On 29 September, an old woman with a slight hunchback tottered into the sick room, and was assigned Bed No. 1 immediately, which was the only vacant bed of the entire tenth floor, dedicated to brain patients. She was stoutly built, had a square face and later when the meal-ordering woman came in, she claimed she was a Hui (Muslim) and ordered Muslim food for the rest of the day.
Later when my teenage daughter came in to see me I whispered to her, showing off my extensive knowledge that Hui is actually a mixed-blood of Han, the majority of the Chinese population, and Iranians, then what was known as Persians, along the Silk Road. That is why they still, whichever way you look at them, carry some typical features of Iranians.
She was out of humour, grumbling most of the time, flying into a temper over almost anything, trivial in fact in nature. I noticed all these while I observed her walking with a light shuffle, glumly, with a mouth overly stuck out as if she had been habitually annoyed by others. This way she walked back and forth from her bed which was close to the entrance of the room, the first room a visitor saw once landing on the tenth floor by elevator, to the toilet at the opposite end of the room or to the balcony which was shared by another sick room.
Soon I caught sight of a younger woman, with a few short stripes of golden curly fluffy hair on top of a head of black hair to the length of her ears, holding a basin and entering the toilet. The way she walked was not much different from her mother’s and she looked as melancholy as her mother.
She was the old woman’s daughter, born in 1975. I soon learned that she had just had arguments with her mother, who vehemently reprimanded her for “constantly” mentioning her deceased father and exclaiming how nice, and so much nicer than her mother was, even though he passed away for a terminal illness in 2013, unconnected with SARS, then prevalent in the country, anyway.
“Your mother is still alive, yet you are forever extolling your dead Dad,” she uttered loudly. “You should, like everybody says, live for the moment!”
On her bedpost, I saw that her name was Chen Guibao, 70, allergic to penicillin and later I learned also to cigarette smoke, against which she would prove a resolute fighter, complaining to doctors and nurses and yelling into the corridor.
She might be passed off as someone difficult to approach, yet she turned out in fact completely the opposite. She said with a pride that she was a very straightforward person, saying “whatever is in your mind, speak out, never go in a round-about manner with me” to me, when I could no longer suppress my displeasure for her sleeping the previous night, the first night, with a radio on, broadcasting first a program about Monk Pig in the Journey to the West, a scholarly SWOT analysis of the personality, merits and weaknesses of this fat pig-headed monk from Tang Dynasty (AD 618-907), then to a program where some man talked in a slightly feminine voice about the virtues of living a simple, crude and uncluttered life, which wearied me to death because I regarded everything he said was nonsense and obvious.
After hearing my complaint in the morning, her response was immediate and simple, “Why didn’t you tell me then and there? I could have stopped!”
To this I replied with a relief, “well, if that’s the case, if the sound is overbearing, I will just tell you.”
That same night she did not turn on the radio, a pocket-sized radio with a wire plugged into the wall. A few days later she told me why she kept the radio on during the night. Her beloved husband’s death so struck her that she started having sleepless nights, and to while away the deadly still and dark hours she resorted to having the radio on to produce some noises, as a sort of company.
During the day time, she was rather irritable, complaining for instance once about a nurse's failure to inserting a syringe after three attempts, picking into her hand three times. The frustrated nurse covered up the needle with a tiny plastic case and fled with some excuse. Chen waited some ten minutes, then started yelling in bed toward the nurses’ desk, some ten meters away in the corridor, “Hey, how come you left me alone on bed waiting for you for ages, just for an infusion.” The nurses’ desk was all noises. Finally a rather senior nurse showed up and nearly painlessly pricked the syringe into her blood vessel to start the infusion.
For a few mornings, when the doctors and nurses went about their routine enquiry and giving instructions to patients, she impatiently complained that her head pain was there still and that her her ears rang like an electric drill in the midst of working.
Wang Weiwei, a woman doctor in her early 40s, assured her the treatment would take its due time to produce some tangible effect on her. Chen didn’t listen and said she could not bear it any more. The doctor was a bit enraged and said, “How about this. I will prescribe you a particular medicine and you should put your worries to rest”. A hour or two later, a nurse returned to her bed with a pack of traditional Chinese medicinal pills.
The drug took quick effect. I heard her sleeping rhythmically and loudly, to the extent she could be regarded as mildly snoring. I told her so the next morning and she acknowledged the effectiveness of the drugs with a grin.
“Yes, I finally can sleep a while while I have been awake most of the night,” she said. Well, I am not sure if she had been awake at all because I didn’t notice it or I was in deep sleep myself.
