My studious attempts to avoid this topic are becoming increasingly strained. SARS has been like a fly buzzing around my head for the last six weeks. Every time I shoo it away, it returns, usually with friends.
Word started to circulate around the backpacker circuit shortly after I arrived in Laos. “Have you heard about this pneumonia?” everyone was asking one another, before returning to conversations about comparative beer prices in Southeast Asia.
I had in fact heard of the trendy new pneumonia, and I was eager not to discuss it. Like the Chinese government, I was less concerned with the outbreak itself than with having to endure unpleasant scrutiny from global health authorities. The Chinese merely have the WHO to contend with. I have my parents.
If I were a more superstitious or paranoid person, I might regard the simultaneous outbreak of a war and a virulent new strain of virus as evidence of a cunning, malevolent, Adam Stein-hating force in the universe. War and disease, along with terrorism and natural disasters, top the list of Things About Which My Parents Can Do Nothing But Fret. It is a long list, one which has grown strong and healthy through constant care and attention. I’ve been scanning the headlines daily in expectation of a plague of locusts in Sichuan or a Uighur uprising in Gansu.
To be fair, my parents have been reasonably restrained, at least in their direct dealings with me. I’m sure they are climbing the drapes at home, but because they have learned a thing or two in my 29 years of prickly existence, they know that hysteria or attempts at coercion will lead quickly to impasse.
Because I have learned nothing in those same 29 years, I first tried to soothe my parents with reason and rationality. After all, the facts appeared to be on my side. Asia has a population numbered in the billions. SARS, at first count, had affected a few hundred, most of them health care workers. I made various statistical analogies with the likelihood of a lightning strike or panda attack.
I succeeded in convincing my parents that I would inevitably contract SARS, be struck by lightning, and then mauled by pandas. However, I also convinced them that I was likely to be as muleheaded on this subject as I am on all subjects concerning health and safety. We achieved an uneasy truce. They agreed to limit their mention of the disease to daily email updates from the CDC web site. I agreed not to contract a life-threatening illness.
Unfortunately, my blitheness has been under assault by those lovable rascals in the Chinese government, who have been systematically lying about the severity of the problem. It’s one thing when they’re just torturing dissidents or brutalizing peasants. Now it’s personal. In fact, “cunning, malevolent, Adam Stein-hating force” is probably a pretty apt description of the National People’s Congress.
So now, as I skirt the borders of China, I wonder and wait.
The first pang of worry came on the sleeper bus between Kunming and Dali. Sleeper trains are a fantastic way to cover long distances in Asia, and I figured sleeper buses would be similarly luxurious. I was disabused of that notion about six seconds after climbing into my coffin-sized berth and pulling a greasy blanket over my shoulders.
The Chinese like to smoke and like to chatter late into the night on their cell phones. The Chinese are also championship spitters. I watched in horrified fascination as one old woman hawked microorganism-laden phlegm with such ferocity and duration that it seemed she were trying to dislodge a squid from her uvula.
As I tried to fall asleep to this chorus of expectoration, a modified verse from “Deep in the Heart of Texas” kept rotating through my head:
The SARS on the bus,
Is con-ta-gious,
Deep in the heart of China…
Although I probably did pick up several new strains of hepatitis during the night, I did not catch pneumonia. Of course, at that point, there really wasn’t any danger. SARS was still confined to the southeast. I could remain happily blithe. Ah, sweet, sweet blitheness.
Now things are different. Although the statistical likelihood of contracting SARS is still extremely low, the trend lines are headed in the wrong direction. Surgical masks are becoming increasingly common on the streets. The government has begun distributing a preventative herbal medicine to all citizens. Residents are supposed to drink three plastic bagfuls of the brown fluid each day to boost their immune systems. Supposedly it tastes awful.
I met an Italian expat who exuded fatalism. He was convinced that the government was underreporting the number of patients by tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands. He was also convinced that he would inevitably contract SARS, but that because he was young and healthy he would likely survive.
So in this context of soaring paranoia, I took a bus today from Chengdu to Songpan. When the bus left the station, the seat next to me was empty. I happily stretched out.
At the first stop, a woman with a damp brow and phlegmy cough took the empty seat. She looked near death. The longer I listened to the mucus rumbling around in her chest, the more agitated I became. I tugged at the latch of my window to let in some air. It was stuck shut.
I wanted to crawl under the seat. I wanted to shout at her to get off the bus. In simple fact, I was deeply pissed off. I was just starting to feel better after two back-to-back illnesses. My food poisoning had segued smoothly into a chest cold (yes, a respiratory syndrome, although not a severe one. I may be the first known victim of ARS, which, appropriately enough, happens to be my initials and also, if pronounced correctly, a description of my essential character). A third illness might cause me to scrap the rest of my trip.
I silently seethed. I was being a selfish brat. But, on the other hand, wasn’t it just a wee bit selfish for this woman to bring her wet, hacking cough onto a crowded public bus for an eight-hour ride up to Songpan?
At the first rest stop, a man came on the bus with a plastic yellow canister strapped to his back. It was connected to a hand pump and a hose, like one of those contraptions used to apply pesticides. He worked his way up the aisle, spritzing disinfectant in a desultory pattern on the floor. Take that, coronavirus.
When I got off the bus to stretch, I noticed for the first time the streaks of vomit underneath the windows. The whole damned thing just seemed to exude ill health.
When we started to move again, the disease vector sitting next to me fell into a doze. As the bus took the corners, she lolled in her seat, inexorably listing my way. I pressed myself into the wall. Finally she slumped onto my shoulder, breathing hot, infectious fumes. Gingerly, I tipped her back toward the aisle with my elbow. This cycle repeated until lunch.
Lunch was a stir-fry restaurant by the side of the highway. It was a self-service affair. Customers were handed plates, which they then loaded up with the raw ingredients they wanted tossed into the wok. When making selections, customers scooped the ingredients from containers by hand.
Plates piled high with uncooked pork. Bowls of cubed tofu floating in amniotic soy fluid. Dishes of weeping, julienned vegetables. Steamed rice in a humid wooden barrel. I lined up and picked over the offerings with everyone else.
I can only speak for myself, but my hands were far from clean. Not only had I not bothered to shower when I arose at 5:45 that morning, I also hadn’t bothered to wash my hands after using the bathroom at the rest stop. Washing my hands would have entailed dipping them in the communal bucket of gray rinse water, and I didn’t much see the point.
I conscientiously avoided thinking about any of this as I dug into my stir fry, which happened to be quite good.
This is the environment as I travel north, anxiously monitoring myself for symptoms. China is certainly no less hygienic than any of the other countries I’ve visited, and the risk of contracting SARS is still negligible. I comfort myself with these facts as I wonder. And wait.
