Dr. Lee laughed. “Don’t worry, Doctor. Most of these people are related to me.” She pointed to a couple whose weathered brown faces were wreathed in smiles. “Those are my parents. As you can see, they’re quite harmless.”

She took Dr. Huang by the hand and led him through the swarm of onlookers. The villagers started to follow, but she waved them off and gently explained that she wished to speak to the gentleman alone.

Back at her hut, she offered her visitor the battered folding chair she sat in to treat patients. Huang mopped the sweat off his bald pate with a handkerchief and scraped the mud from his polished leather shoes. She boiled water for tea on a camp stove and poured a cup for her visitor. Huang took a tentative sip, as if he were unsure it was sanitary.

Lee sat down in the patched-up old dining-room chair that the patients used. “How do you like my open-air treatment room? I see my more modest patients inside the hut. Farm animals, I treat on their own territory.”

“This is a far cry from Harvard Medical School,” Huang said, gazing in fascination at the hut, with its walls of mud and thatched roof.

“This is a far cry from anywhere,” Lee said. “There are some advantages. My patients pay me in vegetables and eggs, so I never go hungry. The traffic is not as bad as in Harvard Square, but it’s next to impossible to find a good caramel caffe latte.”

Huang and Lee had met years before at a mixer for Asian students and faculty at Harvard University. He was a visiting professor from China’s National Laboratory of Medical Molecular Biology. She was finishing her graduate studies in virology. The young woman’s quick wit and intelligence had impressed Huang immediately, and they had continued their friendship after returning to China, where he had risen to a high position in the ministry.

“It has been a long time since we talked. You must be wondering why I’m here,” Huang said.

Dr. Lee liked and respected Huang, but he had been among a number of highly placed colleagues who were conspicuously absent when she needed someone to speak out on her behalf.

“Not at all,” Lee said with a note of haughtiness. “I expect that you are probably carrying the apology of the authorities for their heavy-handed treatment of me.”

“The state will never admit that it is wrong, Dr. Lee, but you have no idea how many times I have regretted not standing up in your defense.”

“I understand the government’s tendency to blame everyone but itself, Dr. Huang, but you have no idea how many times I have regretted that my colleagues failed to come to my defense.”

Huang wrung his hands.