I slipped Mama’s hand from the mitt and began rubbing her palm and squeezing her fingers. Like scored clay, her soft skin bore the imprint of the velcro straps.
“Thank Jesus,” she murmured, and I realized she was praying. She had assumed Ah Zhay’s prayer style: her prayers were usually long strings of barely audible words followed by a loud utterance of “Thank Jesus.”
Her lips moved softly, almost no sound coming out until the next “Thank Jesus.” We carried on with the afternoon punctuated by the soft moan of Mama’s prayers.
56
AND FINALLY, after hopscotching across the city, the quarantine reached us. The announcement, preceded by a pleasant three-note tone reminiscent of a doorbell, came over the loudspeaker. The woman spoke with the calm and clear attitude of an airport boarding call.
“Attention all guests. Do not leave your room. Do not exit the building.” At first, her requests sounded mild, temporary, as if a minor incident had taken place in the lobby. A hush fell over the entire hospital for a moment. That’s strange, I thought, then all those late-night news reports that had echoed in my sleep coalesced into meaning.
I opened the door. The halls filled with people—faces all obscured by cheap paper masks—clamoring at the nurses and doctors, pushing for the elevators, rushing into the stairwells. I stood in the doorway in disbelief.
“What’s happening?” I called out to a woman pushing a slumped old man in a wheelchair.
“Quarantine! Somebody’s sick. You better get out.” She edged the chair into a crowd of people waiting in front of the elevator.
I knew immediately that she meant SARS. Quarantine, as the people stampeding toward the exit would attest, was a death sentence. I shut the door and locked it.
Baba had been dozing in the chair next to Mama’s bed.
“Huh?” he asked.
I went to the window. The police cordons were already up. Anticipating the reaction, they had erected the barricades before the announcement. The police wore white hazmat suits and their usual white helmets. Through an electronic loudspeaker, one officer’s voice rose in an incoherent buzz. I imagined the people pressed against the glass doors downstairs, their slaughterhouse eyes pleading with the officers.
“They’ve quarantined the hospital.” I was stunned.
“Which?”
I turned back to the room. “This one.”
Baba stared at me as if he still didn’t understand. Then his ear caught the tumult outside.
I turned on the television and found…us. The anchor was on the phone with a breathless woman who spoke from inside the hospital.
“It’s a madhouse,” our fellow prisoner said. Her tone was firm, confident, as if she had prepared for this moment: to be the clear-voiced spokeswoman for the doomed.
The reporter leaned forward on her elbows, her pink sleeves creeping back; she looked into the camera: a deep gaze into all of our captive eyes. “Which floor are you on?”
“I’m on the third floor. I’ve locked the door. I’m wearing a mask. It’s mayhem, I’m telling you.”
“Tell us how it feels.” Voyeuristic curiosity—the relief of sidestepping tragedy—passed beneath her concerned frown.
“I am afraid,” our spokeswoman said simply. “This may be a death sentence for us. We may die here. This will be blood on the government’s hands.” It was the declaration of a true martyr.
The anchor nodded sympathetically. “Just a moment—we have another view from outside the hospital.” The camera zoomed its grainy eye to the torn pieces of paper crying I’M NOT SICK! and SAVE THE INNOCENT! that were held against the windows, the telescoped image of ghostly white-coated and white-masked doctors struggling through the crowded halls, the glare off a fifth-floor window where a gray-haired woman, a mask obscuring everything but her moist, stunned eyes, pressed her palm to the glass in a gesture that looked like desperation.
I had to tell Ah Zhay, Wei, my daughters. Someone. I picked up the phone. A tone identical to the one that had preceded the quarantine announcement rang out and a recorded woman’s voice followed: “Apologies, the network is temporarily out of service. Please wait and try your call again.”
—
Later that afternoon, CNN reported that an American had been caught in the quarantine and the surreal sight of my picture flashed on the screen. A snapshot of me laughing with Emily. Blown up, it was grainy, our faces bleached by the flash, our irises slightly red, the kind of photo shown ten times an hour when a person goes missing on a canyon hike with her dog, her car found unlocked in an obscure parking lot, or something like that. Was that the best photo Wei could find?
