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Larry’s Kidney
is the barely-believable and, if true, rather shocking story of how the author helped his cousin procure a black-market kidney in China. Larry is obese, diabetic, a dialysis patient, and he has never met a vegetable he would care to eat, but in the end he does get a kidney transplant from an executed prisoner, jumping the line ahead of many patients in the US and in China. The legality of it all is doubtful and the ethics are clearly wrong. So what could save this story? Entertaining anecdotes about their travel to China? A Damascus-road transformation in Larry’s lifestyle post surgery? perhaps some old-fashioned guilt?
Alas, none of those things happen. The China stories are often uncomfortably racist and culturally insensitive (why use dialect to represent mangled accents? Isn’t it a near miracle that they find so many people who can speak English when all they can manage is some old Mao-era political slogan?) Larry lives it up with his new kidney but it’s not clear he will shepherd it to any lasting lifespan. And of guilt there seems to be none, only a stern warning that they got the last Chinese kidney.
Fill out your donor card and don’t think too much about who will get your kidneys.
