Lives Will Go On

The couple from Poyang were sitting on a bench like many others outside the hospital that afternoon. The husband sat with the easy stillness of someone who had spent many hours waiting in hospitals. His wife sat beside him, wearing glasses and speaking only occasionally. She was sixty-three, a housewife from rural Poyang, and she had lung cancer. They looked less like “a cancer patient and her caregiver” than an ordinary couple from the Jiangxi countryside who had stopped to rest for a while.

It was her husband who did most of the talking. He told us that they had first sought treatment near home. His wife had felt unwell for a long time—nearly a year—but the township hospital had not been able to determine what was wrong. Eventually they came to Nanchang, where a larger specialized hospital could investigate further. By then, the family had already begun reorganizing itself around illness. Their children took turns helping when they could. They had one son and one daughter, both grown, both with their own lives. The husband stayed with his wife when possible, but he also had work waiting at home.

“In the countryside, what retirement do we have?” he said. There was no monthly pension large enough to live on, no comfortable transition from working life into old age. Rural people simply kept working for as long as they could. “If you can work, you work.” He compared their lives with retirees in the city, some of whom received several thousand yuan every month. His own rural pension was a little over two hundred. “What can two hundred yuan do?” he asked. “It isn't even enough for drinking water.”

His wife’s medical insurance reimbursed around sixty percent of her expenses, but the remaining cost was still substantial for a family without stable salaries. When we asked whether the financial pressure was heavy, he answered immediately, “Of course.” People with monthly salaries, he said, could at least depend on money arriving regularly.

“For people like us, if you work today, you earn something. If you don't work, you don't.” Now he was in Nanchang with his wife. The fields were simply left behind. “What else can you do?” he said. Relatives could help watch things for a few days. If farm work became urgent, he would go home and deal with it. Then he would return to the hospital. Illness had not erased ordinary responsibilities. It had simply forced them to wait.

His wife was expected to stay for roughly two weeks. There would be no surgery for now. The doctors had chosen conservative treatment. Her husband accepted that with the same practicality he seemed to apply to everything else. When my father mentioned another patient whose advanced intestinal cancer had shrunk after several rounds of chemotherapy, the husband nodded. A good mental state mattered, he said. “Whatever illness it is, if you can relax your mind a little, that's better.” He had seen people react differently to cancer. Some heard the diagnosis and became terrified. Others refused to treat it as the end of everything. Sometimes, he believed, the second group did better. He repeatedly told his wife the same thing: “放宽一点.”Take it easy. Do not let your mind carry the whole illness before your body even begins treatment.

The wife herself said little. When asked about her age, her work, or her family, she answered simply. She had been a housewife. She had spent her life looking after children and managing the household. My father told her that, with her glasses and gentle manner, she looked like a teacher. She laughed. “People always ask what I used to do,” she said. “But I didn't do anything like that.” She had simply stayed home, raised children and did housework. It was perhaps one reason the husband seemed so accustomed to speaking for both of them. Throughout the interview, he supplied most of the details—insurance, food, treatment, money, farming, children. Occasionally she corrected him. Occasionally she laughed. Mostly, she sat quietly beside him.

Their children were already adults. Their grandson was in the second year of high school. When we commented that their children sounded filial, the wife responded with characteristic bluntness. “We didn't raise him that well.” Then she added that her son liked gambling and had habits she did not approve of. Everyone laughed. The comment broke through the careful language people often use around illness. For a moment, she was not a cancer patient being praised for having a supportive family. She was simply a mother complaining about her son. That ordinary irritation made the couple seem even more familiar. Cancer had entered the family, but it had not turned them into different people.

Food was easier. Unlike many patients who struggled with unfamiliar hospital meals, the flavors in Nanchang were close enough to what they ate at home. Sometimes they bought food outside. Sometimes they cooked for themselves. They knew about the nearby kitchen where families could prepare meals, although the husband preferred buying food or cooking somewhere he considered cleaner. “If you make it yourself,” he admitted, “of course it is healthier.” But he did not romanticize cooking. When my father praised him for knowing how to prepare food, he laughed. “What use is knowing how to cook? Better to know how to earn money.” The remark seemed to summarize his worldview. Life requires practical skills. If you could still work, then life could continue.

He had stopped smoking two years earlier. Before that, he had smoked two packs a day. Now his hair had begun to turn white, and he joked about growing old. His wife, beside him, looked tired but calm. Her husband urged her again not to think too much. “Whether the family has money or not, don't think about it too much,” he said. “First take care of the body. If we have one meal, we eat one meal.” There was no grand declaration of hope in the sentence. Only stubborn practicality. They were rural people, he seemed to be saying. They had never had the luxury of solving every problem at once. They dealt with the work in front of them. Harvest when it was time to harvest. Go to the hospital when someone became sick. Earn money when there was work.

By late afternoon, more people had begun gathering outside. Patients came downstairs after treatment and sat in small groups, trading stories about operations and chemotherapy. Someone talked about a successful scan. Someone else discussed a doctor. Another person simply listened. I encouraged the couple to join them more often. There were volunteer piano performances inside the hospital too, he told them. Retired doctors sometimes came to play music for patients. The husband understood the idea immediately. “The volunteers enjoy themselves,” he said, “and they bring some happiness to everyone else.” He told his wife they should go listen sometime. 

What stayed with me afterward was not anything dramatic they said about cancer. It was how ordinary they remained. Beyond illness, they were just a couple who worried about insurance reimbursement and crops left unattended, a husband who quitted cigarettes after decades, and a wife who was annoyed by her son's gambling. Illness had pulled them away from Poyang and into a cancer hospital in Nanchang, but the logic of their life had not changed very much. You dealt with what came. You did what you could. And if tomorrow there was still work to do, then you got up and did it.