Reporting From New York.com

Thundering over continents of snowy moraines and ice-floes, China Air Flight 982 time traveled through 14 hours of uninterrupted daylight; when it finally landed in the morning, it was already tomorrow night.

Instantly on arrival, Chinese health officials, toting electronic monitoring equipment in trendy Converse messenger bags,  boarded the plane and began individually screening  passengers for flu like signs and symptoms. Since reporting its first laboratory confirmed case of the H1N1 virus on May 11, 2009, China has experienced a surge of diagnoses resulting in more than 1,000 confirmations of the virus on its mainland in just over one month’s time.  In light of its public relations disaster over its handling of the 2003 outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), the Chinese Ministry of Health is cracking down.

Using  a digital temperature scanning probe resembling a gun, rattled passengers submitted, as officials took aim at their foreheads, and fired. One degree over normal, and the entire flight risked quarantine.  

Outside, Beijing was  cloaked in dusk.  The smog swirled like steam, and as you exited the terminal, it felt like you were suddenly standing over an open manhole cover in mid-town Manhattan during August.

Along the Jincheng Gao-su, a 1,600 km strip of highway connecting Chengdu to Beijing, a series of sleek overpasses coiled and slithered through the city above the traffic; the off ramps were illuminated from below and were curved like the underbelly of a snake. 

Gun-metal gray bicycles carrying two and three passengers at a time jerked and stuttered with the flow of traffic as second hand mopeds wheezed between them. Barrelling through Beijing’s canyon of steel and glass, the rows of boxed trees and hedges separating the highway on either side were the only reminders that this was still planet earth. 

 Or was it?

For all you knew, that plane ride was really a rocket-ship to some otherworldly dimension. One look at Beijing’s Bird’s Nest Stadium and you would swear you were on a different planet.

You were…it was Planet China.

Filed under: Uncategorized by reportingfromnewyork