Ward Four
A young patient admitted to the third-class ward of a wartime hospital in the Chinese interior keeps a record of the men in the beds around him — a peddler, a soldier, a petty clerk — and of the shortages of drugs, food and attention that quietly decide which of them lasts the month. A woman doctor moves through the ward doing what can be done without supplies, and the orderlies take payment for the rest. Ba Jin drew on his own hospitalisation in Guiyang in 1944, and this is his flattest and least rhetorical account of what the war cost people with no money.
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Attributes
Conflict
Culture / tradition
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