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“It was horrific,” he tells me over the phone, now 52-years-old,
even describing the waiting room, where his mother remembers seeing
pictures of resident doctors in their previous Nazi uniform
attire.
He stops mid-sentence to answer a domestic ping — a WhatsApp
about a piece of furniture arriving at his house — a small, modern
interruption that lands softly beside the larger claims he’s about to
make. It’s a reminder that the life Ji describes is split between the
ordinary and the extreme: furniture delivery on one side; origin myths
on the other. “I think fascistic medicine actually is very much part
of what we saw deployed…. Project
Paperclip,” he says, and the line between past and present
tightens.
If you trace Ji’s career from that sterile corridor in Germany, the
rest looks almost inevitable. Ji was born a sick infant and spent his
youth suffering from a variety of illnesses, undergoing surgeries he
experienced as mishandled and dealing with the aftermath of
medications he was prescribed that led to more problems. At age 17, he
gave up cow’s milk and his inhaler — swearing that by eliminating
certain dairy products from his diet he no longer needed albuterol to
treat his life-long asthma.
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