Has “bird flu” already arrived in one of the world’s most crowded cities?
The other morning an old man spent several minutes mumbling angry Shanghainese phrases at the two parakeets that hang in cages in front of my apartment building. A few of the old women who regularly congregate in front of the gate watched him with mild interest, but nobody seemed surprised by this behavior.
“Qín líu g?an,” said one of the more assertive women when I raised my brow in her direction. “Qín líu g?an.”
Bird flu. Bird flu.
For the last several months, many of this city’s roughly twenty million residents have assumed that a bird flu cover-up has already begun, despite government assurances that transparency would be the rule in the event of a Shanghai outbreak. This is, of course, learned behavior, acquired during the 2003 SARS epidemic when government under-reporting of thousands of infections resulted in large outbreaks that crippled Hong Kong and Beijing. Somehow, Shanghai, China’s largest city and its most powerful economy, managed to survive that period with fewer than twenty infections.
Regardless, several days after the parakeet incident, I was in Beijing, flipping through China Daily over breakfast, when I noticed a small, below-the-fold beige box packed with unusually small text. The badly camouflaged news was ominous: “A woman may have died of bird flu virus in the first such case in Shanghai, the city’s health bureau said yesterday.” Shanghai’s gossip mill is notoriously efficient, and within the hour I received a phone call from an American friend there who informed me of a reliable rumor that a wild bird market on Nanjing Road, Shanghai’s showplace shopping street, had been shut down and sealed by the authorities. A couple hours later I received another phone call, this time from a Shanghainese friend with the same rumor.
Two days later I returned to Shanghai and hailed a taxi to the Fengyang Road Bird, Flower, and Antique Market, where, I was told, wild birds had been seized by the authorities. The Nanjing Road location, as I knew it, was a low-rise mall that hawks antiques to tourists from nearby high-end hotels. What I did not know was that behind the clean storefronts is a dirty maze of stalls filled with ceramics and bonsai trees that sprawl northward, until literally spilling onto Fengyang Road. I wandered through this tangle, fruitlessly looking for remnants of wild birds. After a few minutes I was reminding myself of the perils of rumor.
Then, searching for an exit, I inadvertently stumbled into a tight lane where several intricately carved wooden bird cages hung empty and low over the pavement. At first I thought that I had happened upon a stall selling bird accessories, but ahead was a procession of dozens of cages, some stacked on the ground and some on boxes, and all just as empty as the ones hanging above me. Around the corner there were still more, some the size of tea cups, others the size of the little old ladies who ambled past them. Again, they were all empty. Men in dusty black suits sat around listlessly, smoking and looking a little lost. When I asked around to find out what had happened, nobody was willing to talk unless the topic was the price of bird cages. Whatever had happened, I could tell that the evacuation had been quick: Droppings and seeds still covered cage floors.
Afterward, I wandered up Nanjing Road and stopped in at a Kentucky Fried Chicken. Last year, KFC admitted that its China sales had been hurt by rumors of bird flu, but in recent weeks the company claimed that sales were beginning to recover. The reprieve, however, looks to have been short-lived: On this Sunday afternoon, at one of many Nanjing Road outlets, the counters were nearly empty and the staff wasn’t even bothering to make french fries. Ordinarily, it would have been mobbed with families on their weekend outings.
Among the roughly fifty thousand Americans who call this city and its surrounding environs home, many seem to believe that escape will be an option if the situation becomes dire. The Shanghainese don’t have that luxury, however, and they mostly seem resigned to their fate. Two days ago, as I left my apartment building, I noticed that the two parakeets were gone. Where their cages had hung was a ragged, red Chinese knot that, I was told, would bring good luck. —Adam Minter
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