Essays ⁽³⁴⁹⁾

On the tenth day of the first lunar month, I walked into the reading room of the National Library. Beneath the medical bookshelf, the first book I happened to open was called The Mad Heart, a popular-science book about cardiac function. The first sentence in…

Today I have returned from my hometown in Hubei to Beijing. Starting tomorrow (the sixth day of the first lunar month), I will resume normal work. Because the first wave has passed and both the infection peak and the severe-illness peak have receded, my work…

Today is the first day of the Year of the Rabbit, and I am here to wish all my readers a Happy New Year. I wish you all the smoothest of sailing in the new year. I pray that in the Year of the Rabbit…

At noon on the 29th day of the twelfth lunar month, I finally returned to my long-absent rural hometown. Seeing me, my old father's joy was beyond words.After lunch, my father, my son, and I—three generations—took incense, paper spirit money, firecrackers, and offerings to the…

The child and his mother left yesterday for their hometown to spend the Spring Festival; I am staying in Beijing alone. I went to bed at 8:30 last night and slept straight through until 5:30 this morning, without waking once in between—thank heavens, no phone…

These days the elderly uncles and aunts in my building have come out one after another. Some look much frailer than before, but others remain robust. An over-80 woman in our building lives alone; yesterday I saw her push her bicycle out and ride off…

I do not know how to describe these days. Every day is like a forced march; there are far too many patients, and I cannot truly rest.I had pneumonia in high school and have had a sequela ever since: whenever I overexert, I cough incessantly.

The day before yesterday I was deathly ill, and yesterday was another busy day. At noon when I contacted my father, he was carrying bundles of straw used as firewood, one bundle after another, from downstairs up into the small attic on the third floor.

Ge Hong of the Jin dynasty wrote a medical book called Zhouhou Beiji Fang (A Prescriptions Handbook for Emergency Use Kept at Hand). It was precisely from this book that Nobel laureate Professor Tu Youyou drew inspiration to discover artemisinin. Ge Hong's book contains many…

The "Ten New Measures" released today mean that the shift in our country's pandemic-control policy is essentially complete.After three years of fighting the epidemic, we have been comparatively lucky: our building door was temporarily locked down only one night, and that happened while we were…