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When they accepted their assignments they were not very confident, especially the assistant head surgeon who simply believed in his own past experience, in the statistics of international medical literature, and in the medical equipment and resources of the hospitals in capitalist countries. Therefore when he first heard the talk of the vice-superintendent, who was the secretary of the general Party branch, he had some inner feeling of resistance. He thought to himself, "This is simply coercing people to try and do the impossible! But since I have accepted the assignment I'll do what I can. At any rate, the patients will die either in the shock stage or later." With such downhearted feelings he entered the ward to see his patients.

— Ba Jin

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "When they accepted their assignments they were not very confident, especially the assistant head surgeon who simply believed in his own past experience, in the statistics of international medical literature, and in the medical equipment and resources of the hospitals in capitalist countries. Therefore when he first heard the talk of the vice-superintendent, who was the secretary of the general Party branch, he had some inner feeling of resistance. He thought to himself, "This is simply coercing people to try and do the impossible! But since I have accepted the assignment I'll do what I can. At any rate, the patients will die either in the shock stage or later." With such downhearted feelings he entered the ward to see his patients." in the context of "" to mean that wisdom is timeless.

Source: The 'What it means' explanation text was generated by Google Gemini Flash (accessed January 18, 2026). https://gemini.google.com/app
Ba Jin

About Ba Jin

Li Yaotang ๆŽๅฐงๆฃ  (or Li Feigan; Zi: ่Šพ็”˜) (November 25 1904 โ€“ October 17 2005) was a Chinese writer and anarchist; he was most famous under his pen name of Ba Jin (ๅทด้‡‘, also written Pa Chin). He created this pseudonym in 1929 from the first syllable of Bakunin and of the last syllable of Kropotkin, the famous Russian anarchists.