Beside the Bed

Beside the Bed, originally titled Nurse Wan Hong, is a novel by Yan Geling that took more than twenty years and three complete rewrites to finish. The story is set in a small city at the border of Sichuan and Yunnan in southern China, spanning the late Cultural Revolution, the reform and opening era, and the new century. In 1976, during construction of the Chengdu–Kunming Railway, Company Commander Zhang Guyu is injured by explosives while saving a comrade and is left lying in a hospital bed, declared a vegetative patient and built up as a universally admired "living martyr." Nineteen-year-old nursing school graduate Wan Hong, selected as his dedicated nurse for her outstanding grades, works in a field hospital converted from a church where everyone treats caring for the hero as an honor and later as the hospital's capital for survival, while privately having long since written him off. Only Wan Hong, from the very first moment her eyes meet Zhang Guyu's, firmly believes in a rapport and communication between them that no one else can understand. She keeps nursing diaries, observes every tiny reaction, and again and again seeks confirmation from superiors, doctors, and even the hero's family that he is still "alive," sacrificing ordinary love and happiness along the way. As the times change and the hero goes from worshipped to forgotten and exploited, only Wan Hong's decades of unwavering care become a final, singular note. Through the warmth and coldness of human feeling beside a single sickbed, the novel portrays the birth and demise of heroism, and the power of an ordinary woman using faith to stand against worldly calculation.