Rong Jinzhen’s stomach ailment

Rong Jinzhen’s stomach ailment is presented not as a single episode with a clear resolution, but as a recurring condition that narrows his life around treatment, hospital stays, and the effort to understand what his body is telling him. The narrative sets this later illness beside an earlier, near-fatal renal failure while keeping the two conditions distinct: the earlier crisis ended his prospect of studying at Stanford; the stomach ailment returned him to hospital years later and remained unresolved in his own account.

Earlier Illness and Its Consequences

Before Rong Jinzhen could spend his final summer at the university and depart for Stanford, renal failure made him gravely ill. A doctor believed he might live only six more months. Oedema caused his body to swell even as his weight fell, and he remained in hospital for nearly two years. Salt had to be excluded from his food because it could endanger his recovery. This was a different diagnosis from the stomach ailment recorded later, but it established illness as a force that could abruptly redirect his future.

The Stanford travel money was spent on medical expenses, and the scholarship, diploma, and student life that had seemed within reach receded. His recovery was described as remarkable, but survival did not restore the plans that illness had displaced. The account therefore gives bodily illness a concrete consequence: it altered where Rong Jinzhen would live and what opportunities remained open to him, rather than serving only as a general metaphor for distress.

Convalescence and Care

After Rong Jinzhen’s condition had stabilized, the hospital accepted his request to continue recovering at home as medical bills mounted. The doctor warned that a full recovery would require more than a year of special treatment and close care, with relapse still a possibility. The transition home did not mean that the illness was over; it shifted much of the daily work of recovery from the hospital to the household.

Food required particular care. During convalescence, the permitted amount of salt began at a minute level and could be increased only gradually. Without a sufficiently accurate scale, the family had to rely first on careful judgment. Later, food was taken to the hospital for assessment, with the salt in each dish recorded grain by grain. The caregiver then counted the grains added to each of Rong Jinzhen’s five daily meals. This exacting routine made recovery a practical, repeated task: a small adjustment in an ordinary meal could matter to his health.

The 1966 Hospital Admission

In the middle of June 1966, after breakfast, Rong Jinzhen lost consciousness in a hallway and fell against a wooden bench. He was admitted to hospital after examination revealed that a stomach problem, considered severe by the doctor, had caused the fainting. The blood from the fall was not the central medical concern; the diagnosis redirected attention to the underlying condition. This admission belongs to a later period of his life and should not be confused with the renal failure that had earlier prevented his departure for Stanford.

The hospital was attached to Unit 701 but stood in the Southern Complex, where secrecy was less stringent than in the Northern Complex. Rong Jinzhen’s identity was not supposed to be disclosed there, although many people already knew who he was and understood that he was important. The setting thus placed a personal medical crisis within an institution shaped by different levels of access and confidentiality. His illness was treated in a hospital, yet the ordinary work of care took place alongside the rules governing what could be known and said about him.

Symptoms, Explanations, and Uncertain Relief

In notebook passages about the illness, Rong Jinzhen records the doctor’s account of a healthy stomach and contrasts it with his own condition. The doctor presents obsessive worry, rather than unhealthy food or drink alone, as a major cause of stomach disease, linking the ailment to prolonged mental strain. This is the clinician’s explanation as reported in the notebook, not an independently established account of the cause. Rong Jinzhen, for his part, describes his stomach as alien to him and as an adversarial presence within his body.

The notebook also connects the stomach to his father. Its imprint, he writes, remains there; when the stomach hurts, his thoughts turn to pear blossoms and to his father. The pain consequently carries both a physical and a personal association in his own telling, though the account does not reduce the illness to that association. His entries preserve the tension between a doctor’s explanation, bodily discomfort, and the memories he finds inseparable from it.

The condition had a long history: Rong Jinzhen says he had taken stomach medicines since his teens, eventually becoming accustomed to them. During the later hospital stay, the doctor still found some bleeding and was dissatisfied with the results of treatment. Rong Jinzhen argued that the dosage, not the choice of medicine, was the central problem; the doctor considered increasing it too risky. The exchange leaves the treatment at an impasse and Rong Jinzhen expecting to remain in hospital longer.

A later notebook entry records a sudden sense that his stomach had become calm and empty after taking Chinese medicine, only a few hours earlier. He wonders whether the treatment might be a cure, but the passage establishes relief as a momentary possibility, not a confirmed recovery. The ailment’s narrative arc therefore remains open: symptoms recur, treatment offers uncertain changes, and neither the medical account nor the patient’s reflections settle the question of lasting resolution.