"2003 was a special year to me; I think I'll remember it all my life. It's a treasure to me," says Liu Qinghai, a young doctor from Beijing's Xuanwu Hospital. The truth is, 2003 was a special year to everyone in China, particularly those in the capital city. It was the year of SARS.

They are all average citizens: doctors, nurses, students and company clerks. None of them anticipated disaster one year ago, but when it struck they hunkered down and fought. Now, a year after that heartbreaking -- but also in many ways inspiring-experience, they recall those days and reflect on how their lives were changed.

Looking at the face in the mirror

The SARS epidemic was in many ways a test. It tested the mettle of those who faced it, bringing out their best -- or their worst. The courageous confronted it head-on, while the timid buried their heads in the sand. Medical workers, family members and friends risked their lives to care for others, while profiteers opted to make money selling false hope at high prices.

Liu Qinghai, Yang Jing, Wang Xu and Zhang Li are four medical workers from Xuanwu Hospital who endured the test of SARS last year.

Liu Qinghai says that doctors are in many ways like soldiers. Troops in combat don't think about death all day long, because they facing it. Says Liu, "If you get hit by a bullet, you'll die. It doesn't matter what questions you had about it beforehand. So as a doctor, you must do everything you can to save patients' lives, while doing your best to keep yourself alive too."

Yang Jing is also a doctor, calm and determined by nature. When one of his friends heard last year that he was going to do battle with SARS on the front lines, she advised him to change his job. Yang refused. "If I had abandoned my career last year, I would have carried the burden forever after. It's not how other people look at you, but how you look at yourself after such an experience. People have to live with the choices they make."

Wang Xu looks introspective as he listens to the others talk. "I was still a student last year. When I requested to go to the front line, our director refused. He said I was still a student. No one wanted the responsibility if something happened to me -- I mean catch the disease. So when I heard that SARS reappeared last month, I thought I could participate this time."

Wang says he volunteered to join the SARS fighting force because he hoped to emulate people he admired. "During SARS, I gained a true picture of some friends. Actually, the most dangerous work was not on the front line, but at the fever clinic before Xuanwu Hospital became a designated SARS hospital, because protection was not very good. SARS was a new disease, so even doctors didn't know how to protect themselves from it. But doctors were needed urgently in the fever clinic. Two of my friends were told in the morning that they were to go work in the fever clinic, and they had the afternoon to prepare. One of them was from Miyun District and he had just come back from home; the other was from Shunyi District and he had not gone home for a week. Since they had no time to go, they just called home and then entered the fever clinic. I believe they will remain my most admired friends all my life."

Zhang Li is a nurse at Xuanwu Hospital. Before the epidemic she had planned to change careers, because she found the job tiring and thankless. But SARS brought new meaning to her work.

Zhang was working in a SARS inpatient ward last year. One evening around 11 o'clock, an elderly patient pushed the call button. She went to the wards and found that his roommate, whose illness was aggravated by a preexisting condition, had begun to cough up blood. The old man asked to be moved to another room. Since all the patients were assigned rooms according to the severity of their illness, Zhang refused at first. But the old man called her again and again. Finally, he caught her hands in his trembling ones and said, "My wife and I just traveled back from another province. We all caught SARS. She passed away yesterday, but I still want to live. I don't want to die. Please save me, Nurse, please. I'm afraid of death."

Zhang's voice sounds choked as she recalls this. "My goggles got fogged up then, and I called our chief to ask if we could grant his request. I got permission and moved him to a different room." The next day, as she made her rounds of the wards, the old man held her hands and said, "I know you! It's you that changed my room last night."  Since the medical workers were covered from head to toe in layers of heavy protective gear, with only their eyes visible behind goggles, Zhang was amazed that he recognized her.

Says Zhang Li, "I knew that I was needed. That moment, I thought, was worth all the work I had ever done."

By the people, for the people

The medical personnel may have been fighting on the front lines of the SARS war, but average citizens were in the trenches as well. Because of the highly contagious nature of SARS, every individual had a responsibility to avoid the possibility of infecting those around him, as well as to take precautions to avoid becoming infected himself.

