They Didn’t Want Us on the Plane
Maybe we had the virus.
“The captain doesn’t want us to board,” muttered the middle-aged Chinese man after his voluntary scouting mission.
He resumed moping back and forth across the passenger boarding bridge, also known by various other names such as jetway, airbridge, air jetty, skybridge, and — perhaps my favorite — gangway. Not unlike the coronavirus, which is also known by various other names such as COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, and — definitely not my favorite — the Chinese virus.
Yelling trailed from the cockpit. The passengers didn’t want the four of us to board either.
I would find out several hours later that our voluntary scout had recently flown back to China from Bangladesh, “recently” being fewer than fourteen days ago.
The university-age Chinese girl, who did her fair sharing of moping as she groaned on her cell phone (“Shouldn’t they have figured this out before letting us out of the quarantine hotel?”), had flown in from New York, which would in a few days’ time become the national epicenter of the country that would become the new global epicenter of the pandemic.
My wife leaned into me, gripping my hand more tightly, as if to say, “If these two Chinese nationals are…
