Watching the developments surrounding the novel coronavirus, I can’t shake the memories of the SARS outbreak, and the psychological and emotional effects it had on my family, Mandy Luk writes.
“Mom, perhaps, you should consider cancelling your mah-jong game for a few weeks,” I said the other night, while chatting with my parents at the dinner table about the coronavirus outbreak.
My parents have a weekly mah-jong gathering at their house with friends every Saturday. It is a traditional game involving four players mixing and drawing tiles to see who can build a winning set first. (If you have watched movies like Crazy Rich Asians or The Joy Luck Club, you will have an idea on what the game is like.)
It sounds paranoid to suggest my parents change their habits because of the new coronavirus. Health officials have said repeatedly the risk of infection remains low in Canada. No one in our family is a frequent traveller to mainland
China.
As a journalist, I know better than anyone that we should make informed decisions, and not react emotionally. But I can’t shake the echoes of the SARS outbreak, and the psychological effect it had on me and my family.
Many Canadians will remember the tough battle we fought against SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome. But for those of us who have strong ties to Hong Kong, the memory is particularly vivid, painful and alive.
More than one-third of the nearly 800 deaths from SARS worldwide were in Hong Kong. The city was the epicentre of the epidemic. Friends and relatives fed us their experiences and emotions from afar, even before it started hitting hard in Canada.
A tricky assignment
Back then, I was a producer with a Chinese Canadian TV channel in Toronto. The SARS outbreak dominated the news for months. As the story developed, my supervisor gave me a special assignment: to produce a documentary on how the outbreak manifested in the Chinese Canadian community. It meant that I would be interviewing patients and medical staff, as well as visiting hospitals.
Perhaps most importantly, I did not eat with my family. They would leave food on a tray outside the room for me.
My family was concerned when I told them about my assignment. At the time, I was living with my parents, my brother, his wife and their young daughter in the same house. Not only were my parents worried about me, but my niece was a toddler. She could be vulnerable if I were exposed to the virus.
In the end, we reached a compromise. For a few weeks, as I was putting the documentary together, I disinfected my hands, put on a face mask, wore protec