TYSUF – Chapter 43 Love Is Not Betrayal (3)

In the glass cup before her, the swollen tea leaves tumbled up and down. Shen Xi stared at the glass, as if to avoid her own shyness. But it wasn’t even like they were face-to-face—he wasn’t even in the room…

“I’ll wait for you,” he had said.

“Mm.” She nodded. But why nod? He couldn’t see her anyway.

It was just a phone call, not a long one, yet it felt as though they’d spoken for hours—a long, exhausting monologue.

People are almost always wrong when estimating their own time.

Shen Xi had assumed her afternoon would be free, but at one o’clock, a nurse called her to the outpatient department. The nurse who phoned was one she had recruited straight from nursing school. She spoke a bit of English and was assigned specifically to foreign patients. That day at the docks, this same nurse had been present and was particularly sensitive about the European flu.

Upon seeing Shen Xi, the nurse immediately started detailing the emergency: three new patients had arrived, a family of three from Germany. The man had obvious flu symptoms and was coughing up blood…

“How many people are in the consultation room?” Shen Xi asked.

“Dr. Shen, per your instructions, we’ve been keeping foreign patients isolated when possible. That room only has their family.”

“Any doctors been in yet? What about nurses?”

“Just me and the head nurse. No doctors so far. Someone’s informed Vice Director Duan.”

The hospital director was a political figure and rarely at the hospital; Duan Menghe handled all the administrative duties. He would probably be there soon.

“Get the prep work started,” Shen Xi instructed. “Isolate the patients and tell someone to warn Vice Director Duan not to enter the isolation area.”

Shen Xi donned a mask and gloves. Following the contingency plan she had previously discussed with Chen Linguang, she cleared half a floor of rooms, set up a quarantine line, and disinfected inside and out. The hospital didn’t have a dedicated infectious disease unit, so they followed procedures used for plague and malaria—doing the best they could.

“Wait,” Shen Xi said. “Have someone outside the quarantine line call extension 334… ask for a Mr. Tan. Tell him I’ll be busy at the hospital for the next couple of days and won’t be able to visit him.”

Wherever Fu Tongwen went, Tan Qingxiang would definitely know how to find him.

Dinner plans tonight would probably have to be cancelled.

Doctors from internal medicine tried to enter but were stopped by nurses, per Shen Xi’s earlier orders. Since she was already inside the isolation ward, she would handle the patients herself. No need to involve more doctors—there was no known treatment for this flu, and the ones falling ill were all young adults. No point in unnecessary sacrifices.

Shen Xi attended to the three patients.

Since they were German, communication was difficult. She tried simple English to ask about symptoms, but they couldn’t articulate clearly. Checking their temperatures, she found only the 17-year-old daughter had a normal reading. She instructed the nurse to take the girl to a neighboring observation room while she and the head nurse stayed with the parents.

Knowing the head nurse had two young children at home, Shen Xi tried to limit her exposure, taking most tasks on herself. Eventually, the head nurse grew anxious and complained, “Dr. Shen, you might as well kick us all out and handle it alone.”

Shen Xi chuckled, her voice muffled by the mask. “I would if I could. But you’re already in here—can’t undo that now.”

“If you collapse, what’s Vice Director Duan supposed to do?”

“…Vice Director Duan is a prime minister’s relative, a Western-educated medical PhD, and our hospital’s actual director. He’ll be just fine,” Shen Xi said wearily. “He and I are truly just colleagues. Nothing’s ever developed beyond that.”

As they talked—

The young nurse rushed in. “Vice Director Duan’s outside—he wants to come in.”

Shen Xi walked into the hallway. In the distance, she saw Duan Menghe’s figure and raised her voice: “I have a patient scheduled for surgery tomorrow morning. That’s on you now, Duan Menghe. Also, take over the seven patients in the third-floor ward.”

At the other end of the hall, Duan Menghe paced back and forth. The sound of his black leather shoes echoed sharply.

“Shen Xi, what department are you from? Who said you could handle patients here? Don’t we have internal medicine?”

“This is a high-risk infectious disease. I’m here—of course I’ll handle it,” she replied firmly. “Besides, I worked in internal medicine at Renji Hospital. You know that better than anyone. And since there’s no effective treatment for this illness, I’m enough here.”

Duan Menghe had no argument against her.

“Besides,” Shen Xi continued, “you’ve seen the reports from Europe. This disease mainly kills young adults. That includes all our doctors—including you. Since I’m already here, why make more needless sacrifices?”

Duan Menghe stood silent, staring at her from afar.

Nurses were evacuating patients. The conversation between Shen Xi and Duan Menghe echoed clearly throughout the building. The foreign patients didn’t understand, but the Chinese ones did—and they all cooperated immediately, clearing out of the floor. All except an elderly man in his sixties, who walked toward them and asked Duan Menghe if there was anything he could help with.

