The Body Remembers: Behind the Making of Bathing

Bathing, our original audio drama, began with a question: what happens when one of the most ordinary acts of life becomes something we can no longer do alone?

For most of us, bathing is almost invisible: water running, a towel unfolded, a door closed behind us. It is private, repetitive, and so familiar that we rarely think of it as freedom. But when the body becomes fragile, that ordinary act can become difficult, risky, even frightening. A bathroom may turn into a place of danger. A helping hand may feel like an intrusion. To be bathed by another person is never only about cleanliness. It is about trust, about shame, about how much control we still have over our own bodies, and how dignity can be protected when that control begins to slip away.

That was where Bathing began. Aging has become a familiar subject in public discussion. Yet the idea that bathing itself could become a challenge touched a much more sensitive place. It made aging concrete. It brought the question back to the body.

The drama follows Lin Xia, a young home-bathing specialist whose work takes her into private homes and into one of the most intimate forms of care. Through her encounters with older people, people with disabilities, and families under long-term pressure, she begins to understand that bathing is not simply about cleaning the body. When she enters the home of Sun Hua and her daughter Qingqing, a routine service becomes a quiet turning point for three women, each learning what it means to be seen, cared for, and respected.

I have always believed that much of what we feel, perceive, and think begins with the body. Our sense of the world is carried by skin, breath, strength, balance, and movement. But what happens when that body begins to lose its certainty? When skin loosens, muscles fail, and the most intimate routines can no longer be managed alone? I kept returning to this curiosity, aware that every body, including my own, is moving through time.

In China, this question is no longer distant. According to the National Bureau of Statistics, by the end of 2024, the country had 310.31 million people aged 60 and above, accounting for 22.0 percent of the population; among them, 220.23 million were aged 65 and above, accounting for 15.6 percent. Behind these numbers are millions of families learning how to live with aging, disability, chronic illness, and care at home. 

For many of them, the most difficult questions are not always dramatic. They may begin in a bathroom, with a body that needs help and a family that does not yet know how to offer it.

As I researched home-bathing services in China, I first thought I was learning about a new profession. Later I realized I was entering a world of touch, risk, skill, and careful negotiation. Home-bathing specialists bring equipment into private homes and help elderly people or people with limited mobility complete a deeply personal act. Their work requires strength, training, medical awareness, and emotional intelligence.

The profession itself is also part of a broader change in China’s elder-care landscape. In 2024, elderly bathing assistance was officially recognized as a new type of work within China’s elder-care occupation. Xinhua has reported that bathing assistance for the elderly is among the new caring professions emerging in China’s expanding elderly-care sector, as many older adults with full or partial loss of self-care ability face real difficulties in bathing.

During my interviews, Li Minhua, founder of Beijing Keyi Home-Based Elderly Care Service Co., Ltd., told me that when she started focusing on home bathing for older adults with full or partial loss of self-care ability in March 2021, the field, as she put it, was still “almost a blank space” in China. Many people could not understand why “giving an older person a bath” required a professional service at all. It was only through repeated practice, professional procedures, and public communication that more families gradually began to understand its necessity.

Chen Yao, a 24-year-old home-bathing specialist I interviewed, described the work to me in careful steps. Before each visit, the team needs to understand the client's physical condition: whether the person has diabetes, high blood pressure, paralysis, recent surgery or recovery conditions, skin problems, or other risks. They assess whether bathing is safe, prepare equipment, test water temperature, observe breathing and facial color, ask whether the client feels dizzy, and keep the body properly covered with towels. Afterward, they dry the skin, dress the client, blow-dry the hair, restore the room, and speak with the family about what they noticed, from dry skin to possible early signs of pressure sores.

What stayed with me most was their understanding of distance. They know that a body needing help is still a body with boundaries. A touch must be announced. A pause must be allowed. A towel is not just a towel; it can be a small wall of privacy. A question before contact is not just procedure; it is a way of returning choice to someone who may have lost too much control already.

Another specialist I interviewed, Wu Xianguo, a former education professional who later became a home-bathing specialist, told me that when speaking to an older client lying in bed, he would sit on a small stool so his eyes were level with theirs. Standing over them, he said, could feel like pressure. He also said that a home-bathing visit is never only about keeping the body clean. During that hour and a half, the bathing specialists may become a bridge between the older person and the outside world. That detail stayed with me. It showed me that dignity often lives in height, distance, tone of voice, and the few seconds one person waits before touch.

Chen also told me about one of the first bathing visits that moved her. The client was an elderly woman who had been bedridden for three or four years. Before that, her family said, she had lived a rich life and had been lively and humorous. Years in bed had left her almost cut off from the outside world. At first, facing a group of unfamiliar young people, she was nervous and quiet. But as the team chatted with her, massaged her, and slowly helped her relax, something changed. By the end of the bath, she was talking happily in the tub. She told them it had been a long time since she had felt so clean and had talked with young people like this. Chen remembered that both the family and the elderly woman had tears in their eyes.

