Closeness In The Age Of Coronavirus

When my sister was two and I was six, my grandmother came from Jinan, China, to stay with my family in Alabama for a year to help watch us while my parents worked to get their degrees. When she arrived, we taught her a handful of English phrases we thought she might need: How much? Too much. Nice to meet you. She also wanted us to teach her a special one: No hug. It’s unhygienic and obscene to press your body so close to someone else’s, she griped.

Today, my grandma has forgotten nearly all the phrases she learned, but ‘no hug’ still rolls off her tongue. The first time I visited her in China as a teenager, bounding out of the car from the airport during a summer visit: No hug! In my 20s, when I introduced her to my boyfriend, who speaks about as much Chinese as she does English: No hug, she warned him. But when I last saw her, just two weeks ago, as China was under quarantine because of a mysterious coronavirus that turned into an epidemic, what used to feel like a personal quirk took on a graver warning: Absolutely, definitely, don’t even try it, No hug.

My mum, sister and I were in China because we were supposed to be visiting my dad’s father, who was ill and not getting any better. My own dad was waiting to go later. The plan was to visit Taiwan, Seoul, then Jinan, China where my mother’s family lived, before arriving in Qingdao, 660 miles northeast of Wuhan, roughly the distance between NYC and Detroit, where — though I didn’t know it then — the virus originated. Before we left the US, our relatives in China mentioned that there was a bug going around the country, and we should bring extra face masks if we had them. Just in case.

But while we were sightseeing in Taipei, we started getting news from friends and family on WeChat that the flu didn’t seem like the standard strain. Local news was reporting that it was a serious form of coronavirus — a group of viruses that includes the common cold and SARS, all of which can cause respiratory infections in humans — and was quickly spreading across China. By the time we reached Seoul, the Wuhan coronavirus was front-page news on international newspapers. There were a couple of cases in my dad’s hometown of Qingdao, and coronavirus patients were also being treated in the same hospital where my grandfather was being taken…

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