“Into the Country”

I feel as if I must close the books on this chapter of my life, a difficult task when it feels so formative. As a young medical professional, I was faced with the plague on a daily level, and this collection of my thoughts shall serve as evidence to whatever impact it had on me.

It is 1908, and my purpose for writing has been eradicated en masse if not entirely. The plague is declared ended – Surgeon General Wyman has given our city its final bill of health, so it seems as if the terror has subsided.

My time in the shelter was too depressing to put into words. I watched death come back to a place already once devasted, and it took with it our homes and our livelihoods. The mayor told us our city would rise out of the ashes, like a phoenix, but I cannot believe his words. I see tall buildings replacing our old stores and grocers and hospitals – this is not the city I knew.

I have choosen to take my family and I into the country. I have heard private clinics are becoming the way, and that Chinese medicine is beginning to become in fashion for wealthy Americans. My brothers have decided to find work as farm hands, and my Ba will enjoy the peaceful nature of a more rural area. Once we are settled, we will plant a tree for my sister, and another for the rest of those claimed in these years of tragedy.

I look back as we cross the bay upon the city that was my home for almost 10 years, and I think back to what it once was. I worked hard there. I watched people die. I lost family. I learned to question the ways of my culture. I will remember it as, if not positive, then formative. Definitely formative.

I hear another sickness is moving into the city; an influenza as the white people call it, a sort of nose and throat disease. It is November. The newspapers claim that man is finally overcoming disease.

I wonder if this can be true; how can we ever really conquer something we have never seen? We are humans I think. It is our way to have sickness. It is what we are used to. It is our nature.

It is our nature.

“From the Open Earth”

In these camps I have seen much depravity, living conditions that have been far below what we should have. Those conditions have people living in filth, cooking in worse, and I started to see it happen. The illness.

But then it was an illness I had seen before, too recently to ever forget. It was as if the eartquake had torn up the ground only to release that which we had tried to bury, those things we could not see and thought we had eradicated rising from the open earth. It is with great sadness that I write that I believe plague to have returned.

It is not just the illness, but the rats: now that we know it is they who carry the virus, I want to kill every one in sight. verywhere I look I see them feasting on left over rations and sneaking through piles of excrement and waste. Perfect conditions for worthless hùnzhàng.

My Ba sometimes tells my brothers and sisters stories to explain the sickness. He tells them of the evil gǒushǐ duī, the trapped spirit beneath the city.

Two of our neighbors awoke to a fever yesterday, and are now dying. . I pray it will go back underground quickly. I have heard word that Mr. Blue is returning, but part of me wonders if we can be saved: the earth opened over San Francisco, destroying everything we had tried to rebuild. Can we go through that again, can Blue rescue us a third time?

I just don’t know.

“The Spirits of the Dead”

When I tried to pull my unconscious sister from beneath the rubble, I felt her Qi leave her. It had not felt Qi for quite some time, had not engaged with that idea. It is perhaps why I have not returned here for so long, having accepted the reality, whatever it was, that faced me.

And then the Earthquake hit. I awoke to the wobbling of my bed frame, and to the crying of my litte sisters. I couldn’t save her, the one under the bookshelf which fell as she tried to flee, but my youngest sister was alive…but what kind of world was she in? It was confusion and turmoil, and little more. Her Qi, in a way, left the room as well – her life was changed, some part of her missing. I did not see my brothers as I exited the house with my sister in my arms, where my Ba had thankfully been helped out by my brothers. He told me they were now gone to help others, which worried me: they were fearless in these actions, and I wish they would stay closer to home. I also wish I could be more like them sometimes. Ba and I watched as our house shifted, and we were relieved to see it remained fairly structured: my sister’s body could be recovered.

It was a different world, a different San Francisco. As far as I could see, Chinatown was nearly flattened and full of rubble. One of my brothers had stolen a photograph of downtown Chinatown, which was at least a small thing for him to take in the riots – He said he found it next to the drugstore, but found is a strange word to use. My heart aches, for him but mainly for the photograph – I think of all the work we had done to rebuild our city, and how it has all gone away.

There will need to be relocation: our home is crooked, and the buildings around it sinking on one side compared to the others. The walls were caving in, and we barely had time to gather my sister’s body before they began to start preparing for demolition of these unsafe residences. The landlady yelled at the people from the city, but inside she knew that it was all necessary: she was just seeing her life fall out from beneath her, and it’s hard to keep one’s composure in such a fashion.