Wang Xu tells the story of an elderly woman who went to the outpatient clinic at Xuanwu Hospital, which stayed crowded with worried people in those days. The woman whispered to the receptionist that she had to be examined alone, and that other people should be kept away from her. At first, thinking that she was afraid of being infected and embarrassed, the receptionist refused. But then the woman said quietly that her husband had just died of SARS, so she was afraid of infecting others. She did not want to say it out loud because she was afraid of causing panic among those who were waiting.

Yuan Jiangming, a postgraduate at Tsinghua University, recalls Enos, an American public relations professor she knew. Enos only taught two postgraduates, as he was in China on a government research grant. When news of the SARS epidemic came out, Tsinghua gave all the teachers the choice of whether to continue their classes, but advised those who kept up the lectures to wear gauze masks in class. Enos continued teach his two students until the US Embassy grew somewhat urgent in advising him to return home. As he hugged the students in farewell, Enos said he wasn't scared at all, but that he had no choice but to leave.

Many teachers stayed at their lecterns throughout the crisis that hot May, lecturing through their thick gauze masks.

Despite the unavoidable fears and tensions that everyone felt in those days, many people stayed on the job. From trash collectors and cooks to cashiers and clerks, drivers, grocers, reporters, utilities maintenance workers, bankers -- the list goes on and on. Thousands upon thousands of ordinary people suddenly saw their lives become all too extraordinary, but they recognized that by pulling together everyone would get through the crisis.

Diamonds from coal

It is easy, in a crowded, fast-changing metropolis like Beijing, to get caught up in the hustle and bustle of daily life. SARS brought many people the opportunity to look beyond the superficial and examine what is really important to them.

Li Mei, a postgraduate at Tsinghua University, says, "If a person never thinks over the question of death, he will never know the truth of life. When he seriously considers the possibility of his own death, or that of his relatives and friends, he becomes more mature."

Nurse Zhang Li says that during the war against SARS on the wards of Xuanwu Hospital, she had her own personal battle with death. "Working in a designated SARS hospital, all the medical workers had to dress in many layers of protective clothing and thick surgical masks. One really hot day in May, I was in the ward with the patients. I suddenly felt I was suffocating, deadly suffocation. I could feel the god of death standing at my shoulder. I ran out of the ward, got out of the isolation area. I couldn't endure a single second more inside those gauze masks. I breathed deeply for almost half an hour before I felt better."

As a nurse in the hospital emergency room, patient deaths had become quotidian to Zhang. But her experience that day changed her perspective, and she became eager to work because she had learned the horror of impending death. "One minute sooner will give the patient a chance to live one minute longer," she says.

People are willing to work hard and make many sacrifices in their quest for money or power. But the SARS experience taught many the inestimable value of a freely drawn breath of air. Tsinghua student Yuan Jiangming says that many of her memories of the SARS period are actually very pleasant ones. "Before SARS, students always rushed about the campus to their studies. But during that period, everyone got out of the classroom and out to the lawns to chat or play badminton or poker or fly kites. During that period I saw this uncommon innocence and happiness on the campus."

Zhou Shengping, another Tsinghua postgrad, caught a cold during the SARS period and one day developed a fever. "I knew that I had been very careful, but I still worried. As I lay in my bed that day I thought that maybe I had caught SARS, but the next morning when I woke the fever had gone and I knew I was still alive. You don't know how happy I was." He smiles now at the recollection. "You know, just being alive is such an enormous treasure. But life is frail; no one knows when he is going to die. So we should treasure what we have."

A test of true love

Li Mei's boyfriend was in Xiamen, Fujian Province, and that April she couldn't bear her worry and loneliness for him. She got on a plane and flew to Xiamen, wearing her gauze mask. But when she stepped off the plane, she carefully kept her distance. She told him she intended to stay in isolation for a week, fearing that she might unknowingly be carrying the SARS virus. "Forgive me," she said, "I'll owe you a kiss." But her boyfriend claimed his kiss immediately, saying, "Let's be together, whether it's for play, for quarantine or for death."

Yuan Jiangming recalls a fellow Tsinghua student whose boyfriend developed a fever and was placed in quarantine. The girl didn't hesitate for a moment, but risked her own health to care for him while he was ill.

