The Hospital Ward is one of the book’s most consequential recurring settings. In its rooms, corridors, and thresholds, bodily vulnerability becomes impossible to ignore: Su Qingrou undergoes emergency surgery, Su Xiangwan collapses from fever, Lu Xun’s respiratory illness recurs, and Lin Yanche’s liver cancer becomes an explicit countdown toward death. The ward also gathers lovers, relatives, rivals, doctors, nurses, and guards into the same restricted space, turning medical treatment into a test of protection, control, trust, and emotional responsibility.

A Place Where Illness Becomes Visible

The ward repeatedly converts private symptoms into public facts. When Bian Jiang enters Su Qingrou’s room, he explains that she had suffered acute appendicitis and had undergone surgery to remove her appendix. Her hospitalization immediately threatens the approaching engagement ceremony, since the family must consider whether the event can proceed while she remains under medical care. Lin Yanche’s mocking arrival makes the ward more than a place of recovery: it becomes an arena where the legitimacy of the engagement and the possibility of the couple’s future are challenged in front of others.

Lu Xun’s own illness also intrudes upon scenes in which he otherwise appears controlled and authoritative. His condition suddenly recurs, prompting him to take a pill from his pocket, remove his mask, and spray medicine into his mouth before taking several deep breaths. The precise, practiced routine shows a body managed through preparation rather than cured by willpower. In the ward, illness therefore modifies his authority without abolishing it; he remains capable of giving orders, but the recurrence of symptoms exposes the physical cost beneath his composure.

The ward also carries the memory of earlier trauma. Lu Xun recalls that he was kidnapped at the age of twelve, that his kidnappers administered various medicines, and that he nearly lost his life; afterward, he developed resistance to drugs. This revelation gives medical treatment a personal history of danger. Medication is not an abstract remedy for him but something connected to captivity, pain, and survival, which helps explain why the book presents his bodily crises with both clinical specificity and psychological weight.

Collapse, Care, and Confinement

Su Xiangwan’s presence in the Hospital Ward is associated with extreme physical weakness and the limits of endurance. After becoming feverish and disoriented, she reaches the elevator entrance, tries to press the button, and faints before her fingertips can touch it. The image places the ward’s threshold at the exact point where independent movement fails: she intends to leave, but her body interrupts the decision. Her collapse makes illness an immediate force that can overrule pride, plans, and the desire to escape.

Care in this setting is often tender but never entirely separate from control. After conflict and danger, Lu Xun comforts Su Xiangwan with hot milk and holds her while she cries in fear. He assures her that he has been there all along, presenting his continued presence as emotional shelter. Yet the same protective structure can become restrictive: Su Xiangwan is brought to a hospital locked up by Lu Xun, and her access to the outside world is shaped by his authority. The ward thus embodies the book’s recurring tension between being kept safe and being deprived of freedom.

The medical environment also intensifies the language of threat. Lin Yanche warns Lu Xun that Su Xiangwan is physically fragile, describing menstruation as an ordeal and predicting that influenza could leave her feverish for three days and three nights. He goes so far as to advise Lu Xun to prepare to identify her body. The statement turns medical knowledge into emotional violence: an account of vulnerability becomes a weapon designed to produce fear, guilt, and urgency. Lu Xun’s face turns deathly pale, showing that the imagined loss of Su Xiangwan penetrates the defenses he maintains in ordinary conflict.

The Ward as a Relational Crossroads

The ward repeatedly forces characters to meet when avoidance is no longer possible. Su Xiangcheng drives to the hospital to see Su Qingrou, whose face immediately reveals that she recognizes something is wrong. Su Xiangcheng recounts what has happened over the preceding days, fights back tears, and considers whether Su Qingrou might intervene with Lu Xun. She refuses that offer because she does not want her sister drawn into the dispute, preserving the ward as a space of sisterly disclosure without turning one sister’s illness into another’s instrument.