We were given vouchers for food and made out way to the shelter with what things we could gather from the house. However, another part of my life remained, and I left my family to head to the hospital to gather what I could. My healing back was there, when the quake hit, but now it was gone, along with the building in which it was left. The fires had taken it, or what the quake didn’t, and I couldn’t even enter the block where it was due to police barricades.

I stopped, closed my eyes, and called upon the spirits of the dead to leave this place – the patients stranded in their beds, and the nurses and doctors who were with them. I left thinking of them, and then met with my family at the place of sheter, a flat muddy piece of parkland. We had what things we could carry, the provided rations of bread and murky water, and ourselves. I ignored our possessions, decided to sleep on a shallow stomach, and simply curled up with my sister in my arms and thought about how this could all happen.

And what kind of city I’d wake up to in the morning.

“The Family”

This month, an entire family was wiped out by plague in the Latin Quarter. I cannot fathom the tragedy of it all, imagination what it must be like for that community. I am fearful myself, and it is far removed from Chinatown where today conditions are radically improved.

But it has also awoken us all: doctors and people from all corners of the city seem more united than ever before. I heard one of the doctors talking about how they felt like they now had reason to diagnose plague when they saw it, whereas before they were uncertain or afraid. There was openness, a sense that we were moving forward.

Out of tragedy can come great progress: in this case, the tragic loss of a family has brought the people of San Francisco into a family of their own, where race is not the barrier it once was.

“Cooperation”

A year had passed since I last wrote. I don’t know why I chose not to return to this space, but something about the plague seemed too big for me. It had spread: it was no longer simply within the confines of Chinatown, but has moved into other populations such as the Latin Quarter. They don’t believe in Qi there, so I am more confused than ever. The plague arrived for good at the turn of the new year, but so too did Dr. Blue return.

We at the hospital were informed of his new methods, and the mood was finally changing – there was less resistance to his plans, and my colleagues and I were cooperative on the outside for the first time since this process began. There are no more jokes on the street: our mood has turned serious as the situation has, and you can see the relief on his face. This time, he thinks, things might work.

He is scouring every house, and is tearing down buildings that are hazards to our health. He is thankful for our efforts, and recognizes our cooperation with a cordial nature unseen in this whole process. The illness is slowly disappearing in Chinatown, and illness in general. I feel healthier, which gets our hopes up that everything is over.

Except, it doesn’t seem like it’s over. In fact, it feels as if there is still much to be done. Piles of lumber fill the streets, and much of our city is in shambles. As I hope and pray that there will come a day where I will not fear my patients, or that I won’t bleach my hands raw, I also see the carnage around me and ponder whether that is even possible.

The new Governor has taken office, and you can tell things are changing: he is a medicine man, my Ba says. A year ago, a doctor who enters politics would be an unpopular sort around here, but Pardee is different – I have yet to see the man, but his presence is felt in a sense of hope that encompasses us that didn’t before. The government has finally admitted that the plague exists, much by Pardee’s doing, and perhaps now we can find our solace.

Meanwhile, I wonder when his men will get to our house – it is fairly clean, but that’s what the people with wet basements thought, and the people with dirty pipes. These are the people who have been falling ill, and my family hopefully will not count amongst them – they spray your house, and even if no one is sick it takes days before you can go back. I worry every day that I’m not doing enough to help them, that somehow I am standing in their way.

And yet progress moves on – cooperation is something that needs us all to be on the same page, and for the first time I believe this is true.

“Quiet”

I write today, after a long absence, because things are too quiet: I do not trust that the sickness has gone away, and yet I see fewer cases now than before. This is a trend, some say, while others feel it is only a brief respite from the terror. The summer months are when the things we cannot see are supposed to breed like chùsheng, the dogs in the streets. The heat is everywhere. I think now maybe it is too hot and wet for the sickness – but who am I to know such things? I continue to hear disquieting rumors of the plague’s return, but somehow still it is quiet.

Too Quiet.

“Underground”

I hear people talking about the plague, although I see less and less of it. Apparently, it goes underground over the winter, something about the nature of our climate in these cold months. The Western men say it goes underground, but I am not concerned with that: I am concerned about whether it comes back up.

We’ve only had one man sick, and we never were sure if it was the sickness or not. I don’t feel it the way I once did in the hallways, but I dare not think it is gone for good.

Our weather must be too bitter for even these things we cannot see; it makes me wonder whether perhaps we are less prepared even than we think we are, if even this monstrous disease can’t outlast mother nature.

