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.