“Ba, look. It’s me,” I said, bemused. As if the quarantine was not surreal enough.
Baba frowned. “So it is.”
“I’m famous.”
“Infamous,” Baba said, and I was relieved to hear that he still maintained some humor in this situation.
“Internationally infamous.” I laughed drily. CNN debated whether the United States would intervene to release me, or if it would try to negotiate with China to allow the WHO into Taiwan now that American citizens had been roped into the drama. The talking heads spoke by satellite to an expert on cross-strait relations, who sat in front of a green-screen image of a generic city skyline. The pundit declared me too unimportant for such a move. Viewer e-mails expressed fears that if I were released, I might be the next Typhoid Mary.
The outer hallway had settled into quiet, but I still had not opened the door. I picked up the phone again. No service. According to the news, some people on the fifth floor had tossed a bag of coins and cash, along with a note of food requests and their room number, from their window, but their plan for take-out was squashed when a first-floor patient darted out and stole the bag of warm bento box lunches that had been kindly deposited just inside the barricade by a cameraman. A young nurse, convinced she had been given a death sentence, threw herself from the roof in a copycat of the previous week’s attempt, and an ambulance had to be called from another hospital.
I made lukewarm ramen from the tap in the bathroom.
“You’ll have to open the door eventually,” Baba said.
“Why?”
“The doctor needs to check on your mother.”
“Ba, the doctors aren’t coming. The nurses are killing themselves. Mama is safer in here with us.” Even as I spoke, the words seemed unreal.
“Her pills come at five o’clock. If the doctor doesn’t come, I am going to look for him.”
I checked the phone again, hoping to call Wei. He must have been panicked. The line was still down. Silently, we watched the recursive news stories, which all circled back to the quarantine—now one subway station had been closed for disinfection—and every few minutes, Baba checked his watch.
“They won’t come,” I said. Hysteria rose in my chest. “Haven’t you been watching the news? We’re imprisoned here.”
Baba closed his eyes. “When I was in prison, we’d take walks around the world. One man—he was a doctor too—had been to New York City, and he walked us block by block through the city. All the grocery stores, laundries, delis, the women on the stoops, the taxi exhaust, the racket. I have been to that city.” He opened his eyes. “The doctor will come at five, or else I will go look for him.”
“What happened to him?”
Baba shook his head and looked at his watch again. “Four forty-five. In prison, we never wanted their doctor to come. You went with him and you came back with Frankenstein scars. I often had to fix his work. We had no tools. We urinated on the wounds to clean them.”
My mother stirred and Baba went to her. I stared at the TV. My father had never spoken of prison to me, not once in my entire life. Maybe in the diminishing light of a long lifetime, no secret is worth taking to the grave.
“Four fifty. Come help me,” Baba said.
Mama, softly moaning, relented to us. We leaned her forward. I supported her while Baba thumped gently on her back to
get her circulation going.
“The doctor will be in soon,” Baba told her.
“Ba.” My tone was an admonishment. He should tell her the truth.
An old vigor flared up in his eyes and I knew to stop. He wouldn’t be corrected.
He rearranged her pillows, and we eased her back. He curled his fingers onto her pulse and closed his eyes for a few seconds. “The doctor will be here soon,” he said again.
“No, he won’t!”
“You be quiet!” He said I had a crow’s mouth, harbinger of bad luck.
Mama was too tired to respond to our fighting. I collapsed into the chair and wondered if we’d die from a weeklong diet of instant ramen.
Then a knock on the door rattled me out of my anger. I looked at Baba. He gestured for me to answer.
It was the doctor. He wore a flimsy paper mask over his mouth and nose.
“How is our patient?” All business, as if the quarantine had been a momentary disruption to the day. He said hello to my father, took my mother’s hand and asked her how she was. He checked her chart and the machines. “I’ll ask the nurse to give your mother more morphine and bring her pills.”
