Alzheimer’s disease state

Alzheimer’s disease state appears in the novel as the elderly woman’s fluctuating inability to recognize the people before her. The condition makes her mistake Shen Tang for Xiu Xiu, her daughter who died more than twenty years earlier, yet it also allows a brief return of clarity when Shen Tang responds to the grief beneath the confusion. The resulting encounter links cognitive impairment with memory, guilt, mourning, and the fragile possibility of consolation.

Symptoms and Setting

Alzheimer’s disease state is identified by a young nurse after Shen Tang encounters an old woman with silver hair who has seized hold of her and repeatedly called her “Xiu Xiu.” The woman does not simply forget a name; she reconstructs the present through an earlier family relationship, treating Shen Tang as the daughter who has supposedly come back. Her failure to recognize people is intermittent rather than constant, and the narrative emphasizes that she sometimes cannot distinguish those around her from figures preserved in her past.

The condition is shown within a medical setting, where the young nurse understands what Shen Tang cannot initially know: the old woman has Alzheimer’s disease and is confusing the young woman with a daughter who passed away over two decades earlier. The nurse’s explanation supplies the institutional diagnosis, while the woman’s speech supplies the subjective experience of disorientation. These two perspectives meet without reducing the scene to clinical information alone.

The Xiu Xiu Encounter

Shen Tang patiently tells the old woman that she is not Xiu Xiu, but the woman continues to address her by that name and speaks of a mother whom Xiu Xiu should not blame because the man involved was not a good person. The statement reveals that the old woman’s confusion carries a specific emotional history. Her lost daughter is not an empty placeholder in damaged memory; Xiu Xiu remains connected to blame, family injury, and a relationship that was never emotionally settled.

Rather than force the woman to accept a correction she cannot retain, Shen Tang squats down, holds her hand, and tells her that Xiu Xiu does not blame her. Shen Tang does not know what happened between the mother and daughter, but she recognizes that an unresolved burden has continued to torment the old woman for more than twenty years. Her response is therefore an act of emotional care rather than an attempt to win an argument about identity.

Recognition and Repetition

Shen Tang’s words produce a striking but temporary change. The old woman’s eyes regain clarity, and she recognizes that Shen Tang is not Xiu Xiu. She then wipes away the tears at the corners of her eyes and asks the young woman’s name, observing that Shen Tang looks very much like her daughter. Shen Tang answers that her name is Shen Tang, and the old woman repeats it appreciatively, calling it a beautiful name.

The recovery does not last. Soon afterward, the old woman again fails to recognize Shen Tang and clings to her while calling for Xiu Xiu. The recurrence makes clear that the earlier moment of clarity was not a cure or a permanent resolution. It was a brief opening in which the woman could perceive both the difference between the living stranger and the dead daughter and the grief that connected them. Shen Tang leaves only after the young nurse manages to calm the woman, taking care not to prolong emotions that could harm the elderly patient’s health.

Effects on Shen Tang

Shen Tang initially treats the incident as a minor interlude and does not dwell on it, but her conduct shows that she is affected by the woman’s suffering. She does not respond with irritation when her identity is misrecognized, and she does not use the diagnosis to dismiss the woman’s words. Instead, she listens to the emotional content of the confusion and supplies the forgiveness the old woman believes she cannot receive from Xiu Xiu.

The episode also places Shen Tang in a temporary caregiving role. The young nurse provides the medical explanation and helps pacify the patient, while Shen Tang offers physical reassurance and a compassionate answer to the old woman’s guilt. The scene therefore distributes care between professional assistance and an ordinary person’s willingness to remain present. Alzheimer’s disease state changes the social demands of the encounter: factual correction alone is insufficient, and the immediate priority becomes preventing distress while preserving the woman’s dignity.

Narrative Significance

The Alzheimer’s disease state gives the novel a concentrated image of how the past can remain active even when ordinary recognition has become unreliable. The old woman repeatedly loses track of Shen Tang’s actual identity, yet she retains the emotional force of her relationship with Xiu Xiu. Memory is therefore depicted as uneven: names and faces disappear or are substituted, while grief, blame, and longing return with remarkable persistence.

The episode also contrasts medical knowledge with human witnessing. The nurse can name the condition, but Shen Tang encounters the person living inside it: a mother still calling for a daughter who died more than twenty years earlier and still carrying a painful question of forgiveness. The condition is not used only as a plot obstacle. It creates a scene in which recognition briefly becomes mutual, then vanishes again, leaving Shen Tang to withdraw quietly rather than pretend that compassion has repaired what illness and time have damaged.