The woman on the phone was reading me my schedule.
She was an American from Ohio, working in China, and she had set up all my shows for the trip. "We'll have you at this restaurant," she said. "Then this church. Then this school. Then the leper colony, and then the American school."
"Wait," I said. "Stop. What was the last one?"
"The American school."
"No. Before that."
"A leper colony."
While she was still talking, I typed into my phone: is leprosy contagious?
I had always heard that it was, all the way back to Bible times. It turns out it is not nearly as contagious as everyone believed. Today it is curable.
"OK," I said. "Let's do that."
Across the rice paddies
It was February 2018, just before Chinese New Year, about an hour outside Shenzhen, in Guangdong province, in southern China.
A young Chinese woman picked us up. She was our interpreter, and her English was pretty good. Her friend drove. He spoke no English at all.
We drove and drove. We left the tall buildings and the apartments and the offices behind, and the comforts that come with them. I sat in the back seat and didn't know these people at all.
Then we started across a rice paddy. The road was a strip of dirt piled up between two pools of water where the rice grew. I remember wondering if this was where they would murder me, and somebody would find my body ten years later.
It was not. Everyone's intentions were good, and their hearts were in the right place.
The hospital
The road ended at an abandoned hospital. It was a two-story brick building that looked like it was built in the 1950s or 1960s.
About 40 people lived there. They had taken it over on their own. Most of them looked to be in their sixties at the youngest, and many were in their seventies or eighties. All of them had leprosy. None of them spoke English.
Many of them had been driven out of their home towns, farther north, because people were afraid of the disease. They moved wherever they could find a place, and for these folks, that was an empty hospital.
Inside, it was dark. I don't think there was electricity. The only light came from the sunshine outside. There was running water, but the stench was overwhelming. Urine, and rotting flesh.
There was a small pavilion out back. It was unseasonably cold that day, but I voted we do the show outside.
Chairs on wheels
The interpreter, the driver and I picked people up and put them in wheelchairs. Some were regular wheelchairs. Others were stacking chairs that a Christian group had fitted with four wheels. We rolled everyone outside and set them up in rows, like a theater.
Many of them were missing at least one limb. Some had no feet. Many had lost a hand, or the fingers on a hand. The disease had taken their noses and ears.
The wrong thank you
In every country I visit, I try to learn a little of the local language. So when they applauded as I was introduced, I said thank you, in the Chinese I had practiced.
My interpreter turned to me. "What are you doing?"
"I'm saying thank you. They're clapping."
"That's Mandarin," she said. "These people speak Cantonese."
Everywhere else I had been in China, people spoke Mandarin. So the joke was on me, in front of the whole audience. I learned the Cantonese on the spot.
It didn't throw me. In comedy clubs and churches back home, most of my show is talking with the audience and thinking on my feet. You pivot and go with the flow. And you can't argue with your interpreter.
Forty-five minutes
We did about half an hour of magic. She translated the patter that goes with each trick, and they loved it. Then I got to visit with people and share some laughs.
I hope that for 45 minutes or so, I helped them forget what that disease has done to their lives.
The photo
At the end, I went down into the audience and we took a group photo. They gave me their permission to take it and to share it.
Dozens of people in wheelchairs, missing hands and feet, and none of them with a nose or ears. And there I am in the middle, with all my fingers and all my toes.
I didn't know there was still leprosy in the world. How naive of me. The United States had leper colonies too: Kalaupapa, in Hawaii, and Carville, in Louisiana, which stayed open until 1999.
What I took home
On that trip I did shows in churches and schools all across China. This is the one that stays with me.
Of course I have problems. Everyone has problems, and down days, and bad luck. But the people in that photo were sick, disfigured, and driven out of their homes, and they still laughed at a magic show out in the cold.
Compared to them, my life is charmed.