I felt sheepish asking, but I could not help myself. “And what about us?”
He shrugged. “The chance of transmission is actually quite low. You should just make the best of things. The government is only being cautious.”
“What about the nurse who…”
He shook his head. “People always get hysterical in these situations. We’re no exception.” He sighed. “Let me know if you need anything. The courtyard is still open if you want fresh air. They’ll probably reopen the convenience store once the clerk calms down. Otherwise, we might end up breaking down the gate.” He chuckled. He reminded us to wash our hands thoroughly, and then he was gone.
After cleaning my hands according to the multistep chart posted in the bathroom, being sure to scrub my fingernails by rubbing them in soapy circles in the palm of my hand, I returned to the window. The sun was low, and bright spotlights beaming from news cameras revealed all the reporters below. The stigmatized street was otherwise dead.
A wild-eyed nurse came in, her eyes darting, and briskly urged Mama to take her pills, which had been crushed and mixed with warm water in a tiny paper cup.
“You’re the American?” she said.
“Yup.”
“Your family must be so worried. But at least someone cares about you. I saw it on the news.” She clicked her tongue. “Two thousand Taiwanese stuck in here, but they only worry about the American.”
—
The thunder of trucks woke me. Bearing huge tanks of disinfectant, they moved slowly down the street. Men in white suits stood on the running boards spraying down the blacktop with misting hoses. We had left the TV on mute, and the news had shifted back to the situation in Iraq. President Bush had declared the incursion over and successful—mission accomplished—but the conflict still lingered. I’d already been relegated to a once-hourly ticker update. “American still quarantined in Taiwan hospital.” And, in the PRC, the Chinese government was threatening to execute those who broke quarantine.
Baba was asleep. I showered and dried myself with a washcloth and a fistful of paper towels.
The hospital was quiet. The nurses had apparently organized themselves into shifts, and half of them slept on wheeled beds lining the halls. A few, still on duty, dozed at their stations. I took the elevator to the lobby. As the doctor had promised, someone had broken down the gates to the convenience store—or else the clerk had surrendered and left it for us in a gesture of compassion. It was open and unmanned. Many of the food shelves were almost bare. I took a few bottles of barley tea and some tuna sandwiches. I also found a bag of almonds that had fallen behind the rack of disposable underwear. I felt entitled to what I’d found, but I left money in a drawer behind the counter anyway.
Through the hospital front doors, I could see the news trucks parked in a row across the street; however, except for the police pacing in front of the barrier, no one else was in sight.
—
We sat on the edge of a planter in the courtyard; Baba’s sandaled feet barely touched the ground. From some secret stash, he had brought cigarettes, and we smoked together. I hadn’t smoked since the middle of my first pregnancy, back when doctors did not warn against the habit, and when smoking was one of my few solaces during those hard months. Three decades later, it felt good. I understood how old addictions crept up and latched on.
I didn’t want to say anything because the cigarette seemed to have loosened Baba’s tongue. Again, he had begun to talk about his eleven missing years, about the Ankeng Military Prison where he spent the early part of his imprisonment and then the prison on Green Island, which now was open to the public as a memorial. At Ankeng, cells so crowded that the men had to sleep in shifts, then on Green Island, for a period, where solitary confinement was served in a hot, padded, coffin-like room, and men were damned by frivolous charges like “discontent with the status quo” and “criticized the KMT.” Later, a portion of the prison had been named—ironically or cruelly—“Oasis Villa.”
“You have no idea. You cannot imagine. Thirty-seven men crammed into a room for six. You ever seen rats crammed into a cage? They start biting each other, claw out their own eyes, chew on their limbs. Men too. Sometimes when you were sleeping, someone would stomp on you in your sleep. Bang. Break a limb. You go out to the infirmary and there’s a little more space for the others. One man was stomped so hard, his bladder burst.”
“And then what?”
