A medical worker between signs that say "SARS Consultation and Monitor Room" at Hankou railway station in Wuhan Photo: © reuters newmedia inc. / corbis

There was a seamy underside to the government and its newfound commitment to the health and well being of its citizenry. It manifested itself not just in the speed with which officials mobilized an urban population of 14 million, but also in the resurgence of Cultural Revolution-era tactics that publicized and ultimately enforced the mobilization. Languishing “neighborhood committees” re-assumed their positions as amateur surveillance units; security guards refused entry into upscale apartment compounds. The barrage of four-character slogans (Chinese slogans, set phrases, and literary references tend to come in multiples of four characters) included calls for solidarity (“in the face of adversity, the unity of the masses is an impregnable fortress”), appeals to science (“depend on science; overcome SARS”), and reminders of Party power (“The SARS [sic] will be conquered by the government and the Communist Party of China”).

More perplexing than banners and slogans were the quirky moments of communist Theater of the Real that inevitably popped up at the press events scheduled by the publicity committee. On a visit to Xiaotangshan, the 1,000-bed SARS hospital in the Beijing suburbs built by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in eight days, workers in contamination suits waddled like Oompa-Loompas, unloading crates of disinfectant and instant noodles before the cameras. At a carefully orchestrated ceremony marking the end of a two-week quarantine on some college dorms that had spawned fourteen cases, a compact older woman in gauze mask and hairnet stood by the soon-to-open fence waving the sort of tiny flag toddlers hold on National Day. Right arm extended, left encumbered with a gaudy bouquet, she reached like Lady Liberty toward her son’s roommates as they called down from their eighth-story window.

A tiny bit of journalistic prodding revealed that she didn’t know the names or majors of the seven students to whom she claimed to have delivered food each day, and that her “son” was still quarantined at some other location that she could not remember. An official came over and reminded her, in a voice really meant for the gathered mass of Chinese journalists, that, “although the quarantine period has ended, the campus will not be open to the public in order to prevent the further spread of SARS.” The woman thanked the official for his wise words, her earnest voice pegging her as a Party plant.

Patrol: policemen in an empty Forbidden City Photo: © reuters newmedia inc. / corbis

Theater and sloganry converged in the campaign to worship doctors and nurses. “They can’t help themselves,” I heard Eckholm say one afternoon on the phone with the foreign desk. He was referring to the “Study Comrade Jiang Suchun Movement,” a bizarre homage to the seventy-four-year-old, PLA infectious-disease specialist who was among Beijing’s first SARS sufferers. Papers featured heroic pictures of this man, who recovered in just twenty-four days. On his sickbed, he insisted that his underlings inject him with an experimental treatment of blood serum from recovered patients, and even found time to write nine articles about the epidemic.

Jiang Suchun (not to be confused with Jiang Yanyong, the whistleblower of Time magazine fame) was just one of many doctors and nurses who were honored as “front-line warriors” and “martyrs.” Hospital gates were often crowded with lineups of quarantined medical personnel in masks and gloves receiving flowers and fans (it was hot in those contamination suits, and the hospitals couldn’t use air-conditioning for fear of spreading infected air) from corporations before throngs of CCTV cameramen. One particularly irksome slogan was “Salute the Angels in White Clothing,” featured prominently in the sappy music videos that ran between segments of the all-SARS evening news. For me, the seraphic imagery, spewed from a government with no appetite for or experience with Christianity, revealed the anxiety and insincerity of the entire project.

On the Chinese street, comparisons to September 11 seemed to abound. Columnists wrote elegies to the end of uneventfulness and assurances that “what doesn’t kill us will only make us stronger.” Leaders promised to protect the homeland. Earnest praise for the disaster’s frontline workers—Beijing’s nurses replacing New York’s firefighters—seemed the only way to pluck good from a very bad thing. China, which especially in the months leading up to the war in Iraq had seemed an economically blessed bystander to the machinations of greater powers, was once again central to the global conversation.

More prosaically, our jolly, twenty-something expat world of wannabe journalists and art dealers and paralegals had been served a rebuke. Parents wanted us home. Many, realizing that their exotic, strong-dollar lives were not worth personal risk or the fear they now caused loved ones, obliged. At a few of the intrepid restaurants that remained open, a string of farewell dinners ensued. For a few weeks I was scared, wearing my Times-issued N95 masks on interview trips to train stations and pharmacies. Life had grown surreal, even frightening, as the city’s routine was put on indefinite hold. Left-leaning friends would write from home saying they knew things just couldn’t be as bad as the media were reporting, that there must be people on the streets. But for a few days in late April and early May, there really weren’t.

Rumors flew by e-mail and cell-phone text message: “Don’t go out today, they’re moving patients around”; “in a few days they’re going to shut down the airport, and no one will get out.” Worse than the rumors were real stories of friends, mostly Chinese, who had decided to quarantine themselves, buying large supplies of food and staying in their apartments for weeks at a time. The U.S. embassy sent a circular to Americans living in Beijing with a haunting warning that, once infected, even a golden-eagle passport couldn’t get you a ticket out of town. Even the brave among us were furtively touching their foreheads a few times daily, looking for signs of fever, or having brief moments of panic each time they boarded a taxi and heard the driver cough.

On a few late-night walks through the diplomatic compound, I mentally mapped a SARS evacuation route—through the north gate, up the East Third Ring Road, out the Airport Expressway, to the next U.S.-bound flight. And then I would feel guilty for thinking like that. As much as I was experiencing the same urban hysteria as any native Beijinger, I had a way out that neutralized emotion, even turned it into pretense. This escape route of mine raised big issues of global equity and cultural belonging that would have been at home in Duke freshman seminars with names like “Third World and the West.” Yes, Beijing was as much my city as anywhere I could have moved after graduation. But though I wasn’t going to leave over this, like the Brits in the treaty ports during the Japanese invasion of the late 1930s, I could have..