The old man wore a traditional robe and had a Qing-style braid. Embarrassed by his status as a Chinese medicine practitioner, he’d come to this Western hospital for help with an exposed abdominal tumor. But when he heard Shen Xi say the disease mainly affected young adults, he figured, as an old man and a healer, he might be able to help.

Moved by the old man’s offer—and worried about Shen Xi—Duan Menghe’s tense heart finally softened. Compassion among doctors is universal. He patiently explained the situation to the old man, then had a nurse escort him away.

“Give me a basic rundown of your patients,” Duan Menghe said, calm once again.

After Shen Xi briefed him, she returned to the ward.

The man was not only coughing blood—his eyes and ears had begun to bleed. The head nurse had never seen such extreme flu symptoms and was stunned. Shen Xi knew, from the dissection reports shared by Chen Linguang, that this patient was beyond saving.

His wife lay on the next bed, barely conscious, yet still staring at her husband, murmuring something in German that Shen Xi couldn’t understand. Was she comforting her unconscious husband? Or saying something else? No one could know.

Slowly, the woman looked at Shen Xi, tears brimming in her emerald eyes. In broken English, she pleaded:

Don’t hate them—don’t hate Germans because of the war they brought to China. Please save her husband.

Shen Xi’s eyes burned. She turned away to hide the emotion welling up.

She remembered what Fu Tongwen had said—about buying a villa in Shandong, settling down there with her…

Shandong, the place she had never been.
The place Fu Tongwen longed for,
The place taken by the Germans.

Her feelings were tangled—national sorrow, and the deep love she saw between this ordinary couple in the face of death.

By evening, food was delivered.

The young girl had tried several times to break into her parents’ room and had to be forcibly locked in another. Her dinner was knocked to the floor. Unable to speak the language, locked away, and with her only means of communication—her mother—now unconscious, her world collapsed before her. She cried, then shouted, again and again.

In the silent isolation ward—and indeed, the entire hospital building—her voice echoed.

Shen Xi and the two nurses sat quietly in the hallway, eating their dinner.

The young nurse, still a child in many ways, had seen the male patient’s skin turn black and his face covered in blood. All her courage to save people had crumbled. Hearing the girl cry, she too burst into tears.

Shen Xi gently placed a hand on her back. Not good at comforting others, this was the only way she knew to offer solace.

At 10 p.m., the middle-aged male patient died.

She finally understood what Chen Linguan meant by “powerlessness.”

The air was gray and hazy, as if dust floated everywhere, making it hard for her to breathe.

“Dr. Shen,” someone called her from a distance.

Shen Xi came back to herself.

“Vice Dean Duan asked the phone company to come install a telephone for you,” the resident doctor called out, “You’ll be in the quarantine zone for a long time, he said this would make work discussions easier.” Duan Menghe had actually had the telephone from the duty room on the first floor dismantled, mounted onto a wooden board, and somehow had it connected with a line and sent over.

The resident doctor used the same method as delivering meals — a rope-pulley system — to send the board with the telephone through.

The wooden board dragged the telephone line behind it, as if it had grown feet, creeping forward across the floor.

Once it entered the quarantine zone, she picked it up but couldn’t find a suitable place to put it. She fetched a stool and placed it on top. The first thing she did with the phone was report the situation to Duan Menghe. In his office were several Western medicine doctors from Shanghai hospitals who had come specifically upon hearing of the first influenza case here.

Everyone on the call was debating the patient’s condition and the next course of treatment.

Voices were loud and filled with tension, disputes flying back and forth. Shen Xi, the only doctor on-site, had little to say. She stayed silent, waiting for them to finish arguing. Fortunately, Duan Menghe knew how to take control and soon pointed out a new method for her to try.

“Okay, I’ll call again if anything happens,” she replied.

She left the phone in the hallway and didn’t bother with it again.

At 6 a.m., the middle-aged female patient died.

The young nurse began showing symptoms of influenza as well.

Between her and the head nurse, after the continuous deaths and the infection of a colleague, there was hardly any verbal communication left. Maintaining calm and restraint was the unspoken agreement between the two.

At 7 a.m., Shen Xi asked Duan Menghe for help to let the head nurse make a phone call to her family.

Shen Xi stood in the corridor, facing the wall.

At that moment, she felt completely empty. A scalpel against the scythe of death was a battle between the weak and the strong—just like Chen Linguan wrote in his letter: even after centuries, they were not much better than 14th-century doctors. Back then, it was the Black Death; now, it was a flu ravaging countries.

“Dr. Shen, thank you,” the head nurse handed back the receiver. “You should call your family too.”

Family…

There was only Fu Tongwen.

She held the receiver in her hand, dazed for a moment, then asked the operator for 334. Every second of waiting stretched infinitely, like a pendulum that had lost balance, swaying helplessly and unable to reach the next tick…

“Hello.” His voice seized her soul.

“It’s me.”

“I’ve been waiting for your call,” he said. “All night.”

