n Beijing they didn’t say SARS at first.

Before the government admitted that an infectious respiratory disease had come to the capital, it was called feidian. Fei is one of several very ancient characters that negate. In the contemporary language of a newly consumerist society, it has come to work like the alphaprivative, prefixed to words like “smoking” and “local” in the way we use “non.” Dian is short for dianxing, which means “classic” or “typical,” a Mandarin word that feels too close in meaning to its English equivalent to come from a language so foreign. Dianxing is commonly used by ironic intellectuals to disparage things (for example, the Mao posters that once hung on my living-room walls: “This is a dianxing foreigner’s home,” a People’s University grad student said to her friend upon seeing them), and to translate ideas like the “Classic Roast Beef Sandwich” at Sammies, a local chain of Western-style sandwich shops.

Feidian is an abbreviation for feidianxing feiyan, a phrase that translates as “atypical pneumonia.” Medically vague, it proved linguistically precise. Life had become “atypical,” and feidian was a neologism that referred as much to a general state of affairs as to a coronavirus. The ambiguity of this situational word gave leeway to amateur pundits: Calls to this restaurant or that gallery, to ask if doors were open, often met with a no. Asking why would garner just a two-word response—“feidian shiqi,” “atypical (i.e., SARS) era.”

The Australian researcher/translator at The New York Times bureau in Beijing had chosen this month to make a long-awaited trip home, and I was hired to fill in for him by bureau chiefs Erik Eckholm and Elisabeth Rosenthal. I started a month-long stint on April 14, a week before the end of the official silence. My second day on the job, I went with Rosenthal to Shunde, Guangdong province, where we interviewed snake and civet mongers in some of the meat markets where the World Health Organization thought the virus might have jumped from animals to humans. That Friday, we were the first foreign journalists to make a SARS-inspired visit to the provincial capital of Taiyuan, snooping around the grounds of the Shanxi Province People’s Hospital that was feared to harbor the first cases.

Then came Easter Sunday: What looked like a routine, if high-level, press conference featuring the minister of health became what many journalists would later refer to as the biggest political shake-up since Tiananmen. The health minister didn’t show up at his own press conference; instead, his deputy revealed the systematic deception of the government’s initial reporting on SARS. Hours later the New China News Agency had posted a two-line item revealing that he and Beijing mayor Meng Xuenong had been asked for their resignation. A decision to face the disease had come down from on high.

For the next three weeks, I spent mornings rendering the state newspapers’ newly voluminous SARS coverage into an executive summary for the bureau’s use—standard practice in most Times foreign bureaus, a way of providing the correspondents with a sense of the day’s news in the local media—and afternoons riding around the capital on the dreaded subway or in the bureau’s white Jeep Cherokee, observing the deserted cityscape and searching for the elusive man on the street.

That press conference sparked a whole series—semi-slick, semi-weekly affairs held before a blue and white background declaring bilingually and tautologically “PRESS CONFERENCE.” City leaders met the press in the tawdry carpeted confines of a ballroom in the International Hotel. The dispatches were emceed by Wang Hui, an austere woman in well-tailored suits, and consistently featured municipal propaganda chieftain Cai Fuchao. With his studiously blow-dried hairdo, Cai was the picture of authoritarian technocrat as game-show host: His 1950s-vintage given name translates “rush to North Korea” (presumably to resist the Americans), and his proclamations, inevitably in strings of punchy, four-character phrases that added just the slightest hint of literary elegance to a well-honed socialist syntax and lexicon, tended to lose their contrived poignancy when rendered by whichever nervous young interpreter was seated to his far right.

In the reforms that quickly swept through the government once officials publicly acknowledged the existence of feidian, Cai’s fiefdom grew more insistent that it be called the “publicity committee”—a change that went on the books several years ago but that foreign reporters still refuse to heed. (One imagines a team of management consultants in a smoky room with city leaders: “You know, ‘propaganda’ is such a harsh word.”) Still, for all the charades, the televised press conferences functioned as town-hall meetings by proxy, bringing with them an unprecedented if vague sensation of political accountability. Beijing watched raptly at 10:00 a.m. most of those Tuesdays and Fridays; I know because the telecast cutaways of which I became a brief fixture were mentioned every time I called a friend or bought a bottle of water. The owner of the commissary in the diplomatic compound where The Times and many other bureaus are housed even said what I would never have presumed: “The foreign reporters are asking the questions we all want to ask.”

In other places, political accountability was less vague. One morning the bureau received a call from an anonymous man about a riot that had happened the night before in his town of Chagugang, a village outside the nearby municipality of Tianjin. We hopped in the bureau’s Jeep immediately, arriving an hour later in a village under martial law. Bureau co-chief Eckholm moved into the back seat with me as Zhou, our driver, pressed on; we hid behind copies of the People’s Daily as we passed several hundred military police and public-security officers, many in riot gear. The Jeep eased through three cordons set up precisely to prevent journalists from entering the town. In spite of dead-giveaway black license plates issued to journalists—similar to diplomatic plates, but without the orange character shi (envoy) that spells immunity—we were not pegged immediately by the police, who were perhaps unfamiliar with Beijing’s vehicle-registration conventions.

I got names and quotes from a few villagers inside a tractor-repair shop before getting back in the car and bolting for Beijing. Being detained by the authorities was a real risk, and I might have faced deportation, as I am not an “accredited” journalist.

The Chagugang villagers told us they had heard that the Tianjin government was planning a SARS containment facility in their midst. Ten thousand people from their town and neighboring villages as far as ten kilometers away had reportedly gathered the night before, gutting the school that was to be converted into a sanatorium and throwing rocks through the windows of the township government. This made page one of The Times. Not surprisingly, it was never picked up in the Chinese press. Though calls I made two weeks later to random numbers in the exchange revealed that thirty-two of the perpetrators were still being detained, the facility, so far, has not been built.