She received foot bathing with some traditional Chinese herbal powders in an electric bucket on the same floor, in the nurses’ space, and then she went downstairs by elevator to the fourth floor to receive massage and three other tricks of the traditional Chinese medicine. Invariably she returned with a rather cheerful mood. She walked briskly and was almost about to sing and dance, to the amusement of other patients and relatives who came to look after them.
“For the same foot bath, here it is only RMB 48, but outside the hospital even a foot bath of RMB 200 cannot be compared with it,” thus she advocated Bed 2, a woman of 61 suffering from Altzheimer, her arms and legs often irresistably shaking. “It sure does good to you - I can guarantee you.”
You see she is also warm-hearted and helpful to others like an angel.
She in general went along quite well with everybody in the room, including me, for almost ten days. We were three people in the room, but after the National Holiday (1-8 October), a 47-year-old man came in with his right face stiff and senseless, eye and mouth and tongue all twitched in the wrong directions.
She became talkative to me day by day, reminding me what sort of food could effectively lower my blood pressure, sometimes hovering between 170-110, a strange stubborn issue that an experienced doctor from Department of Cardiology was called in to study my case.
She told me that I might need to see the urgency of quickly getting out to seek help from Changhai Hospital and made a point of me remembering an old male medical expert surnamed Zheng. She seemed unable to stop extolling Mr Zheng, stressing how he and quite a few other junior Navy medical professionals, stood at the head of her bed and discussed together her conditions and deliberated on solutions. Or I should go to Ruijin Hospital, where even foreigners and important people from Beijing are treated. She was nagging forth like she would look after me in all aspects. To her chain of reminding I mostly simply nodded, or said “Yes, I will”, with my face facing toward her. We two took up two oblong diagonal beds in the room that held four beds, with quite spacious space left in the middle. She also passed to me boiled eggs, smoky tofu snacks, dried fruits, fish steak and things I cannot remember now.
We did have another argument again nearly two weeks later. She was saying with a glee that the hospital charged everyone RMB 18 for meals for ten days of staying in the hospital. That’s not what I have heard, and I told her plainly that RMB 18 was the charge for one day. She didn’t believe it and verified with other patients and a woman who came in to order meals for everyone. The woman let out an instantaneous cry that it would be “out of your mind to think you only pay RMB 1.8 for one day’s three meals”. Hearing this, she looked crestfallen and said no more.
The day I was told to leave the hospital was announced on Friday, 9 October, by Ms Huang Wenjing, who was in charge of allocating beds on the floor, the neurology ward for all patients with problems in brains.
I forget to mention that all patients in this ward are not necessarily segregated by sex. I was admitted in on 22 September, but just before 1 October, I had a 82-year-old lady, Bed 2, facing me outright. She received treatment for the cerebral infarction brain. The other two beds were occupied by a man of 68 and a man in his early 70s, joking with or playing mischief with each other almost whenever they had eyes popped open. Once I could make out from his Shanghai dialect that the 68-year-old one was encouraging the nurse to prick thrice on the other before starting the infusion.
Bed 1 was talking to me ever more. On 11 October, one day ahead of my being discharged, she revealed to me her real pain weighing down in her heart these many years and after she told me all, she said she felt relieved afterwards.
The story went like this. Her biggest problem was not with her directly, but with her grandson. Her grandson once straggled her and tried to kill her. She said, quoting the 14-year-old boy as saying, “I will kill you sooner or later because your houses should have been signed under my name.”
She shook her head sadly and said, “My grandson was finished up.” She said the teenager came over to her when she started hospitalization here. She recounted to me that he merely said “I’ve come over to say hello to you” and she replied “Babe, study hard.” That was all the conversation she had had with him.
The boy was the son of her daughter aforementioned with her husband who more often than not lived in Hangzhou, together with the man’s parents, who were hospitalized with some hopeless disease. The woman was doing great in career, was an accountant, and enjoyed some previlege that no other staff did.
“She was given a big Ipad once by the boss and she gave it to me,” she recalled. later I found out that she had never opened the packaging a year after receiving it, and so urged her to take it out and plug on into the electricity as electronic goods must be connected with electricity every three or six months to avoid them becoming uttlerless useless. She was rather grateful for my advice!.
Her daughter was to her a pride and solace just as any daughter would be to a mother. The daughter came over two or three times later, doing some washing for her and chatting with her warmly in a while, and then quietly absorbed herself onto the screen of her phone. A homely scene of a mother and her daughter.