Two other real stories shaped the drama more directly. One involved an elderly client who passed away not long after receiving a bathing service. I later transformed that emotional weight into a scene in the drama, where the family tells the bathing team that the old man left “clean and comfortable.” For me, the story revealed how closely this work can stand beside life, death, and farewell. Sometimes a bath may be one of the last times a person is cleaned, held, and looked after with care. It can also comfort those who remain: the family members who know that, at the end, their loved one was treated with gentleness and respect.

The other story involved a younger person with a disability who needed help bathing. That opened the drama in another direction. It reminded me that loss of ability does not belong only to old age. A body can become limited at any stage of life, through illness, accident, mental or physical change. Through this realization, Qingqing entered the drama. She is not elderly, but her body has restrictions. She wants help, but she also fiercely wants control. Her presence asks young listeners: what does it feel like when your body no longer fully follows your will?

Then came Sun Hua, Qingqing's mother. At first glance, she belongs to another familiar group in aging stories: the older caregiver, strong, capable, and used to holding a family together. But I did not want her to remain only a mother, a caregiver, or a future care recipient. I wanted to see her as a complete older woman, someone with elegance, embarrassment, pride, bodily memory, and the desire to still appear before the world with dignity.

This became especially important to me as a woman writing the story. In many narratives, women’s bodies are looked at through familiar frames: beauty, motherhood, desire, decline. What is rarer is a calm, appreciative gaze toward an aging female body, simply allowing it to be seen as a landscape of life.

In the final movement of Bathing, Sun Hua receives a bath before her seventieth birthday. The scene is quiet. She allows herself to be helped, and step by step, lets her own weight be supported. Afterward, she stands before the mirror and looks at herself. She does not turn away. She puts on lipstick. Her daughter helps her choose the shade. In that small moment, the mother steps out of her family role. She is a woman looking at herself again.

While writing this, I also found myself looking at my own body differently. One day, after a shower, I noticed the mirror leaning against the bathroom wall. It had seen my body change: weight gained and lost, fatigue, skin softened by steam, the familiar complaints about what was imperfect. Water moved over the slopes and hollows of my body like small streams. For a moment, the body seemed like a vessel being washed bright again. But unlike porcelain, the human body carries oil, smell, tiredness, and time from within. One day, I thought, this body too may need help. If only, when aging comes, one could become a fish, moving through water until the end.

That private thought became part of Lin Xia's inner voice in the drama. Through her, a young woman first sees aging with shock, then with fear, and finally with tenderness. She learns that older bodies are not only bodies in decline. They are bodies with memory, sensitivity, intimacy, shame, humor, and longing.

This is also why Bathing had to be an audio drama. The subject is too intimate to be shown carelessly. Visual storytelling, if handled carelessly, can easily turn the vulnerable body into simply an object. Sound offers another path. In radio, the body does not need to be displayed in order to be felt. A glove snapping open, a wheelchair brake, a towel shaken loose, water being tested, a breath before consent--these sounds create presence without exposure.

Sound also allows dignity to be heard. The listener can feel the space between people: when someone approaches, when someone waits, when someone lowers their voice, when water softens a room. In Bathing, the bath is not a spectacle. It is a ceremony of care, made from ordinary sounds.

In telling this story in English, I also wanted to make a small part of China’s changing elder-care landscape audible to a wider world. The details are local: the apartment hallway, the family bathroom, the bathing team carrying equipment into a private home, the careful negotiations among client, caregiver, and family. But the question behind them is shared: how can modern societies care for fragile bodies without reducing people to their fragility?

Looking back, I think the drama is about aging, but not only aging. It is about all bodies that become limited, all families learning how to care without taking over, and all people who hope to remain themselves when they need help. In a rapidly aging society, this question is shared across cultures: how do we care without erasing choice? How do we touch without taking control?

For me, Bathing is an answer in progress. It comes from Chinese homes and Chinese caregivers, but it speaks to a question every aging society must face. True care is not simply doing something for another person. It is asking, waiting, listening, shielding, supporting, and seeing. It is returning dignity to the smallest actions. Even in the most fragile moment, a person is still more than a body needing help. They are a life, a history, and a self that deserves to be seen whole.

You can listen to Bathing, the original audio drama by CGTN Radio, online here: 

https://radio.cgtn.com/news/recommend/CGTN-Radio-Drama-Bathing/3047

Written by: Lu Chang

About the Author: Lu Chang is a CGTN reporter, writer and producer of original English-language audio dramas.

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