They came for us in hazmats suits, with guns pointed at our foreheads.
“Temperature check,” the faceless voice said in broken English.
It was well after midnight and it was taking me a while for my eyes to adjust to the fluorescent lights that were shining on the cold concrete floor beneath my feet.
I sat there in silence, as the faceless voice waited for the beep of the thermometer to go off and the green light to appear.
“Okay,” the faceless voice said. “See you tomorrow morning.”
July is hot in suburban, post-communist China, with temperatures reaching the 80s or 90s everyday. It’s even hotter when you’re quarantined to a converted high-school dormitory.
The H1N1 virus, commonly known as Swine Flu, was an influenza pandemic that appeared with flu-like symptoms and I had the pleasure of being right in the middle of it in the summer of 2009.
I traveled in a large pack of Western high-school students, as part of a “cultural awareness” program, sponsored by the Chinese government. We were lured in by a free trip to China. All we had to pay for was the plane ticket.
When Swine Flu hit, things didn’t go quite as planned.
Fellow students I met were on the news, cooped up in a four-star hotel in Beijing, spending hours watching dubbed Chinese soap operas.
My mom would try to email me, asking if I was okay, but I couldn’t get the emails. They hacked our emails, I would discover later.
Some days, we were lucky and they let us go on excursions, as part of the formal “cultural awareness” program created by the Chinese government. I saw The Great Wall and The Bird’s Nest.
Other days, we woke up at 7, were sent to breakfast in a dimly-lit cafeteria, where we were greeted by another hazmat suit and another temperature gun.
If our temperature made the cut, we were allowed in. If our foreheads were one degree higher, we were sent to the back of the line to “try again.” If that didn’t work, we were sent back to our metal-framed beds and the concrete floors.
The high-school campus was sprawling. Giant grey buildings overpowered high-fences, with security guards waiting at the entrance and exit.
While in quarantine, they kept us busy with morning exercises and Chinese language and cultural lessons. We learned our Hello’s and Goodbye’s and were told that Tiananmen Square wasn’t real.
The environment was stiff and hushed. No one really knew what was going on and I just wanted to go home.
With limited Internet access and a language barrier, I had to find comfort elsewhere. I had to find my lifeline.
And then I found Oreos.
Each day while under quarantine, I ate Oreos. Not one or two, but like a sleeve or two.
On days when I was away from the temperature checks and stale breakfasts, I ventured to the campus “store,” a converted hut, which I’m pretty sure was built exclusively for the Westerners’ arrival.
The Oreos felt like home. They reminded me of sleepovers with friends and grocery trips with my dad, who was the only one who would willingly buy them for me.
Those circular treats were the emails I couldn’t send and the comfortable mattresses I couldn’t sleep on.
My short-lived infatuation with Oreos was my way of coping with my short-lived quarantine. I had to find the good in the situation, and boy were they good.
The physical space of quarantine made me stir crazy, but it forced me to find a place of comfort, no matter how jet-lagged, sleep-deprived and claustrophobic I really felt.
I’d take a deep breath, tear open a new sleeve and take a bite, waiting for another temperature check by the faceless voice in the hazmat suit.
