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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Too Quiet.

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.

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.

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.

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.