Hospital is one of the book’s central spaces of crisis and recognition. It is not merely a place where injuries and illnesses are treated: it is where concealed danger becomes undeniable, where relatives arrive under pressure, and where care can either protect a vulnerable person or become another form of control. Across operating rooms, sickrooms, corridors, balconies reached through rescue, and elevators where bodies give way, Hospital gathers the novel’s recurring tensions between life and death, fear and reassurance, freedom and confinement.

Emergency, Surgery, and Family Arrival

Hospital first appears as the destination of an urgent family response. When Su Qingrou is taken there for an operation, Su Xiangnan reaches the entrance of the operating room and finds her crying intensely. Bian Jiang is also present, while Lin Yanche is absent, a physical absence that already carries emotional and relational weight. Su Qingcheng’s arrival produces another disturbance: Su Qingrou notices that Lu Xun has brought her as well and questions why she has been included. Hospital therefore functions as a gathering point where family loyalties, absences, and resentments become visible at the same time as the medical emergency.

The operating room briefly suspends the surrounding conflict. When Jin Zhengnan comes out and confirms that nothing is wrong, Su Xiangnan leaves after bidding Su Qingrou farewell. The next morning, concern returns through the telephone rather than through the ward itself: a call intended to ask about Jin Zhengnan’s injuries is answered by Lin Yanche, who coldly says that he has Su Qingrou’s number. The hospital has not resolved the relationships surrounding the injury; it has only concentrated them, allowing medical recovery to expose who is present, who is missing, and who controls access to information.

Hospital also becomes the setting for Su Qingrou’s acute appendicitis. Bian Jiang explains that he saw her condition that morning, brought her for examination, and arranged surgery to remove her appendix. The operation threatens to delay her engagement ceremony, making the hospital a direct obstacle to a public marital ritual. Lin Yanche’s mocking response outside the medical setting intensifies the contrast: even if the engagement is not delayed, he doubts that the couple will succeed. Surgery thus interrupts the appearance of orderly romance and reveals how precarious the proposed union is.

Confinement, Rescue, and the Sickroom

The hospital’s protective function is sharply contrasted with the manor where Lin Yanche confines Su Qingrou. Late at night, Su Qingrou calls for help and says that Lin Yanche has locked her inside the manor and will not let her leave. Su Xiangcheng immediately reports the danger to Lu Xun, who brings people to intervene. From a distance, Su Xiangcheng sees Su Qingrou sitting at a balcony window and runs toward the house, urging her not to act recklessly. After the door is opened, Su Qingxiang reaches the balcony and pulls Su Qingrou away from the edge.

Once Su Qingrou is rescued, Lu Xun sends her to Jin Zhengnan’s sickroom at Hospital. The movement from manor to sickroom changes the meaning of enclosure. Lin Yanche’s estate is described as a beautiful cage that cannot keep its captive, whereas the sickroom offers a supervised space of recovery after the rescue. Yet the hospital does not erase coercion from the surrounding story. Lu Xun’s call to Lin Yanche makes clear that the rescue is also a challenge to his authority, and medical care becomes part of a larger struggle over who may decide where Su Qingrou belongs.

Hospital is likewise the place toward which Lu Xun directs Su Xiangcheng when Lin Yanche is hospitalized. His message says that Yan Che is in Hospital and that he will wait there so they can take Grandfather home together. The news surprises Su Xiangcheng, who imagines Lin Yanche as physically indestructible, while the reality of hospitalization reveals a body unable to sustain that image. The ward is not quiet: Lin Yanche is so manic that objects can be heard falling from it. The hospital room therefore contains both physical illness and psychological instability, making visible the collapse beneath his outward strength.

Bodies in Crisis and the Labor of Care

Hospital scenes repeatedly make bodily vulnerability impossible to ignore. Lu Xun’s illness suddenly recurs during one episode; he quickly removes a pill from his pocket, takes off his mask, sprays the medicine into his mouth, and breathes deeply until the symptoms ease. The episode links Hospital and medical care to his concealed respiratory condition, while also showing the speed with which a private bodily crisis can threaten his authority. Illness interrupts composure before it can be explained.

