Bleeding for China: Why I'm a Han

There you have it. The first two characters 血... mean blood type. The big red O is pretty self explanatory. The Rh means Rh+.

The next line, 姓名 means name, and there you can seen my Chinese name: 白蕊, as written by the nurse who filled out my blood donor book.

And now it gets interesting. The next line is 民族, which my students had a lot of trouble translating, but it means ethnicity. The nurse decided to make me a 汉 "Han". (actually she was probably just on autopilot after a whole day of writing it, since approximately 94% of China is this same ethnicity.) So all day after that, I got immense amounts of entertainment out of showing people my card and announcing that I am now a Han.

I've been looking for an opportunity to give blood here in China ever since the first time I saw the blood van Parked nearby the building where I live. And this was the day I had been waiting for. I had my passport on me, I was wearing my easily rolled up sleeves and I had drunk about a gallon of water the day before for no then discernible reason. I just needed a translator. Fortunately, I saw several of my students.
It was surprisingly easy to fill out the little "have you ever..." questionnaire based on assumed similarity to the US version. Then blood pressure. My blood pressure was very normal. Then they poked my finger, but it wasn't for the copper sulfate test. It was actually so they could test for my blood type. The whole thing was puctuated by the need for several eagerly helpful translators and the remarkable wit of the nurse. She was just as amused by my ridiculous presence as I was. This was all done under a little tent outside the blood van. Next we went inside the blood van. I put cute plastic bags on my feet in order to go in. There was one little bed for giving blood, but I did my turn in one of the two seats.
There are many great things about giving blood in China. For one, you can choose from three bag sizes: 200ml 300ml or 400ml. I chose the large size because I'm pretty sure that's less than a pint. I had been wondering how on Earth my itty bitty students were capable of giving blood with their 90 lb selves.
Another great thing is that if you look weak, they'll hand you a warm cup of sugar water. This had me excited for about twenty minutes. I downed two more cups before I was done.
A really great thing is that somehow they nailed my normally difficult-to-tap vein. It didn't hurt going in, and it bled immediately and fast. In past donating incidents, my vein has collapsed or the nursed have had to do a lot of painful adjusting.
And one last great thing about giving blood in China is that at the end I got a box of yoghurt (they're like juiceboxes here) and a dog stuffed animal. Then my students insisted on carrying my bags and taking me to eat noodles.

Here's one thing that struck me about the blood van: a lot of the nurses spoke at least some English. Now that in iself is no big deal, but what it means is that they had English probably as students. I connected that to the fact that one of my team mates is teaching nursing students this semester. From the experience of previous teachers, the nursing students are a harder class to teach English to and they don't seem to benefit much from it. But we have been instructed not to concentrate on what we can do in a semester, but on what team after team does over the course of years. Maybe my encounter with the nurses was a second chapter. I can only hope that while I was giving blood, it was with the right attitude and sending the right message. The message that I know how much I have been given and I want to do all I can to give to and help others.