At the site of the world’s largest Buddha I met some nice Danish girls who asked me what was I doing in China when I didn’t have to be there without some compelling reason. We traveled to Outer Mongolia together and slept in the same yurt. The Danes told me they’d hit China by accident and were bugging out for the nearest border, which I recollect was Siberia. This was just after SARS raised its ugly head. At the height of SARS hysteria Chengdu appeared to be a ghost town, the crowded streets empty except for lone individuals in face masks making panicked runs to the nearest pharmacy or grocery store. People in our program would get drunk on Tsingtao beer, and with beer bravado they vowed long and loud to stick it out until the end. A day later you would hear they’d lost their nerve and in the dead of night had caught the first flight home.

The weather in Chengdu is so variable that you can almost die of heatstroke one day and on the next you’re wrapped up in a mummy sleeping bag by the electric heater with your teeth clacking like a pair of joke-store dentures. On cold nights you can see your breath. It forms into ice crystals that look like diamond dust. They hang in the air a moment and then tumble to the floor with tiny silver-bell tinkles. Antarctica.

As for the cockroaches, you get so used to them you learn to stab them to death with your index finger. Early on, the Chengdu roaches were so terrifying to me that at the first look I would bust down walls to effect an escape. What really got to me were those razor-sharp jaggedy things on their legs, and those wispy thin whip antennas. See one coming and I would go on a rampage like a twenty-ton elephant that had just seen a mouse and was convinced the harmless little rodent would climb up its trunk and accomplish a suffocation. Quinny says that for the elephant a field mouse is akin to a small but highly visible SARS molecular virus. He said it’s all a matter of proportion, a matter of scale. And it’s all completely irrational. “Like how many people worldwide have died of SARS, three hundred? That’s just a stupid superstition!” But the next afternoon his crap was all gone and Elizabeth informed me that Quinny had caught the eleven A.M. flight to Vancouver. What a piker!

During my first months in Chengdu the streets were so thick with the confusion and disorder of human traffic, the city’s every corridor so crowded, that I scarcely knew where I was going. You just got caught up in riptides of the frantic hoard. I would get so lost I had to take cabs home at extravagant prices.