A decade ago the couple used to work in Wuhan, earning quite some absurdly rich money, and had put their son in teachers’ homes in Shanghai. At the time of entering schools, the boy’s mother had a close friend who Chen said was very beautiful, and usually stayed abroad. The daughter asked her friend to send her son into an International School in the name of the latter’s son.
Here the hell started. The boy went with her classmates a few times overseas for trips and holidays but he became flamboyant and developed an extravagant lifestyle, entering into a race of comparing whose shoes were better, which means “more expensive”. He would come home saying something like someone had a pair of shoes that cost RMB 10,000, but his shoes were just RMB 1,000 short of that price. This and that, no matter how much his parents paid for his things, he would and could always find out to be inferior to somebody else's.
Unable to outshine his classmates in terms of belts, boots and trousers, the phone and the like, he decided to win by stating how many apartments he owned or could own some day. This I guessed from how obsessively she wanted to kill Chen to get her three apartments in Shanghai, one in suburban but spacious and luxuriously equipped apartment in Minhang District, two in Yangpu District, which happen to be torn down soon to provide room for new constructions.
For God’s sake, these two apartments were by no means within the knowledge of the grandson, she said. Chen kept this secret to her and hanged onto it like the last straw of her life.
The Yangpu apartments promise enormous fortunes to her, and she decided to sign up her name after she was out of the hospital in return for probably six new apartments or a big sum of money in the region of RMB 10 million.
She decided to reside in one of these few apartments for the remainder of her life, a safe haven from her grandson and where she could relax, playing with her dog and two cats freely.
What about her Minhang home? She has already decided to sell it, to cash out. And she was eager to quit it, by lowering the price down by RMB200,000 from the original price to RMB 280,000 online. The reason? The grandson knows where she lives, once secretively groped his way to the apartment, chatted nonsense with her a while in the sitting room, but started straggling her when she went back to her bedroom for something.
“The guy caught my collar, I struggled and instantly called the police, and then yelled to my son-in-law about his son,” she said. “What on earth is he doing?”
The police rushed in a few minutes later and saved her, she said.
Since then she has never wanted her grandson to visit her apartment again. She feels danger. The boy wants some apartments assigned to her now, immediately, for the sake of his honour in front of his school buddies, many of them being children of foreign diplomats and businessmen.
“Ah, I feel finally relieved. A big block of stone is removed from over my heart,” she said, after recounting her experiences with the grandson to me. “I’ve held the secret for so long that I could only now find someone to spit it out.”
But I feel a weight on my heart. How can a grandmother escape from her grandson just for safety? The boy is the source of the problem and should receive all possible attention, I reasoned with her.
She said “yes, we’ve done all reasonable things for him, and we could never talk to him in a peaceful way”. He would appear offended and hurt, and yell back all too readily.
He was brought to some psychiatrist to no avail. Actually today he was in a hospital for some magnetic scan of his brain. Perhaps there was something physically wrong with his brain, she muttered.
“It can’t be his brain going wrong”, I told her with confidence. “It must be the manner of his being brought up at home.”
“Yes, that is likely. When he was small they were away in Wuhan making money, and now the child has no feelings toward her parents.”
“I regret that my daughter and my son-in-law talked openly and excessively about how much money they had made and what properties they were planning to buy in front of the child during meal time.”
It could also be the International School that has caused the problem or contributed to the problem, I reasoned. She agreed, seeing much value in this proposition.
His parents tried to find out from the International School a clue, to no avail. In meetings with the school, the school told them that the boy was all right in the school and had every right to be himself in the school, but he has never been destructive or negative in anyway, and instead charged his parents for being too strict with him, placing excessively high expectations on him.
Returning from the International School was a total frustration, and added more myth than anticipated, she summed up.
She was told to be ready to leave the hospital on 13 October, but on 12 October, she received a phone call from his daughter that she shouldn’t expect to leave that day (Tuesday) and that she would reason with the doctor, she told me.
“Oh my God, what could that mean?” she ejaculated. “I know that my daughter would be cleaning up my Minhang place and looking after the dog and two cats, but could this mean that I was not allowed back home and she would ultimately send to the Old People’s Home?”
She was adamant that old people should not go to such places, recalling some gruesome stories. For one, she said, a relatively healthy old woman was soon found to be dumb and deaf a few days after entering an Old People’s Home.
My husband told me, “You would rather die on the streets, but never, ever, enter an Old People’s Home!”
She did leave the hospital on 12 October. At about 4.30 pm, she called my wife’s phone, asking how I was getting along and wished me good health.
- Written in the Neighbourhood Centre in Qingyun Road, Jing An District, Shanghai, on 23 October 2022.
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