The Piano Begins Again-2

“Sorry, I overslept a little. My husband didn’t wake me up.”

Half into the afternoon, the performances resumed with another volunteer everyone simply called Teacher Zou. Her style was vastly different from Ms. Cao. Zou never relied on scores. She played from memory. She poked at the notes with self-assured fluency, marching through songs. 

Watching her play in the hospital lobby, I had assumed music had always been part of her life. But it hadn't. Medicine had. Long before she sat behind a piano, she wore a military uniform. She enlisted at sixteen and spent eighteen years as a military doctor, responsible for doing ultrasound. In 1988, she transferred to Nanchang, where she became an ultrasound physician and remained for more than three decades. Even after officially retiring in 2021, she did not really retire. Hospitals all over Nanchang rehired as an expert for medical examinations. Despite her busy schedule, she started coming to the hospital in the evenings to play the piano. "I still work every morning," she smiled. 

Looking through the photographs on her phone was like flipping through several lifetimes. There were faded pictures of a sixteen-year-old soldier. A restored photo of herself which is now her profile photo. It was a girl with braided hair from last century, holding a red accordion. “I was only twenty then,” she recalled the good old days with nostalgia, “I really liked playing the accordion back then.” Reunion photos with old comrades who had once served together and now joked about becoming grandparents. Family trips across Australia with her son and daughter-in-law. Pictures from volunteer performances. Every photo came with another story. One memory flowed naturally into another, and before long we were no longer talking about the hospital at all.

She laughed about her son and daughter-in-law's decision to go DINK. "They're modern," she sighed dramatically. "They like living their own lives."Then she laughed again before adding that she had finally stopped trying to persuade them. "They're happy. That's what matters." She seemed to collect stories the way other people collect photographs.

She learned the piano at a pretty old age for a pianist. “The University for Older Adults teaches you everything." She laughed. She attended masterclasses whenever she could, sometimes taking the place of friends who were unable to go. Her moments were filled with photos from lessons, performances, and pages of marked-up sheet music. "You never stop learning," she said matter-of-factly. 

In 2019, when the oncology hospital bought a grand piano after seeing similar programs in hospitals around China, she became one of the first volunteers. "It felt necessary," she said simply. Every Tuesday she came to play for patients and their families. The setting was hardly ideal. The lobby was noisy from morning until evening. People queued for blood tests. Wheelchairs rolled past. Hospital announcements echoed overhead. Doctors called patients' names while families spoke anxiously on their phones. Sometimes staff members asked them to lower the volume because conversations had become difficult. She knew the music was competing with the hospital itself. "There should be a separate caring space." She told me about another hospital where she volunteered every Thursday. There, performances took place inside a dedicated room with chairs, a small stage, weekly programmes displayed on digital screens, and audiences who came specifically to listen. "It's peaceful there," then she looked around the crowded oncology lobby, "Here, everything mixes together." Yet she came anyway.

"People could listen on their phones," I suggested. She shook her head, "A phone is just a speaker." She reached out as though touching invisible piano strings, "This is different." Then she smiled. “And here they can talk to you. It’s like a personal concert.” I asked whether patients ever talked to her after she finished playing. She nodded immediately, "They tell me everything." Not just that the music sounded beautiful. They told her how they first discovered the tumour. Which chemotherapy they were receiving. Whether the medicine was working. How frightened they were. "They'll stand beside the piano," she said, "and suddenly they're telling me their whole story." She admitted that sometimes she hardly had enough time to listen before another piece began. "But maybe that's enough," she paused, "When people finally speak it out loud..." She searched for the right words, "...it's like half the burden is already gone." Perhaps the piano was only the beginning. The real comfort was that someone stayed long enough to listen.

Patients often requested songs. Some wanted familiar folk melodies. Others asked for songs she had never learned. There was even a man who wrote songs and asked her to play. "If I know it, I'll play it," she laughed. "If I don't..." she shrugged, "I'm not a professional." Sometimes she promised to practise it at home. The next time they met, she might surprise them with the piece they had asked for. She even sight read a C pop song after an hour of performance. 

When I told her I hoped to study abroad, she looked genuinely pleased, "Young people should come out and see society. You have to understand how people really live." It struck me that this advice reflected her own life. She had spent decades diagnosing patients through ultrasound images, looking inside the body for signs of illness. Now she looked for something else. She listened to stories, to requests for songs, and to conversations that began with 'Can I tell you something?' The instrument had changed, but the work of caring had not.

I left the hospital thinking that perhaps Ms. Zou had never really changed professions. Whether wearing a military uniform, a doctor's white coat, or sitting quietly behind a grand piano, she had always been doing the same thing: finding another way to help someone carry what was too heavy to bear alone.