I was yanked off the bus at 6:30 in the morning, the sole passenger to be forced to report to the officials at the SARS checkpoint outside of Dunhuang. I was also the sole Westerner on board.
A few hours earlier, I had reached the end of a 32-hour train ride only to discover that my bike hadn’t made the journey with me. It’s still missing somewhere in the Chinese railway system.
I wasn’t in the best of moods.
The officials wanted me to fill out a little form attesting to my good health. The form was in Chinese, but the officials had a cheat sheet in a language that was eerily similar to English. Most of the boxes were easy to fill in. The following three gave me pause:
- Temperature: Heat rum: Have None the cough of fuck the: Have None be short of breath: Have None
- Arrive the earth
- Two cycles left for what place
The first box, in spite of the warped grammar and inexplicable profanity, was decipherable. I was meant to indicate whether I had any of the listed symptoms. I dutifully circled all three instances of the word “None.”
The second box could be poetically interpreted as asking for my birthday. Or perhaps it really was asking for the date that my spaceship crashlanded in China, and I dragged my pale, hairy alien body out of the escape hatch. What it really was asking for was my onward destination.
The last box I never figured out.
Upon checking into my hotel, in addition to the usual reams of paperwork, I had to enter my name in a health ledger and indicate my present condition. I had encountered a health ledger once before, at the Beilin Museum in Xian. The attendant there suggested I say my health was “good.” I wrote “A-one.” At this hotel, I was “tip-top.”
I’m glad the Chinese are now taking vigorous measures to combat SARS. I’m glad they check everyone’s temperature in train stations. I’m even glad they follow white people around spraying chlorine bleach on everything we touch. But I’m not so excited about their attempts to fight the disease with stacks of paperwork.
For weeks, I’ve been doing my best to subvert the hotel industry’s love affair with forms. Rarely do the hotel managers speak English, so I can fill the boxes with whatever I want. The “Object of stay” field is my favorite. So far, my purposes in visiting China have included: conquest, freeing Tibet, anti-rightist campaigns, and good lovin’. Occasionally the desk clerk will frown at my entries, but no one has ever complained.
But I have restrained myself with the health forms. Nobody’s in a laughing mood regarding SARS. Today I met a pair of tourists who were forced to skip a stop on their itinerary when not a single hotel would rent them a room. Eventually they returned to the train station and simply moved on.
My foul mood continued even as I climbed the massive sand dunes south of town. I rented a toboggan to make the downhill trip. Usually moving at speed in an uncontrollable vessel is a surefire way to cheer me up, but I have a bad history with slippery surfaces, and I started having unpleasant flashbacks when the toboggan yawed sideways. Fortunately the ride was over before I could build up dangerous momentum. I trudged back to town.
It wasn’t until evening that my mood broke. The air is lovely at night in the desert spring, still and dry and cool. I walked to the night market, a long arcade of stalls lit by bare lightbulbs. People there sat in lawn chairs drinking beer, or gathered around charcoal pits where Muslim men in white caps manipulated fistfuls of skewers with the deftness of card dealers.
I took a seat around a charcoal pit. The needlelike skewers held only a sliver of lamb; ten came to an order. Flames leapt to meet the sizzling fat.
I ordered ten skewers and a round of grilled flat bread, all basted with oil and sprinkled heavily with salt and chili powder. Then I ordered a beer and a whole grilled fish, pulled fresh from the tank. Then another round of skewers, a second grilled flatbread, and a second beer.
A little girl came by, her hair in pigtails. She had a small guitar slung around her back, and wanted to sell me a rose. She was so adorable that I briefly considered whether she would fit in my panniers.
I’m glad my time in China is coming to end soon. The atmosphere here has been poisoned by the health crisis. But I’m grateful for a few more weeks.
