out cloth bag in her arms, her head bowed so her face is not visible.

The BBC's internal report followed that afternoon, with a headline that roughly translated to: She made the Director-General of the World Health Organization wait for forty minutes outside the operating room.

The Times devoted an entire column to interviewing three British doctors present at the scene. Williams' words were quoted in bold: Everyone thought she would accept the appointment letter before dealing with the emergency, but she didn't even glance at the document.

The New York Times took the most unconventional angle, repeatedly mentioning the rural mother squatting by the wall and the detail of Ye Zhen refusing to accept twenty-three dollars and sixty cents. The headline boldly proclaimed: Twenty-three dollars and sixty cents and one hundred million marks.

Ye Zhen was eating a steamed bun with a plate of pickled vegetables and half a bowl of millet porridge in front of her.

Gu Zheng pushed the stack of papers toward her, his eyes brimming with undisguised pride: "You're famous now, the whole world is writing about you."

Ye Zhen took a bite of her steamed bun, her eyelids glancing briefly at the stack of papers.

"What is that?"

"You'll see when you see it."

Ye Zhen put down the steamed bun, picked up the top sheet and scanned a few lines, then flipped to the second sheet and glanced at it a few times before casually setting it aside.

"Where's Harrison?"

Gu Zheng pulled out an overseas fax with punch marks from the bottom. It was a typesetting proof sent overnight by the editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), with a Chinese translation draft attached next to it.

Headline: "A Correction and a Confession"

Ye Zhen took it and looked at it more carefully this time than in the previous media reports.

Harrison's correction statement was a full 2,800 words long. The first paragraph listed all the criticisms he had pointed out in his previous open letter, and then contradicted himself point by point.

The first point concerns the insufficient sample size for surgery.

Harrison wrote: I was using the American Heart Association’s standards for adults, but Dr. Ye was dealing with newborns weighing several kilograms, and simply copying the standards was a foolish mistake.

The second point concerns the lack of medium- to long-term follow-up data.

He wrote: In the six weeks since I issued my open letter, Dr. Ye has completed several extremely difficult surgeries, including cross-border transfers, each of which has been verified by a third party and guaranteed by Academician Andrei of the Soviet Union.

Article 3, concerning the lack of international multicenter randomized controlled trials.

Harrison responded in five paragraphs, but the core message was: when a new technique can pull a child back from the brink of death, insisting on a three-to-five-year trial process is tantamount to watching hundreds of children die while waiting.

The last paragraph was written specifically for Ye Zhen. The letters were typed very tightly, clearly indicating that it had been carefully considered.

In other words: The academic superiority I had built up over forty years was utterly shattered in that simple operating room, in front of Dr. Ye's domestically made scissors that cost only 1.2 yuan. This is not a disgrace; it is the best lesson I have learned in my forty years of medical practice. I owe Dr. Ye a face-to-face apology. I have already said it, but I am willing to say it again here.

After reading the last page, Ye Zhen folded the fax twice and placed it under the pickled vegetable dish.

"This old man is at least honest."

Gu Zheng was waiting for her to say something insightful, but all she did was offer this one light and casual comment.

Ye Zhen swallowed the last bite of steamed bun, picked up the enamel mug and took a sip of warm water, then turned around and took out a stack of things from the military satchel on the back of the chair.

It was a crudely printed form, with creases from the mailing process at the corners, and the cover was printed with the title: "First Batch Summary Table of Screening Data from the National 'Huaxia Heart' Program".

Gu Zheng raised an eyebrow: "When was this delivered?"

"The results of the first round of preliminary screening in seventeen provinces across the country were forwarded to me by Dean Zhang yesterday afternoon."

Ye Zhen turned to the first page, her fingertips tracing the densely packed numbers in the table. When she reached the third page, her fingers suddenly stopped.

Gu Zheng noticed that her expression was off and leaned over to take a look, but the numbers on the paper were like gibberish to him.

"What's wrong?"

Ye Zhen didn't say anything, took out half a red and blue pencil from her bag, and drew a heavy bar under one of the numbers.

"Look at this province." She turned the form around and pointed the pen at the column for a remote province. "The reported congenital heart disease screening rate is 0.3 per thousand."

Gu Zheng stared at the number: "Is this considered high or low?"

"The national average is 0.8%." Ye Zhen turned to the next page. "Look at its neighboring provinces, with similar populations and environments, their screening rate is 0.76%."

Gu Zheng's brows slowly furrowed into a tight knot.

Ye Zhen slammed the red and blue pencils down on the table, then pulled out a thinner stack of papers from under the summary sheet—copies of the original registration forms submitted by each province. She flipped through the pages to the section for that province, circling several columns again with the red pencil.

"Look here, the number of people screened at home is 2,300."

Ye Zhen's voice turned cold, and she spoke very quickly: "This province has nine prefecture-level cities and forty-seven counties. Based on their population size and birth rate, the number of children who truly need screening is at least between 18,000 and 20,000."

She put a huge question mark next to "two thousand three hundred".

"In other words, they didn't even cover one-eighth of the area, yet they dared to use such a small sample to come up with a conclusion of 0.3 per thousand and submit it as an assignment!"

Gu Zheng's face darkened: "Are you saying that your subordinates are shirking their duties?"

"I'm just guessing. Could you go to the logistics department and borrow a scientific calculator for me, one of those old Casio calculators that can do square roots?"

"Now?"

"Yes, right now!"

Without saying a word, Gu Zheng turned around and strode out the door.

That day, Ye Zhen stayed with the stack of mimeographed forms and a borrowed Casio calculator, spending more than five hours calculating.

Seven sheets of paper were used, all filled with densely packed numbers: population base, number of newborns, and annual health check records, substituted into epidemiological formulas to arrive at the theoretical range.

Ye Zhen pushed the calculator aside and clipped the seven sheets of paper together with paperclips. She wrote the conclusion in red pen at the bottom of the last sheet, pressing it firmly through the back of the paper:

Based on the province's population structure, the actual number of sick children is likely eight to ten times the reported figure. At least several hundred children have not been registered!

She stared at the line of red text, sitting motionless on the wooden chair for a full minute, like a cold, hard statue.

Ye Zhen knocked on Zhou Hai's office door.

Ye Zhen slammed the seven sheets of paper onto the desk, with the summary sheet sandwiched in the middle.

She didn't waste any words and simply pointed her finger at the three sets of numbers.

"These are the numbers they reported." Moving the finger to the right, "These are the actual numbers I calculated." Further to the right, "This is the difference."

Zhou Hai stared at those sets of numbers for a full ten seconds, leaning forward and then back, his brows furrowed in a frown: "Xiao Ye, isn't this difference calculated incorrectly?"

Ye Zhen pushed the calculation process right under his nose: "Every step of the formula is here. Dean Zhou can verify it line by line."