“The Mission’”

It is the fall of 1901.

I do not understand why the Christian missionaries spend their time here – well, I do not understand their reason, anyways. They claim they are here to help, but are they not really here to spread their own religion to replace our own?

Another woman was sick when I came in this morning, someone who we saw quite often out on the street. Miss Cameron, a well known missionary from another hospital came to see us. She tells us things are going to be fine, and that God loves us all and desires to help us. One of our nurses tells her God has chosen to punish us, and cannot reconcile these facts. Miss Cameron tells her it is because we are not yet Christians and we need to learn the ways of the true God before he can accept us as his children.

This makes most of us angry, and even some of the white nurses seem annoyed – they see her racist treatment of us just as much as we do based on their exclusion from the discussion. The white nurses come to our defense, telling us that God loves us already, and that He has not given our people the sickness.

I don’t know what I believe; more and more now I doubt the spirit at all. The Qi, the new God, or the ways of my Ba. None of these things help save our dying. None of these spirits protect us. I hear today a white nurse on California Street has died: where was her God? I hear word that she died months ago, and no one told us.

If I was one of these missionaries, I would be scared. They don’t like to show, like to believe that they are above us, but I think it’s all an act. I think they are scared of time: how much time God is giving them, how much time until this becomes their problem as much as it is ours. They think it is a disease of the blood, and our blood is just the same as theirs; they bleed in the same way, the same colour. This thing we cannot see, Qi or disease or whatever it is, could be in all of us.

There are efforts being made to give us more time. Zou Puquan, a man who helped us get our quarantine lifted once before, has come again to hear us out and to fight for our case. The hospital is worried about shutting down – our head nurse has written a letter to the “Big Six”. A group of wealthy Chinese Americans who have fought for us before, and gave us most of the money we needed to open the hospital, the power they wield is palpable. They are here to help us.

The President has died. I hear the bells ringing in the street. A white man shot him. I wonder if this will change things for us.

“Bad Qi”

I always knew the Bad Qi would happen. Just as my Ba had warned me. I wasn’t prepared: I didn’t know it would hit so close to home, and that it would extend as it had.

It happened to a nurse, someone like me. She got it from a man, a man who she didn’t want to admit had the plague for it compromised the hospital, and there were some who felt this was wrong. His family came to visit him, and I did nothing to stop them or the nurse. I simply watched them: a family rallying around their dying member, wondering what the future holds.

All the while, the Nurse was contracting the disease. At lunch, she felt hot. She said it was nothing, and continued on her work. I purposely moved away from her while we ate – I said I would turn her in, but yet I just sat there with everyone else, silent. If Dr. Blue and his men find out she is sick, we may be shut down, or quarantined…or worse. What was worse, precisely? I didn’t know, but suddenly all of my independence melted away.

It was because that could have been me, and this suddenly all affected me on a personal level. What if I cannot leave to go back to my family? Who will take care of my Ba? My little brothers and sisters? How will they get money to eat, and who will guide them in their lives? I fear for this more than I fear for myself.

I am tempted to leave the hospital and not come back, to burn this part of my life away and start anew. I think I understand these people now, those who hide their dead or run away. They are scared, an emotion I don’t know I felt until this moment.

She worsens that afternoon, is put into a room. The doctor goes in to see her, and my heartbeat quickens. I try to think of any contact I have had with her – I draw a blank, but that doesn’t mean anything, every day seems the same so I forget everything. I try to remember if I was as cautious as my Ba asked me to be, if I had forgotten about the risks of the Bad Qi. The Bad Qi: a danger that I can’t see or hear, and that now takes over my life. It is a punishment, and it is here.

I don’t wait to see what the doctor says, it is all too much – I abandon the rest of the dispensary to their fate and run with my bag to the nearest exit. My work day isn’t over, but I worry that my life is instead. I don’t trust Ba’s advice, or the doctor’s opinion, or any of it – I feel only apprehension. I sat at home that night, watching my family and pondering if a few days from now I would never see them again.

When I went into work the next day, the nurse was reading a chart. It had just been a day flu. But the Bad Qi was still in the air: even if it didn’t take the form of the plague, something had changed. In her, in me, in Chinatown.

I don’t know where it goes from here.

“Transition”

Dr. Kinyoun is gone. He was innocent, but that did not change the situation. In charge was Dr. White, but he was not the man for the job some said. I don’t know if anyone is, but Dr. Blue may be close. Either way, we are in a period of rapid transition, a period that the plague seems to enjoy. I see it more and more.

