Jeremiah Keenan | Sparing more than change

Keen on the Truth | There’s more to give to those in need than food or shelter

By Jeremiah Keenan 09/30/14 10:56pm

I nsid e the tightly packed cluster of nine story walk-up apartment bui ldings, it was damp and dark. There were about five feet from the wall of one building to the wall of the next. This constituted the passage way in and out of the complex. I ducked my head to avoid some laundry hung out to dry (God knows how!) on a pole extending from a second-story window.

I was 15 at the time, and had come to visit a girl named Jin Shui who was in the first floor apartment to my left. The door was slightly ajar, and my father walked in without knocking. Jin Shui’s mother, with a strained and silent face, came into the room. Speaking in subdued tones, she ushered us into the bedroom.

In the bedroom lay her 17-year-old daughter — dirt poor, up from the country-side and dying of cancer. Two months earlier, Jin Shui had traveled to Guangzhou with her parents to sit on the street and hope some moneyed passerby would take her to the hospital. It just so happens, however, that moneyed passersby have a habit of passing by in a great hurry to get where they are going.

By the time a woman in our church found Jin Shui, it was already much too late. Doctors prescribed pain meds and predicted five months of life.

I sat on my hard plastic stool in the small bedroom where Jin Shui was dying, and listened as my father spoke about heaven and the life to come. The girl responded in a quiet, clear voice — held carefully in check by conscious effort.

But once, her voice wavered. In pain, fighting back tears, rushing over her words, she stuttered her hope against hope: that by some miracle the cancer might stop. That by some miracle she might recover. She wanted to live! To get out of bed, to be a big sister to her brother, to return to her home!

A month later the girl was dead. Her father wore a shoddy suit — which did not fit him — to the memorial service. Her mother cried. Her little brother tried not to.

Recently, something made me think of Jin Shui again in connection with Nick Cernek’s Bold and Humble Project . Currently a super senior at Penn, Nick spent this past summer living on five dollars a day biking across the United States as a vagrant and trying to connect with homeless people he met along the way. This would have been Penn-typical if he was collecting statistics for a paper on American vagrancy or jotting down stories to write a novel. But he wasn’t.

He was using the summer after his senior year for the exclusive purpose of learning to appreciate people. I talked with Nick for nearly two hours trying to figure out what could have motivated him to do something so crazy. It all boiled down to a simple idea: Nick wanted his heart to break with love for broken hearts. And he wanted to show that love. He wanted to buy lunch for someone and then — instead of handing it down to them and hurrying off to class — sit down next to them on the pavement and treat them like he’d treat a friend.

Nick’s boldness made me so uncomfortable I had to blink and swallow to keep my voice steady. Like most Penn students, I have political and social ideas about what should be done to help “the underclass.”

But there’s a guy who sits on the corner of 38th and Chestnut in a wheelchair that I’ve walked past many times. He’s the poverty I’d like to solve. But not once — even just with a passing smile — have I acknowledged his humanity.

It dawned on me that it was to avoid just such an error that my father forced me to visit Jin Shui back when I was 15. He didn’t want me to just know about the 17-year-old girl mentioned for prayer during the Sunday announcements. He wanted me to see her where she lived. He wanted me to hear her long to stay with the people she loved.

And he wanted me to care.

Jeremiah Keenan is a College junior from China studying mathematics. His email address is jkeenan@sas.upenn.edu. “Keen on the Truth” appears every Wednesday.

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