Like floating dust

     When the small town of Weibei was shrouded in thick fog after several days of continuous rain, I rushed back from Xi'an because my mother needed surgery. I spent three days in the county Red Cross Hospital, which had been relocated.

    During those three days, I witnessed countless seriously ill patients being wheeled into the emergency room, weary caregivers sitting on benches in the corridors, and the rural children these caregivers brought with them. These children ran and played in the corridors, weaving under the beds. The caregivers, either as ignorant as the children or too preoccupied to care for their own children, let these children, who saw the world as their playground, frolic in this germ-infested hospital. And the embarrassment and helplessness of them, driven by nurses or doctors, sweating profusely as they went to register here and pay there, only to be refused by the hospital cashiers because they didn't have enough money, are deeply etched in my heart. After everything was settled, one of them carried a cup thickly stained with tea stains, the other held a leftover cold fried dough stick from the morning's meal. They drank plain water, ate the cold dough stick, watched their child running around freely, and waited to be called to the ward at any moment. Perhaps they didn't realize that their diet at that moment was actually eroding their health. And perhaps they, like my parents, defined "health" as simply the absence of immediate discomfort. Little did they know how many illnesses already existed beneath this apparent comfort, simply because they lacked the money or time for checkups. Thus, a small oversight can lead to a serious illness, just like that cold fried dough stick and that cup of plain water. If, for the caregiver, they had successfully cared for the patient but then, through their own diet, became a patient themselves, it would be a great misfortune. Of course, I'm not cursing anyone; I'm merely an observer with sympathy, because I am also a caregiver

    for a patient. No one wants to go to the hospital willingly, except perhaps doctors and pregnant women nearing delivery. (They suffer for new life, for the joyful anticipation.) As for the others, they are all helplessly passive. Life is sometimes like this: some things you don't want to do, but the die is cast. Some things you want to do, and try your best to do, but are just a step away. Looking at those wards, those rows of wards, those lives tormented by illness, those lives struggling between care and support, now lying in wards, those lives where minor illnesses have accumulated into major ones, and whose families are pleading with the hospital for more time to raise the medical expenses. Life, at this moment, becomes the first thing people pursue, whether the rich in luxurious rooms or the poor in ordinary rooms.

    Life is a state; a body without a soul is just a living body, a body without life is just a corpse waiting to be buried. Life may be a speck of dust in the world, drifting between birth and death. When life comes, it rises silently; when life ends, it settles back to the earth.