The Sound of Silence

Saturday afternoon was quiet, with few people rushing between examination rooms. The piano softly played, attracting some curious looks and some casual audience who simply sat down, glanced at the piano, and turned to scrolling. The faint noises from their phone rustled with the gentle melody.

When I first saw Uncle Cheng, he was lying on one of the seats beside the booming piano. He had come down from the ward alone, apparently without any particular purpose. He was not enjoying the music, nor was he looking at his phone. He simply lay curled up in the chair, barefoot, his clothes loose around him. His polo shirt was unbuttoned at the collar, and the trousers looked almost oversized on his thin frame. There was something strikingly casual about him, as if he had wandered out of his room without really deciding where he was going. He was all alone, static and speechless, but his silence was deafening. 

He was seventy-one, from Wuyuan. I sat down and started talking to him. At first, his answers were short. He told me that he had thyroid cancer. He had been the one to notice that something was wrong: his neck had begun to swell. He went to a county hospital, but nothing was found there. Eventually, after further examinations, he came to the cancer hospital, where he was diagnosed with cancer. The hospital posed two options: radiotherapy or chemotherapy. His children had not wanted him to undergo chemotherapy. They thought the treatment would be too hard on him, and that the damage it caused might outweigh its benefits. So, for now, he was receiving radiotherapy instead. Apparently, therapy did not massively weaken him. Nor did the cancer leave much mark on him except that his neck was subtly thicker. He looked like an absolutely normal man, only that he seemed to be exhausted by something invisible.

He had a son and a daughter. Both were already working, and both were busy with their own lives. They had brought him to the cancer hospital, but they could not stay beside him every day. So he was admitted on July 4, unaccompanied. After spending some time in the hospital, he had gone home for a few days, only to return again. Now he was back in the ward, undergoing treatment by himself. When he talked about it, there was no particular complaint in his voice. He simply said that staying in the hospital alone was something he was not used to. 

Meals were another small problem. He usually went to the elevator area to buy food. He had never used the hospital's community kitchen because, as he explained, those facilities were mainly convenient for families cooking or eating together. He was only one person, so he simply bought whatever he needed.

The details were ordinary, almost trivial. Yet as he continued talking, they began to form a picture of what being sick alone actually meant. He did not seem to have much of a routine beyond treatment. Sometimes he came down to the piano area. Today, too, he had simply come downstairs and stretched himself out on the chair.

I asked whether he talked with other patients. “Not really,” he said. He had met several people from Wuyuan, his hometown. But even with people from the same place, he said, there was not necessarily much to talk about. A hospital ward is full of people, yet being surrounded by people does not necessarily mean being accompanied. There were nurses and doctors. There were other patients. There were occasionally fellow townspeople. His children called or came when they could. But none of them could be there all the time. So he came downstairs. He sat beside the piano. And sometimes, perhaps, he simply lay there and stared into space. 

At first, I had thought he was simply resting. But after we started talking, something changed. His eyes glistened with delight, as if meeting a long lost friend. The man who had seemed so quiet suddenly began telling me things one after another. He was no longer answering questions with a few words; he seemed almost relieved to have someone willing to sit down and listen. 

Perhaps he had simply needed a conversation. Perhaps the piano area had become a place where he could escape the four walls of his ward for a little while. Or perhaps there was no particular reason at all.

He had cancer, but he was still a seventy-one-year-old man from Wuyuan who had spent most of his life living according to his own routines. Now those routines had been interrupted. His children had their jobs. His treatment dictated his days. His body no longer allowed him the same freedom as before. And so he found himself lying barefoot on a chair beside a piano, waiting for the next treatment, the next meal, and eventually the next day.

When we finished talking, he did not immediately get up. The piano silenced beside him. For a moment, the scene seemed almost peaceful. But I could not help wondering how many hospital patients spend their days in exactly this way—not necessarily in pain, not necessarily unhappy, but simply with a great deal of time and very few people to share it with.

Uncle Cheng had come downstairs because there was nowhere else he particularly needed to be. Perhaps, that afternoon, a conversation was enough to make the hospital feel a little less lonely.