The same tension appears in Su Xiangwan’s fever. After enduring two days of high fever while being cared for by Mo Beiyu, she is so weak that she cannot summon enough strength to sit up without help. Mo Beiyu feeds her water, insisting that she must drink after boiling for two days. Later, as she leaves, her legs feel weak, her consciousness fades, and she collapses at the elevator entrance before her fingertips reach the button. The elevator turns a threshold into a medical emergency: departure becomes impossible, and the body forces the narrative back toward care.

Care at Hospital is often intimate but not uncomplicated. Lu Xun ignores the wounds on his own face while embracing the frightened Su Xiangcheng, and he reassures her that he has been there all along. Mo Beiyu, by contrast, physically supports Su Xiangwan and brings water to her lips when she cannot manage the act herself. These gestures offer genuine protection, but they also reveal how illness rearranges agency. The person who is feverish, injured, or terrified becomes dependent on another’s hands, decisions, transport, and interpretation of symptoms.

Memory, Diagnosis, and the Pressure of Mortality

Hospital also creates the conditions for painful disclosures. Su Xiangcheng recalls that her mother had a terminal illness and believed that leaving the family would prevent her illness from implicating them. As a child, Su Xiangcheng drew an image of her parents holding her hands; after seeing it, her mother walked onto the balcony. The memory turns medical diagnosis into a family trauma that cannot remain confined to the past. Lu Xun responds by wiping away her tears, but the hospital-centered world of illness makes clear that physical disease has shaped the family’s emotional history long after the original death.

Lu Xun’s own history of bodily danger is disclosed in a separate account. At twelve, he was kidnapped, given various medicines by the kidnappers, and nearly lost his life; afterward, he developed resistance to drugs. The recollection explains why certain methods no longer work on him and why his body carries an unusual medical consequence of childhood violence. His narration treats the past as distant, yet the fact that he can describe the experience without visible collapse does not remove its force. Hospital and medicine become the vocabulary through which survival, resistance, and old pain are understood.

The most severe diagnosis attached to Hospital is Lin Yanche’s liver cancer. Yun Xiao quietly tells Su Xiangcheng that Lin Yanche has received the diagnosis and is waiting for a suitable donor; without one, he can only wait for death. His thinness, previously noticeable but unexplained, is retrospectively reinterpreted through the diagnosis. Hospital here is not simply the place of possible recovery. It is also the institution implied by waiting lists, organ exchange, and the narrowing distance between treatment and mortality.

A Narrative Space of Reversal

Hospital repeatedly changes the value of a scene. A feared operation becomes reassuring when Jin Zhengnan is confirmed safe, while another operation interrupts an engagement and exposes instability. A rescue from confinement leads to a sickroom, but the transfer also deepens the conflict with Lin Yanche. A message about hospitalization turns Lu Xun and Su Xiangcheng toward a new confrontation, and a diagnosis transforms Lin Yanche from an apparently invulnerable antagonist into a man facing death.

Its recurring corridors and rooms also provide a counter-image to the novel’s private residences and estates. Mansions can become cages, marriages can become structures of obedience, and family homes can preserve traumatic memories. Hospital, despite its own systems of supervision, is where those structures are tested by the material facts of the body. Fever, surgery, respiratory attacks, injury, mania, cancer, and collapse interrupt the characters’ attempts to command events through wealth, marriage, or force.

For that reason, Hospital serves as a narrative threshold rather than a stable refuge. Characters arrive carrying secrets and leave with altered knowledge: Su Qingrou’s medical emergency exposes the fragility of her engagement; Lu Xun’s illness reveals the limits behind his control; Su Xiangwan’s collapse proves that endurance cannot substitute for treatment; and Lin Yanche’s cancer places every act of domination under the shadow of death. The location’s decisive significance lies in this repeated reversal: at Hospital, the characters’ social identities become secondary to the bodies they can no longer conceal.