I do not feel close to Blue as I did to Kinyoun, not to say I am actually close to either – I see them from a distance, making my judgments based on their physical characteristics and mannerisms. I hear jokes on the street about him – Blue, or qīng, to us means he is a man of low stature, a tame man of little import: to me he seems proud, perhaps too proud. But I am not much good for perception.

No longer do we feel the need to be quiet about the sickness, Blue is quite clear about this. His men know our people have been lying to them, and they try not to act angered by this. I look into Blue’s eyes, as my Ba always told me to do to judge character, and I see a much more worried man than Mr. Kinyoun ever was. He is not a rough doctor as much as a man hoping to keep this evil at bay. I feel poorly for him.

He is here more often, perhaps the reason I find him unnerving: I never saw Kinyoun, but Blue is a presence, perhaps too much of one. I don’t see the same fear as I did with Kinyoun, instead calmness. I am not sure why he kills rats as he does, but that matters not: for us, our hospital is more important than vermin.

He has big plans for the hospital: he wants it to help people, not simply usher them out of this life. I am so accustomed to death now – and yet there is still no dialogue on the subject. Blue pushes the issue, but we all take it at a distance. We talk about the future, but never the present – we talk around the issue, instead of confronting it head on. I don’t know how many plague cases that have been missed, but this is only because part of me doesn’t want to.

The nurses are scared of the rats, but I find them interesting: not to the point of going near one, but just their travels. We rarely see where they come from, or where they go, but they emerge nonetheless. We don’t know where Blue came from, or what is in his future, but he is here now. And he is an enigma: I feel he must be worried, to work as he does, but he doesn’t let his emotions show as Kinyoun sometimes did (or so I hear). He is kind to us even when he likely knows we’ve lied, and I feel bad every time he does so.

To soothe myself, I spoke harshly to a nurse who lied straight to the face of one of his men. But I did not speak to the man himself: I called her a hútú dàn, but I said nothing to the man who mattered, and did nothing to help the situation except to soothe my conscience.

I feel I am myself in transition, and wonder when I may someday get out of it. Maybe next year.

“Translation”

Wong Chung, Mr. Blue’s translator, came today. He walks around the hallways slowly, and looks at everything – his eyes never stop moving, his perception no doubt greater than my own. He is mostly quiet, except for a few comments – he mainly asked us about recent deaths, and some rat questions (There’s always rat questions).

Mainly he speaks with our head nurse, and not the Western doctors – this is a rare thing. They look at him like he is nǐ bú shì rén, or worthless. The head nurse is nice to him, smiling while she shows him projects from our children’s ward. He smiles, gives us a kind goodbye, and leaves. I wonder what he will report – he is the translator, but he will be giving second hand information in a tongue different than his natural one. Will he be able to tell some of us have lied to him? I have heard he can see through the gǒu pì, the lies we construct to hide ourselves.

But behind his kindness is another harsh reality, a meaning beyond his actions: why should he come here if the plague is done? The newspapers are quiet about the sickness, focused on the mayoral elections, but both seem foreign to us: they seem like they aren’t being translated, and our struggles aren’t making it to the rest of the city. I wonder what the rest of the city is truly like. Are they struggling just as we are?

I do not know the answer, and am too concerned with my own people to broaden my view so greatly.

I notice he comes in a horse and wagon. I have heard this is one of Blue’s new methods of skirting around the painful procedures the authorities have adopted to protect us from the reality of the sickness. He himself has brought this wagon to take careof dead bodies directly: he has his own personal morgue. I think this is clever, and smile to myself.

“Perception”

As a nurse, I like to believe I am perceptive. I don’t know what of, I don’t know how it works, but I like to think I see things.

Right now, what I see is not what others see, and not what I want to see. The papers see what they want to see, no plague and the vilification of Dr. Kinyoun. The businesses see a San Francisco with a clear bill of health, and the President sees whatever his advisors tell him to see.

Me? I see plague. Kinyoun sees plague too, and yet now he’s on trial for his insistence, for his work. He tries for quarantine, out of concern for the city, and he’s on trial. I don’t know what justice is, but it is not what I perceived it to be.

It is October now, and we see the plague lifting back: fewer cases are being reported, according to Kinyoun, I hear from my Ba. He doesn’t believe him, immediately discredits what he reports, but I block out that part. The cool months must place it into hibernation, and yet Kinyoun will not sleep. He knows it is growing, that no court case can change that.