“I’m the only doctor here… I can’t talk long,” she said softly. “Two of my patients didn’t make it. One of the nurses is also infected… Fortunately, the German girl is still okay.”

Why tell him all this? Just to make him worry more? She blamed herself.

“I went to the hospital yesterday afternoon,” he said casually, “but didn’t go up to your floor. I was afraid I’d just be in the way, distracting you from saving lives. A girl with such ambition—I have to learn to support that.”

He always portrayed himself as pitiful, shifting her unease back onto herself.

“You wouldn’t have seen me even if you came. The hospital has regulations,” she explained.

She could hear his breathing. In the early morning hospital corridor, her nose suddenly stung.

Tan Qingxiang had been right—life is short. Only now did she truly grasp the weight of those four words.

“I…” Her heart suddenly tightened. “I regretted it.”

Even if she got infected, she had to tell him how much she regretted leaving Beijing back then.

Fu Tongwen fell silent.

The rustle of his shirt brushing the phone receiver sounded like wind through sycamore leaves.

Why wasn’t he speaking? Was something wrong with his heart? She panicked.

“Third Brother…” He paused, seeming to choose his words. Then he said, “What I feel for you, I’ve never felt for anyone else before. If you want to hear it, when you’re back, I’ll tell you everything slowly.”

After a long pause, he added, “You’re a doctor saving lives on the front line. I’m just someone sitting safely at home. I should be supporting you, not saying disheartening things.”

“You haven’t… you haven’t affected me…”

Your very existence is already a kind of support to me.

“Wanyang,” he called her by a name even she found unfamiliar, “I love you.”

He said it, paused a moment, then repeated, “I love you.”

The lower half of Shen Xi’s face was hidden under a mask, the cloth lightly trembling against her skin. Her breath was in disarray.

Wanyang — graceful at the center of the water — a beautiful meaning.

But also a lonely name, surrounded by water on all sides, with nothing to rely on, adrift her whole life.

Under the pale light, her eyes shimmered with unshed tears.

He said he loved her—how was she supposed to respond?

“Dr. Shen.” The head nurse tore through the silence.

Flustered, Shen Xi said, “I’ll call again later,” and dropped the receiver, returning to her battlefield.

Even when the noon sunlight poured into the ward, she was still wondering—after saying something like that, how did he feel when she abruptly hung up?

Everything changed that afternoon. After the death of the previous two patients, the doctors found better methods. The young nurse became the first recovered case in Shanghai.

At the time, Shen Xi thought China would fare better than Europe in this flu, but reality proved that epidemics spread globally. Eventually, not even China or Russia could escape.

It was just that in that era of warlord conflict, not many records—photos or texts—survived.

Three days after the young nurse recovered, Shen Xi left the quarantine ward.

Ten days had passed since the first patient was admitted.

The German girl, because Shen Xi had been her attending doctor, clung to her constantly. Though they couldn’t communicate, fortunately, Tan Qingxiang knew foreign languages and handled communication through a few phone calls, taking on the task of comforting the orphaned “child.”

Though called a girl, due to her ethnic background, she was taller than Shen Xi—possibly even taller than Tan Qingxiang, whom Shen Xi hadn’t met yet.

Shen Xi asked a nurse to prepare clean clothes for her—an old-style, Chinese student uniform.

She and Fu Tongwen had agreed to meet at 4 p.m. in the hospital’s first-floor waiting area.

At 3:35, she couldn’t wait and brought the girl downstairs early. Unexpectedly, someone else had also arrived ahead of time and was waiting inside the hospital doors.

His car was parked outside. He had left his Green Gang protectors waiting outside and stood alone by the large glass-and-wood doors, hands clasped behind his back.

He waited without impatience, but with unmistakable boredom.

Staring at him for long, he seemed ordinary—but the moment he stood among others, he stood out again. A grown man, standing before the plain white-painted hospital doors, still had the power to outshine all fleeting beauty.

From the moment he saw her, he had been watching her, boredom erased.

As she walked, he kept his eyes on her.

“When did you get here?” she asked guiltily, like a schoolgirl caught at the school gates, aware of the nurses and doctors in the lobby watching them.

“Hard to say. Around two, maybe.” He approached.

“Two?!” That was such a long wait… “You came so early and didn’t even tell me.”

Her nose nearly touched his suit jacket—only then did she realize what he was about to do. But he didn’t give her a chance to react—he kissed her directly on the lips.

This was China—not New York. Even in New York, lovers didn’t just kiss whenever and wherever they pleased, let alone in a hospital with people constantly coming and going…

And yet—it was a completely unrestrained, soul-stealing deep kiss.

She lost all sense of gravity, her soul swaying violently within her body, as if it had been pulled free.

After the kiss, he even had the audacity to smile.

“A proper date requires a little waiting first to show sincerity,” he said, lightly pecked her lips again, then her forehead. A true rascal. “Third Brother will take you to eat lamb chops—your favorite.”