Other encounters are more openly adversarial. In a hospital setting, Chu Fei explains to Lu Xun that he regards him as an eyesore because he is attracted to Su Xiangwan. Chu Fei distinguishes his pursuit from direct coercion, claiming that he prefers the process of chasing her and wants it to last. The contrast between the medical setting and the language of pursuit is deliberate: while one man frames possession as protection and another frames desire as pursuit, Su Xiangwan’s own bodily vulnerability remains the condition around which both men organize their rivalry.

The Hospital Ward also connects familial secrets to present grief. Su Xiangcheng recounts that her mother had a terminal illness and withdrew from the family because she did not want to implicate them. She remembers drawing her parents holding her hands and then seeing her mother walk onto the balcony. Lu Xun wipes away her tears and regrets not investigating the matter himself. The ward-like atmosphere of confession and care allows a childhood memory of maternal suicide to surface beside current distress, joining past illness, family guilt, and present protection in one emotional register.

Diagnosis, Waiting, and the Edge of Death

Lin Yanche’s illness gives the ward its starkest terminal horizon. Yun Xiao quietly reveals that Lin Yanche has liver cancer and is waiting for a suitable source from which to obtain a liver; otherwise, he can only wait for death. His thin appearance is retrospectively explained by the diagnosis, and his body becomes evidence of a condition that he has not fully surrendered to publicly. The revelation changes how his aggression and exhaustion are read: his instability is not only moral or psychological but also situated within a life-threatening disease.

Even after his diagnosis, Lin Yanche remains capable of entering confrontations and speaking with apparent steadiness. When Su Xiangcheng encounters him after he leaves the hospital, he looks sickly but walks steadily, and his temperament has not diminished. Later, in the abandoned factory base in Yan City, he is found slumped against a sofa after confronting Chu Fei, exhausted but still present in the struggle over Song Yuner. The movement between hospital and conflict site emphasizes the contradiction at the center of his arc: illness makes death imminent, yet rivalry and unfinished claims continue to pull him away from passive convalescence.

The ward consequently becomes a place of waiting as well as treatment. Its doctors and nurses redress Lu Xun’s wound after he returns, while Lin Yanche’s cancer leaves him waiting for a possible liver source. One patient receives immediate practical care; another confronts an uncertain future whose terms cannot be solved by determination alone. These different forms of waiting make the ward a structure for suspended decisions, where relationships may be repaired, broken, or prolonged while the body imposes its own timetable.

Narrative and Thematic Significance

Across the story, the Hospital Ward is where romantic declarations are tested against physical facts. Lu Xun can promise protection, but he must also manage recurring illness and injury. Su Xiangwan can resist confinement, but fever and collapse limit her ability to act independently. Su Qingrou’s surgery interrupts an engagement, while Lin Yanche’s cancer turns his future into a question of survival. The ward gives each relationship a bodily consequence that cannot be resolved through argument alone.

Its repeated use also exposes the book’s unstable boundary between care and possession. A hospital can offer shelter, medication, surgery, nursing, and emotional consolation, yet it can also be locked, guarded, or used as a place where another person’s movements are controlled. That ambiguity mirrors the central marriages and pursuits: protection may be loving, but it may also restrict; attention may be compassionate, but it may also claim authority over the vulnerable body.

By the later scenes, the ward becomes a site of renewed intimacy rather than only crisis. After Lin Yanche leaves, Su Xiangwan sits beside Lu Xun’s bed and peels an apple for him. He asks her to stop being busy and talk with him instead. The small domestic action reverses the earlier pattern in which Lu Xun alone comforts, transports, or guards her. Within the Hospital Ward, care becomes reciprocal: the injured man receives companionship, while the woman who has repeatedly been treated as fragile exercises agency through an ordinary act of devotion. The setting therefore closes its recurring cycle not by eliminating illness or danger, but by showing intimacy being negotiated through the care that survives them.