December 26, 2002
Shenzhen, China
36 Infected, 8 Dead
FANG LIN BEGAN TO FEEL FEVERISH JUST AS THE WEATHER WAS starting to turn dry. (Later, he would say it had been around the time the big Yao Ming posters advertising mobile phones had started appearing on billboards around the city.) Since arriving in Shenzhen five months earlier, he’d had several slight fevers and colds; in the Click, many residents seemed to live in a perpetual state of low-level illness of one sort or another. When the fever didn’t begin to break after a day and a half, he consulted a local physician, a man with one eye and a rusty stethoscope. Fang described his symptoms—there was the fever, his muscles seemed to ache when he woke up in the morning, and he’d had nasty diarrhea for two days. The doctor nodded but didn’t say anything. From behind a glass case, he removed a box of tablets.
“How much?” Fang asked.
“Fifty jiao each.”
Fang bought four tablets, swallowed two right there, and went to work.
Riding around in the truck that day, he felt more invigorated but still feverish, and at one point, as they were tossing cages of civets, badgers, and pangolins into the truck, he felt so weak he had to sit down. The driver offered him a cigarette.
“Here,” he said to Fang. “That’ll make you feel better.”
Fang made it through that day and night, having to pause during his work in the chop room to catch his breath, and he took frequent cigarette breaks on the back stairs. He had told his colleagues in the chop room that he didn’t feel well, and though both men agreed they could pick up the slack, in actuality there was no way that fewer than three men could do the job without slowing down the kitchen. So Fang had had to keep on chopping, until the main banquet room seating was over.
The next evening, when he went out for a cigarette break and sat down on the back steps, he couldn’t get up. His fever had climbed, probably to over 103 degrees, and he found that no matter how deeply he breathed, he felt perpetually winded. His body aches had reached a point where whatever position he stood or sat in, he felt as if his muscles were being pulled from his bones. Du Chan found him out on the steps and asked what was wrong.
Fang told him that he didn’t know.
Soon Chou Pei came out and handed a bottle of grain liquor to Fang.
Fang took a tiny sip. Immediately, he vomited it back up, along with a stringy pool of yellow bile. He had never before experienced this combination of nausea and diarrhea.
“You need to go,” Du told him.
Fang nodded but couldn’t get up.
Du and Chou helped him to his feet and loaded him onto the back of a motorcycle taxi. Somehow, Fang managed to stay balanced for the seven-minute ride to his cun. After he was deposited at one of the alleys, he found another storefront doctor. Even in his addled state, Fang recalls, he knew he needed medical help. This doctor told him to stand still, then to stand on one leg, then the other. He asked Fang a few questions: Where did he ache? What had he eaten in the last few days? Where had he been born? Was his mother taller than his father? In what direction did his bed face? As Fang answered, the doctor laid his hands on Fang’s chest and arms, squeezing gently as he ran his hands over the young man’s bloodstained shirt.
The doctor pronounced Fang Lin’s chi (the vital force believed by Chinese to be inherent in all things) to be unbalanced. Fang needed to reorder his life, he said, so that he would face southward more often. He also needed to drink more of a certain type of fungal tea, which this doctor sold by the can. He should also take vancomycin and proparacetamol tablets, which the doctor sold to him for fifty kwai.
Fang Lin made it back to his north-facing room, but he never went back to work. The anti-febrile medication did nothing to assuage his fever, which may have spiked north of 104.5. Twice, he was unable to rouse himself from his sleeping pallet in time to reach the toilet in the hall, each time soiling his trousers. He hadn’t eaten in three days, so his excrement was almost entirely liquefied. He became progressively more disoriented. Even for the fully cognizant, it was hard to differentiate night and day in the Click. Now, in a state of near hypoxia, he lost track of time. He was vaguely aware of when his roommates were in the room, and when he heard their steady, deep breathing, he was reminded of how shallow his own breaths had become. He found that if he moved even slightly, to roll over or sit up—to stand was now out of the question—he would be completely out of breath. He begged his roommates to open the window, a request that elicited grave silence from Du Chan and Huang Po: the room was windowless. They brought him a Styrofoam bowl of soup with pork dumplings, which Fang left on the floor. He managed to sip from cans of herbal tea.