But what will be perceived? Will Kinyoun ever overcome this reputation? I remain unsure, and yet let us remember: I can’t see what I want to see. So, I did not choose to see danger: but it is all that I can think of when I sleep at night.

“Detention”

I remember detention. It is a concept that spans race, or gender: everyone can get in trouble, can face some form of containment. Sometimes this was staying after school, sometimes it was a punishment for a crime.

I do not know what we did wrong.

There is talk from Kinyoun. It is talk about sending us to detention centers. It relocates us, allows them to tear away our lives and our livelihood. This dispensary would be gone, and I would be a prisoner and little more.

Part of me doesn’t care anymore: a new Quarantine has many of us out of jobs anyways, and at least on the island we wouldn’t see the whites walking along the border of the quarantine zone, mocking us. I don’t know if they do it on purpose, but they seem to walk so slowly when they’re in view, savovuring every last moment of freedom.

My Ba wonders, or presumes, that this would be treated different if it was a white disease: I nod my head in agreement, but I am not sure how I would answer aloud. One day he wanted further clarification of my head movement, but I changed the subject. I quickly learned to change the subject with my Ba, it is a skill we all needed to learn.

Perhaps in Detention we’d have food, we are struggling to survive at the moment. What rations we have are small, and we are not used to being hungry: even our everyday exclusion from normal life is more free than this.

But how we react is bothersome: we react by subverting Kinyoun, by subverting his travel quarantine or his efforts. He wants us in Angel Island so that these people are no longer a problem, that the people making fake health certificates are no longer a barrier to his success. And I almost agree: I want those who are standing in the way to be gone too.

But would that include me, and the people I love? I don’t know, and am not sure where we go from here.

“A Man of 22″

When you are a nurse, you see a large number of patients. Today, I saw one that I will never forget.

A man of 22 came in today. He was shaking, unable to stop tossing and turning, and his fever was beyond my past experiences. A thick bump, which the Western doctors call a bubo, protruded from his inner thigh, far enough to almost touch his other leg. It was tender to the touch, and the man bit his lip and turned away when it was prodded. I knew we were hurting him, but yet I also knew this was nothing compared to what he must be going through overall.

He died quite quickly, too quickly for me to gather much beyond his age or his gender. We were all perplexed by this scenario, but I was the only one to actively ask what this could be. I do not see the signs I see of the cào disease, also known as venereal disease. The tiny oozing red bumps or the crusty white mucous weren’t present, in their place a strange series of symptoms I would come to know too well.

I tell them that this is new. New things scare people, however, and my colleagues were unwilling to admit the same. They said that he was a Coolie, that he had bought a “low class chòubiǎozi”, that it was his own fault. They saw it every day, they said, therefore that’s what it had to be. But something is wrong: that should not have killed him so quickly, or violently. And it is not just him: a man of 35, a cook, comes in from Dupont street and dies on the heels of the other man.

This Man of 22 signals the beginning of the Year of the Rat. He, the rat, is meant to bring us material wealth and success, yet he also brings their opposites: war, sickness, death, ruin. And yet, our beliefs of the Rat are much more complex than what we see here, where rats are vermin: they don’t see the other side.

Dr. Kellogg, the man who studies the strange illness, does not say a word as he inspects these dead men and women. He takes tips of blood from them and cuts of their flesh, and he stores it all in vials and other glass jars. I would be amongst those who believe that these autopsies are of concern to our values, but I have spent too much time in hospitals and know too much of the way medicine works. I hide this from my Ba, voicing a false protest whenever the topic comes up.

Kellogg doesn’t speak to me, but I feel we have some sort of a connection. He is a man who always looks concerned, but also eager. If we are as infected as Dr. Kinyoun says, the rat will be true to its prophecy. It will bring us ruin, our people in this place – I believe that Dr. Kellogg feels this way, and I think I do as well.

This Man of 22 makes me wish that my parents had nothing come here, but my Ba says this is evil talk: we will work hard, and then the rat shall bring us good things. I want to believe this is true, but then I remember the faces: of the Man of 22, of Dr. Kellogg, of my own face in the mirror.

And then I see the faces of the animals: Dr. Kinyoun is apparently keeping animals out there, and I hear rumours that he is falsifying information, making them ill to prove his case. I have no idea if this is true, but I do know I think about the animals. I feel their pain in the same way I feel my own, and worry that this plague is too big for me, or anyone else, to handle.

Or else we’ll all be animals, or men of 22.

