Hospital (Han novel)

Hospital (Chinese: 医院, Pinyin: yīyuàn) is a dystopian science-fiction novel by Chinese writer Han Song and the first part of the Hospital trilogy (Chinese: 医院三部曲, Pinyin: yīyuàn sān bù qǔ). The novel describes a world with an extreme misuse of the healthcare system. Patients are not properly informed about their diagnosis, told lies or are exploited. The Chinese version was published by Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House (Chinese: 上海文艺术出, Pinyin: shànghǎi wén yìshù chū) on 1 Juni 2016. The English version was published by Amazon Crossing on 1 March 2023. The translation was done was Michael Berry.

Plot
After a catastrophe on Earth, buddhism became the primary belief of humanity. The spaceship SS Mahamayuri (after Sanskrit महामायूरी Mahāmāyūrī for „Great Peacock“) travels to Mars to search for another incarnation of Buddha, but instead discovers a hospital and peacock-like creatures attacking and then destroying the spaceship. Afterwards, many more hospitals are found everywhere in the Solar System. (The prologue is not referenced again and often interpreted purely as a metaphor.)

During a business trip to C City, Yang Wei, a songwriter from Corporation B, drinks a bottle of mineral water in his hotel, gets a strong stomach pain and falls asleep for three days. The hotel staff breaks into his room and transports him to the hospital, where the doctor treating him immediately knows about the mineral water. Yang Wei is told by a nurse, that the entire hotel is unser surveillance and that the hospital has access to all tapes due to security concerns. For his examination, Yang Wei is brought into the dirty basement filled with moss and gets told, that the hospital demands a proof of his faith in form of money. Just recently, a patient mistrusted the hospital, handed over tea instead of urine and saw the positive result coming back as a proof of scam, severely angering the hospital. Yang Wei encounters multiple patients who themselves came back extremely angry, including one who paid a million dollars and one who had to pay for additional surgeries, that were neither necessary nor wished by him. Yang Wei realizes that people starting to pay for treatment can't leave before it is concluded as they would otherwise waste the money already paid. Therefore, the hospital can keep them as long as they wish by just postponing the end of the treatment and getting more money. Sister Jiang visits him to tell him about needing surgery after considering the results of his examination, but doesn't want to tell them to him, because it's only the business of the hospital. She invites Yang Wei to put his head on her lap to sleep and then treats him like a baby, continuing to call him „Little Yang“. When being told, that pain in surgery is necessary to gain happiness in health, Yang Wei has a little panic attack. When returning, he sees his doctor running out of ink and instead using fresh blood to write. Sister Jiang tells him, that another person drank the mineral water at the hotel, but before she can leave, an angry former patient returns to detonate a bomb in the hospital, killing her. In her last moments, she hands Yang Wei over to ten-year-old Tao. Yang Wei starts to believe that everything weird he has seen yet is only the manifestation of some dark secret. Yang Wei's boss visits to tell him, that due to good relations of Corporation B with C City, it is good that he will stay in the hospital longer. Yang Wei begins a deep dive into the system behind the hospital, including an underground world of patients, a sentient being living in his stomach and the hospital spanning not only the Earth, but also the cosmos.

Reception
Ian Mond, writing in the Locus magazine, that „when viewed from a pre-COVID perspective, the novel’s central concerns seem to become about imperialism and authoritarianism“. Han Song „tackles these broad themes“ in „inventive ways“. Ian Mond further writes, that despite admiring the novel, it's one he „struggled to love“ due to it „seem[ing] overly long“, the „first third becom[ing] increasingly less engaging“ or „depiction of women“ being „hard to digest“. On the other hand „the novel’s final third is a remarkable display of the absurd and the cosmic, with what feels like a new, startling idea on every page.“

Another reception by Subashini Navaratnam was published in Strange Horizons on 29 January 2024. It claims, that the novel „feels universal in its depiction of medical bureaucracy“ and „reads like slapstick Dostoyevsky“. The translator Michael Berry „has done a good job“ transporting this feeling. The premises in the novel are „depressingly and familiarly fascist“, but „remain open to discussion“. It is „far from an easy read, despite its relatively short chapters and eminently pithy and quotable lines.“