My mother’s April flight was canceled. She sounded resigned when she told me that customer service had booked her on the very next available seat for June. They had asked her to be patient. Hundreds of flights had been canceled, tens of thousands of Chinese nationals were trying to get home, especially international students with time-sensitive visas and immigrants working here with entire families back in China, a loved one dying or sick, not from the virus but from other causes, like cancer or heart disease, like stroke. What a virus has never done is scare other deadly illnesses off.
My mother guessed that she wouldn’t be flying back in June either. From June it would get pushed to August, to October, and before she knew it, she would turn seventy and, as her friends had warned, be stuck in this country forever. Even if a vaccine did become available and travel resumed, something else would come up to impede her, like extreme climate change, an apocalyptic flood, and not totally impossible, the Third World War.
But if they did ever let her leave, this would be her last trip to the States, she’d decided, she wouldn’t be visiting again.
I too suspected the same, that once she left, it was for good. I asked her over the phone how she felt about that. That should she manage to leave now, we might not be able to see her for several years, with more travel restrictions being put into place. There was a long pause and I thought I’d lost her. Mom? Mom? I said and she tsked and told me to calm down. Come up and see me before October then, she said. But not every weekend, please. We’ve already spent a good amount of time together, so we also don’t want to overdo.
Having finally come to terms with our mother not being happy here, Fang was trying to find her a more reliable ticket. I asked him what was happening to these unreliable ones? How were they still being booked and then canceled?
In March, the number of daily cases in China fell below a hundred. On March 10, Xi Jinping visited Wuhan to declare the fight against the virus a success. Wuhan must be victorious, Hubei must be victorious, and all of China must be victorious, he said, while raising a clenched fist. I thought of my father, of course, and the feeling of tumbling face-first down a steep slope of ice. But to continue being victorious, China would close its borders to other nations just as other nations had first done to her. The new policy from its aviation bureau was called Five-One. All domestic airlines were limited to one international flight per week per country, while foreign airlines could fly into the mainland no more than once per week. The list of approved flights was released in batches, and you wouldn’t know until some unknown time prior to your flight date if your flight would actually leave. So, to play the odds, people were buying up dozens of tickets at a time and there were simply not enough. The most indefatigable group （hardy international students, the truly desperate to return） bought tickets elsewhere to Japan or Korea, to India, in hopes of catching a transfer, but once they reached their transfer point, new regulations had gone into effect while they were midair, pausing all flights from that country. China-bound passengers would then have to deboard the plane, wait a few hours, and board the same plane back. Fang and I agreed that we couldn’t put our mother through that; it was either a direct flight home or nothing.
Home run, for which nicknames include a homer, a goner, a moon shot, the big fly.
* * *
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THE HOSPITAL CONTINUED TO ban family visits, but families wanted to visit, so we began holding phones and iPads up to the sick, ourselves wrapped in polyphenylene ether, gloved, masked, the iPad shielded, wrapped in plastic, the patient covered in a thin white sheet. Sometimes you had to bring the iPad close to catch the patient’s voice and then pull the screen farther out since the relatives were louder.
Close: I love you.
Away: And I love you too, but listen, you’re going to be fine, and I’ll talk to you tomorrow, okay? At this exact time.
There were some horror stories already. Not at our hospital yet, but elsewhere and abroad. A woman in Italy had been unable to leave her apartment. Her husband had tested positive and died in their house early the next week. The town’s protocol stated that no one was allowed to approach the body until at least two days had passed. So, the widow was stuck at home with the body. She was seen on her balcony crying for help.
In my own unit, one exchange between a husband and a wife caught me off guard. I tried to hold the iPad level but was already having trouble. The city’s death count had been climbing, a reminder of the tired-out truth that the demon will always win. But even if it does win, one still has to try. While there is no fight against death, there are fights to delay it and to give a person more time. For my father, after a blow to the head, it was over. He could not speak or move thereafter, so in that second, he was already gone. But what would he have said to my mother had he been given the chance?