Du Chan would bring back bottles of beer from the restaurant or plastic jugs of bright blue or orange sports drink. Fang would bend his head forward just enough to suck a little of the liquid down his throat and then would fall back exhausted and in pain. The muscle aches were so severe, he recalls, that he found staying still unbearable, yet any movement would leave him gasping for breath. The proparacetamol would temporarily provide some relief for the muscle aches, but the fever never subsided. Fang found that the temperature in this hot little room seemed to oscillate wildly between extreme heat and terrible cold.
One of his roommates suggested he go to a hospital.
Fang squashed that idea by muttering, “No hospital. No money.”
WHAT WAS HAPPENING TO HIM? FANG KNEW HE WAS ILL. BUT HE STILL assumed he was suffering from another of those respiratory infections that regularly burned through the Click. Everyone seemed to have a hacking cough of some sort; whether it was due to cigarettes, persistent asthma, or air pollution was impossible to say. During influenza season, in winter, some of those coughs turned into serious illnesses. But who ever died from a bad cough? Fang wondered. You took some antibiotics and drank plenty of fungal tea. And if you still didn’t recover, you got some rest. But he had been on his back for several days now and wasn’t feeling any better. Most terrifying for him, when he was conscious, was the sense that no matter how deeply he breathed, he felt that what he was inhaling was not oxygen but some other odorless, tasteless gas with similar properties but without the life-sustaining force of simple O2. He was running out of air, yet he felt he was breathing freely.
He now had to stay perfectly still. To move was to suffocate. Stay still. And breathe. Breathe as deeply as possible. He fell into fitful bursts of sleep, angry patches of shut-eye during which he would see recurring images of the room, his roommates, the restaurant. It didn’t feel like sleep but rather like a waking dream during which he would systematically re-create and recount his days since leaving Jiangxi. Bits of conversation he’d had were steadily repeated and turned over in this dark semiconsciousness. This mental exercise always left him dissatisfied and unsure upon awakening, as if he had not slept at all.
Outside, he would later recall, he could still hear the city—the clanging and banging and the steady racket of construction, the constant clomping of other residents coming and going, and the sounds of doors opening and slamming. He’d never felt so alone as he did then, hearing the working girls returning from their night’s work and then, a few hours later, the day laborers and construction crews rousing themselves and setting off. Sometimes, this cacophony would blend into one dull tone, leaving him frustrated at his inability to understand what was going on.
On about the sixth day of his illness, he lost all track of his environment. From then on, there were only dark dreams and the sensation that his life was literally being squeezed from him. His muscle aches would come in steady, rolling waves and would peak as gripping cramps around his spine and in his neck and upper legs, a dreadful tightening that would coincide with a gasping inability to draw in enough oxygen. He lay still and struggled to stay awake so that he could focus on maintaining his steady, ineffectual breathing. He feared that if he fell asleep, he might forget to breathe, and that would be it. Perhaps that is what dying is, he wondered—your body forgetting how to breathe.
But he did begin to drift off, always remembering, even in his unconscious state, that he must stay still. Any movement at all, even a wiggling of toes, even blinking, used precious oxygen. That was air he didn’t have. So he lay perfectly still, and in those moments between severe cramps and muscle aches, when his bowels were settled, he would drift into dark snatches of unconsciousness. But it was a cruel sleep, one that never let him forget, for even a moment, his suffering. During those naps, he would always feel very far from home and very alone. A terrifying idea began to glow in the darkness: he would die far from home, away from his family. He understood, finally, the importance of that Chinese tradition of rushing home when you were ill, even if only to pass away. And then he thought of another matter: who would pay for the cost of his funeral arrangements?