SARS proved to be a serious test for many young couples. Like other colleges in Beijing, Tsinghua University shut its gates with the students isolated inside to keep them safe. Zhou Shengping's girlfriend was outside, and they had to meet with a fence separating them. "She was sad every time we met. I felt it was cruel, that such a tiny virus could keep us apart no matter how much we missed each other."

Those are touching stories of true love, but in the case of some romantic partners who were not quite so devoted to each other, the separation that SARS started lasted forever. Some students couldn't endure the loneliness of separation, so they took up with someone else in the same lockdown area. One student jokes that there were so many breakups and recombinations of couples on their campus that it was like shuffling a deck of cards.

The sky is falling

Li Zhi runs a small retail business in Beijing. Like a number of others, when SARS struck the capital city he closed his doors for business. He and his family stayed indoors, quietly panicking and grasping at every preventative straw they could find. Gauze masks, the thicker the better; traditional herbal tonics in double doses; hand-washing in antibacterial soap couldn't be done too frequently -- or, for that matter, often enough. Thoroughly washed hands had also to be soaked in disinfectants every day.

Now, with a year separating him from those experiences, Li cannot help but laugh at his own ignorance and fear. He likens their unthinking efforts to prevent illness to firing a gun into the air: it frightens the bystanders but doesn't harm a hair on the enemy's head.

Software engineer Wang Xueliang still can't laugh over his SARS scare. During the worst of the crisis, he and his colleagues continued to work on coding in a locked-down computer center in Changping District, north of the city proper. Everyone turned pale at the mention of SARS, he recalls.

Perhaps because of the pressure of work and the stress of isolation in the center, Wang fell ill. His symptoms were similar to SARS, except that he did not have the telltale high fever. Nevertheless, panic filled his heart and he huddled in bed with fantasies of a tortured death and prayers for recovery to every deity he could think of. He was afraid his colleagues would abandon him but was too fearful to communicate with anyone. Finally, one of his supervisors had him checked: he was diagnosed with a very common minor ailment.

Wang felt as if he had been pulled back from the voracious jaws of death. He still recalls those days with a shudder, and no small amazement at the calm and assurance of his colleagues. He cannot imagine anything more horrifying ever happening to him, and all he wants now is to live a calm and peaceful life.

No commodity more precious

Li Chunyu, a Bank of China executive, is one of the organizers of the bank's hiking and mountain -- climbing activities. In past years, they have had a Mountain -- climbing Month at the Fragrant Hills every May, but since the SARS experience Li and many of his colleagues go hiking every weekend all year round. The Bank of China is supporting their activities, providing yearly access tickets for the Fragrant Hills, and also arranging for trained doctors and an ambulance to be on hand in event of an emergency.

Li says that many of the employees seem happier and their work has improved greatly since the bank began encouraging participation in outdoor activities like hiking. As long as everyone sticks together and sticks it out, says Li, even a disease much worse than SARS cannot beat them.

Ralph Jennings, a reporter for the South China Morning Post who covered the SARS story every day last year, recalls the cleanliness of the capital city during those days. He said he never even caught a cold last spring, probably thanks to the quantities of disinfectant used everywhere and people's concern for one another. He was shocked one day when someone pushed him away, apparently fearing that he had caught the disease. But he will never forget the exhausted doctors and nurses who still managed to make time for interviews with him.

Nurse Zhang Li says she knows now that health is the most precious thing in the world, and that no amount of money or power can surpass it.

Zhang says too that she had never truly understood familial love until her experience with SARS. Her parents and other relatives called her three times a day to cheer her and make sure she was okay. And despite her own fear and exhaustion, she made an extra effort to keep her family from suffering on her behalf.

Liu Qinghai, the doctor at Xuanwu Hospital, recalls feeling as if he could hear his parents' heart beating together with his during that time. On his own for years during his studies and work, he had always been fiercely independent. But when the crisis was over and he returned home, his heart nearly broke to learn that his mother had cried every day when she heard news about Xuanwu Hospital.

Retailer Li Zhi says that earning money no longer gets highest priority in his life. He laughs at the irrational fears his family shared during the SARS crisis, but he also learned a serious lesson about value in those days. His family means more to him than anything, and now he takes the time to go fishing or fly kites with them, storing memories of precious moments that he can enjoy for the rest of his life.

(China.org.cn by Chen Lin and Wang Ruyue, June 17, 2004 )