“To Run To Him”

A tannery owner is not following the new rules, and they have arrived to fumegate and keep his business from simply furthering the march of plague across Chinatown. They arrive early, the nurse on duty tells me. He swears at them, (“qù nǐde” he called out), but what good does swearing do? For Kinyoun, it does not phase him.

Part of me wants to talk to Kinyoun – he is a broad man, not like the snake that people make him out to be. He is a bald man, and as he leans forward you feel secure of his presence. You feel secure because he is not confident, you can see it in his eyes; there is a darkness inside of him that is not directed at us but at others. The officials holding him back, and the dirty mayor who hides his findings. The racial element of this fight is prevalent considering its location, but for Kinyoun it seems different.

I want to run to him to tell him all of this, and to in some way solve this problem. What holds me back is a combination of my nervousness, and also my insecurity: I still don’t know whether I trust this process, but I trust this man. There are things I could tell him, things I know are happening . I hear stories of bodies being hidden, doctors ignoring clear cases of plague. this behaviour continues, but what could I do? My voice is but one, and it will take a turnaround of all of us to change things.

They are becoming more aggressive, they have to – they are ordering all suspicious deaths to be autopsied, further angering those who are against this practice. I remain quiet, my further ambivalence concerning to my sense of morality. I know how my people feel: we are disturbing the spirits. We are disrespecting them, perhaps, but if it helps prevent further deaths then is it not worth it? I want to tell Kinyoun that I believe in him, and that I am not like the others: that I would never have my entire family go into hiding if one of us was unlucky enough to get this disease, that I would accept our fate. But would I?

But I don’t. As Consulman Ho fights our government for assistance to improve conditions, and as Kinyoun leaves, I see one of his men approaching the hospital. I duck inside the entranceway to avoid him. I am not yet sure where I stand, and I don’t trust him: only Kinyoun.

“The Pulse”

Yechunwo is my given name. My Ba gave it to me before I was born he jokes. It is a combination of my mother and grandmother’s names.

For the sake of this site, this shall be as far as I go . As a nurse in San Francisco, my life at the moment is one of turmoil and tension. It is my job to find the pulse of my patients, to quell their inner Qi, however I find life is beating too fast. I want to rid myself of it.

The pulse of the plague presses in on us from all sides.

My Ba tells me every day to wear my long sleeve shirts, to not let these people’s bad Qi get into me. To wear my white collar high around my neck.

He thinks, as most of us here think, that this suffering is of our own making. It is pain from the chòubiǎozi, in their whore houses, blowing kisses to the men from the street. Since our people came to this place, they have received not gold and richers but rather swollen testicles and pitching fever.

As the plague threat hits our city, we have no information – only strange men in our hospital. They walk up and down our white tidy hallways and write down words and purse their lips. They tell us not what they find, just that they find something; whether it is good or bad we don’t know until they leave. We find out what they found from newspapers and Consulman Ho, who yells words of encouragement in the street, and tells us he plans to sue the government for a lot of money. Should we be suing? Or joining in the fight?

He says many things about the quarantine, but the largest question is fairness: we are Americans, but where is our freedom? Are we Americans, or slaves? I may not know myself, but I know that said self does not identify yet with this nation, with its flag and its governments. I have read the things they told me to in school. America is meant to be a land built on freedom.

I sit with my tools of trade: my herbs, my needles, and my copy of the Huangdi Neijing. I flip through its pages when I get bored, when the Western doctors tell me “there’s nothing you can do here”. I look at the old Chinese drawings, of the evils in the environment entering the human body, and I wonder if we are right or they are. And does it even come down to that question?

I don’t entirely understand the medicine of it all. Yersin’s serum, Haffkine vaccine, it’s all foreign to me. I have heard stories that the vaccine comes from horse’s blood. Can this be true? It’s hard to imagine how foreign it is to the people, the people who are struggling to come to terms with the work of Kinyoun, and others. Can these actually prevent this illness, to slow this pulse? Or is it western words, as some in my community say? And considering the situation, can they really blame them?

Ultimately, we are being treated as cattle, and there is no proof that the Haffkine vaccine works nor that it has no side effects. The man from the newspaper fell ill, and his eventual recovery proves nothing. We are different yet the same, our beliefs meaning that a medicine has impacts outside of what Westerners may see. We look inside not just for medicine, but for spirituality: day by day, I am concerned that this is forgotten, and yet wonder whether the drive for a cure may be more important.

And all the while, the pulse quickens, and I have to keep up.