“And then what? He died.” Baba shook his head. “It was better on Green Island. At least we got our own tatami then. And we could go outside. It was an island—where could we run? But in Ankeng.” He shook his head and took a draw of his cigarette. “Tuberculosis was rampant. That’s how they wiped us out the cheap way. Put a few sick people in a room—don’t have to pay for a bullet later, right?”
Our conversation was interrupted by a twentysomething man in pajamas who bore a railroad of crusty stitches across his shaved head and a black chest tattoo peeking out the top of his shirt. I was wary, but Baba said hello immediately and introduced me tersely by saying, “My daughter.”
“The American?”
I nodded.
“I saw you on TV. My cousin lives in Los Angeles. Wong Bin Lao. You know him?”
“California is pretty big.”
He sat on the other side of Baba and lit his own cigarette. “Can you believe this shit? Ah, excuse my language, Grandfather.” His laugh had a sour edge to it. “I thought I was coming in for surgery, not prison.”
A patch of blue sky, inaccessible freedom, taunted us. Around us were the shadows of the old red brick; parched, scraggly grass; and halfhearted palms. Some “experts” claimed that SARS, like the old viruses of yore, died in fresh air.
“Which one of you is the sick one?”
“We’re here for my mother.”
The man laughed. “Well, that’s bad luck.”
A doctor stepped into the courtyard through the French doors. He nodded at our odd crew, pulled off his mask, and asked for a light.
“No problem, Doc.” The man hopped down and lit the doctor’s cigarette.
A relaxed silence fell between us. The doctor paced the courtyard, his exhalations weary and almost thoughtful.
“Doc, what are the chances we’re going to die?” The man scratched at his stitches.
The doctor sighed. “Nil. But it makes everyone feel better to keep us here. We’re lepers.”
“Lepers. Ha! I was a leper before I came here.”
The outside world was quiet. We could not hear anything beyond the courtyard, as if the city had come to a standstill. I’d heard that the subway trains raced past nearly empty platforms and parents were going mad trying to calm their cabin-fevered children now that the schools were closed.
The image of the virus circulating through all the cracks and
vents came to me. Tiny, sneaking specks of illness. I wanted to go home alive. Like a gesture against superstition, I decided that when I returned to our room, I would wet a towel and stuff it against the gap under the door.
We had nothing to do but wait.
57
FEARING FOR THEIR LIVES, healthcare workers quit en masse at two of the city’s hospitals, causing angry politicians to rail against their selfishness and threaten jail. Two new declarations came out from independent researchers—one that said the virus was spread from unwashed utensils and the other that declared civet cats as the definite culprit.
It made little difference to us. A week of identical days passed. Our dangers were not dirty forks or civet cats, but each other. The news crews maintained their post outside even when the dramas of our more hysterical fellow prisoners stopped. Bored patients and their families gathered in the common areas to stare gaping at the mounted televisions. Sometimes scuffles broke out among the frustrated internees, drip bags swinging on their poles, tubes entangling.
Mama was weakening. The color was almost completely gone from her face; she woke less often, and when she did, she cried out that she was in pain. More and more morphine dripped into her; the doctor called this “comfort care” and neither Baba nor I commented on the euphemism. She existed now. I would not imagine a moment beyond that.
Baba stood at the window for long periods. Occasionally, he’d comment on what he saw as the streets came slowly back to life despite waves of panic that rolled through with each newly discovered infection: the office workers again cutting across the park, lovers kissing behind trees, taxi drivers playing chicken with pedestrians. What did he think about as he gazed over this city he had known? His boyhood in the narrow streets of Twa Tiu Tiann, the shudder of the ground against his straw-soled sandals as he ran past the tea merchants, the rice flour grinders, the apothecary with his jars and drawers full of fragrant herbs—that moment in life before one becomes aware of himself?
I thought of all those times past when it was just Baba and me, like this, Ah Zhay and Dua Hyan wishing they could find the center of Baba’s attention as it had been before he left. Had he spoiled me precisely because I had no memories? With me, he didn’t have to be the father they remembered, the one who was certain and moral.
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