The Sanatorium is a place of recuperation that also functions as a private threshold between family life and medical uncertainty. Its most important appearance centers on Su Xiangwan’s grandfather, but its significance extends beyond a single patient: it is where relatives preserve contact, discuss the future of the Su family, and measure love against the limits imposed by illness and age.

Family Visits and Mediated Contact

Su Xiangwan visits the Sanatorium before leaving on a trip because she wants to see her grandfather and help him set up WeChat on his phone. The practical task carries emotional weight: the application gives them a way to meet again at any time even when they are physically apart. Her sweet pride in having made this possible turns technology into an instrument of family continuity, allowing an elderly patient and his granddaughter to remain present in one another’s lives despite the Sanatorium’s separation from the household.

The visit also shows the Sanatorium as a place where ordinary family roles are temporarily reorganized. Su Xiangwan reassures her grandfather that he need not worry about company affairs because Bian Jiang is professional and responsible enough to manage them. The conversation therefore joins medical convalescence to corporate succession: the grandfather’s withdrawal from active responsibilities is acknowledged, while Su Xiangwan tries to protect him from anxiety by presenting the business as safely supervised.

A Place of Counsel and Emotional Limits

Inside the Sanatorium, the grandfather speaks not only as a patient but as an elder attempting to prevent further suffering. He hopes that, if the family can see Su Qingrou again, Su Xiangwan might persuade her not to look back. His stated wish is modest and protective: with little time or ambition left, he wants the two women to remain safe rather than continue fighting over an attachment that may never bring happiness.

Su Xiangwan resists the simplicity of that advice because Su Qingrou still loves Lin Yanche. The grandfather’s response distinguishes inner feeling from attainable partnership. Some people may love entirely within their hearts without ever being able to hold on to the person they desire, and forcing a contest can produce only pain. The Sanatorium thus becomes a setting for an ethical argument about love: affection is acknowledged as real, but it is not treated as sufficient justification for continued conflict.

Her own uncertainty is equally important. Su Xiangwan admits that she sometimes wants to catch Lu Xun and sometimes fears him, without knowing how to reconcile those impulses. The grandfather’s question about whether Lu Xun treats her well turns the medical visit into a moment of intimate diagnosis. The Sanatorium does not cure her confusion, but it gives that confusion a protected space in which family concern can be spoken aloud.

Encounters at the Threshold

When Su Xiangwan leaves her grandfather’s room, she unexpectedly finds Lu Xun leaning against the wall outside. The doorway links the two emotional worlds of the scene: the grandfather’s counsel about safety and the uncertain marriage represented by Lu Xun’s sudden arrival. Lu Xun explains that he came to see an uncle and invites her to leave with him, admitting that he has not brought a gift and will visit the grandfather properly another day.

Su Xiangwan declines to force an immediate visit, reasoning that her grandfather may not want to receive visitors while in this condition. She proposes waiting until his discharge and then eating with him together. Lu Xun agrees to follow her decision. This brief exchange presents the Sanatorium as a boundary governed by the patient’s condition and preference, even while it draws family members and spouses toward the same vulnerable center.

Medical Space in the Novel’s Wider Pattern

The Sanatorium belongs to a broader chain of medical settings that repeatedly redirects the plot. Lu Xun’s illness recurs suddenly during another episode, requiring him to take medicine and regulate his breathing. Lin Yanche is later hospitalized, and Lu Xun waits at the Hospital so that he and Su Xiangwan can take her grandfather home together. Su Qingrou’s acute appendicitis leads to surgery and places her engagement ceremony under threat, while Lin Yanche’s liver cancer is disclosed as a condition that may leave him waiting for a suitable liver donor or death.

These linked episodes clarify what the Sanatorium represents within the narrative. Illness is not merely a background condition: it changes who can travel, who must be protected, who controls information, and when family members are compelled to reunite. A fever, a respiratory attack, an operation, or a terminal diagnosis turns emotional conflict into an urgent question of physical survival. The Sanatorium’s quiet family visit therefore anticipates the novel’s repeated movement between care and crisis, where affection is expressed through accompaniment, medication, feeding, transport, and the promise to bring a vulnerable relative home.

The setting also exposes the unequal burden of care. Su Xiangwan handles communication and reassurance for her grandfather, while Lu Xun’s presence at the doorway suggests a husband attempting to enter the family’s sphere of illness without fully knowing its rules. Elsewhere, Mo Beiyu feeds Su Xiangwan water when fever has left her too weak to sit up, and other characters offer medical explanations, warnings, or physical assistance. Across these scenes, treatment can protect a person, but it can also make the patient dependent on whoever possesses mobility, information, or authority. The Sanatorium consequently carries both tenderness and constraint: it is a refuge from ordinary pressures, yet it makes bodily vulnerability visible as a force that reorganizes relationships.