Section 1 is Warnings.

Our first oral history takes place in GREATER CHONGQINGN THE UNITED FEDERATION OF CHINA. The opening mentioned “victory in China” day, and the typical trope is to have the infection be worst in the places it started, so you can figure it must have started in China and this is about our patient zero.

As I mentioned earlier, race/culture stuff isn’t my specialty. I’m not sure what an accurate depiction of China would be. But this reads almost like a caricature of China in popular thought. It doesn’t reference anything I don’t already know, and the level of detail is…well, about what you’d get from me if you ordered me to write this myself and prevented me from accessing google.

The guy is a Chinese doctor who’s servicing a rural area.

We’re told about the village the call came from. It’s one of the many ancient villages displaced by China’s huge dam (“the dam flooding displaced people from their ancestral villages because China is evil” being the limits of what I know on the subject, the media reports said little else). This particular ancestral village was carefully moved to a new location but only to be turned into a tourist attraction, with the people kicked out to make a new home elsewhere. Not sure if this is true about a particular place or just a logical extrapolation from the ‘China displaces people and is evil’ thing.

The doctor then says the usual thing about how doctors these days are no longer true to China’s revolutionary roots, so the younger ones wouldn’t go out to deal with some poor villagers, but I guess I’m still an old revolutionary at heart. “Our duty is to hold ourselves responsible to the people.” Those words still mean something to me…and I tried to remember that as my Deer bounced and banged over dirt roads the government had promised but never quite gotten around to paving.

(According to the book, a Deer is 2. A prewar automobile manufactured in the People’s Republic. This strikes me as a gratuitous factoid, where the author wrote everything then went through looking up specific terms to replace with authentically Chinese references, but not anything that actually sets the scene. What, exactly, does the fact it’s a Deer mean? Googling it gets me pictures of a large pickup truck, exactly the sort of thing you’d think could handle unpaved roads, and not at all what I was picturing. Considering the size, I’d expect the complaint to be about the width of the roads.)

When he makes it to the village, he finds that the sick are all laid on bare cement in a building and no one will go near them.

I asked the villagers who had been taking care of these people. They said no one, it wasn’t “safe.”

This is the usual cliche, where the more educated outsider comes in to find the locals avoiding it as if they know something he doesn’t. On a visceral level, this works (we are, after all, social creatures who are very prone to following the cues of others) but it needs to be supported in the story.

If they’re expecting the sick to turn into monsters like the first one, what they’re doing here doesn’t quite make sense. They’ve made no effort to restrain any of them beyond a door. And there are seven people – the first one to go wild will rip the rest up, are everyone’s family members fine with this? They seem to know the sick are all doomed and all going to zombify, on the one hand, yet they aren’t taking the precautions one would if that was true either.

Why not have them tied up? The doctor would be just as shocked and confused by why they were more concerned with binding them than treating them, and that would prevent them from attacking each other as well.

And if they aren’t expecting them to turn, then they should be better treated, just kept apart for fear of it spreading further.

They cringed and whispered; some kept their distance and prayed. Their behavior made me angry, not at them, you understand, not as individuals, but what they represented about our country. After centuries of foreign oppression, exploitation, and humiliation, we were finally reclaiming our rightful place as humanity’s middle kingdom. We were the world’s richest and most dynamic superpower, masters of everything from outer space to cyber space. It was the dawn of what the world was finally acknowledging as “The Chinese Century” and yet so many of us still lived like these ignorant peasants, as stagnant and superstitious as the earliest Yangshao savages.

This really reads like a white guy trying to imagine what a Chinese guy would say. (Also, China really has more internal problems than that.)

The doctor examines them. They’re feverish, incoherent, and each has a human bite mark somewhere on them that shows no sign of infection, despite all the bacteria in a human mouth. This happened while they were trying to subdue the first victim, and that’s where the doctor goes next.

(There’s another small hole here – the people seem to still believe that first victim is sick, not undead, yet they show no interest in having the doctor look at him. This would work better if it was clear the locals did figure he was some undead and were just hoping the doctor could save the others.)

You know how, in every zombie movie, there’s the bit where the zombie appears and no one gets that it’s a dead person? That happens here. The doctor observes that the boy has torn up his skin trying to get loose and there’s no blood. He’s “cold”, and has no pulse or heartbeat. At no point does the doctor, who presumably has plenty of experience with corpses, realize that’s what he has here.

I tried to take a blood sample and instead extracted only brown, viscous matter.

I mean, I realize we’re going on the idea that no one would expect zombies, but this is a doctor, surely he can recognize the fact this kid seems to be lacking vital components of life? Every now and then doctors will run into some medical abnormality, like an impossibly high blood alcohol level or something, and they freak out more than the average person would, not less.

Again, there’s a reason for the trope, it’s to let suspense build as we wait to see if he realizes in time. But this is just too much. The kid doesn’t need to be already mangled and showing off his lack of bleeding. A second after he gets the blood sample the boy starts thrashing around more, so it’d have been fine to have it happen while the doctor was trying to get it instead.

The thrashing leads to the kid breaking his arm and tearing it out. The doctor is duly freaked out by the way this happens, but makes no comment on the fact that, yet again, it’s obviously a corpse from the fact there’s no bright red blood spraying from the wound.

If the doctor isn’t supposed to realize this, the kid needs to not be this far gone. Might help to have terrible enough light in the shack that the color of blood isn’t distinguishable.

Still, he does rush out and demand to know how the kid was infected.

Well, remember that dam? He and his father were out diving in the reservoir see if they could find some treasure left behind in a town that was evacuated. Something bit him in the muddy water, he couldn’t see what.

I initially thought that this kid really was patient zero, but he isn’t, and I think that works better. We learn his dad disappeared completely and then later that this isn’t the first outbreak, so it’s not that some mysterious thing transmitted the zombie virus to him, it’s that somehow there were already zombies down there.

There’s this awkwardly written bit where he calls his colleague to find out what I just said. He’s calling on a cell phone, but…

I told him everything: the bites, the fever, the boy, the arm…his face suddenly stiffened. His smile died.

Now, you can put the pieces together and work out he must be using a phone that has perfect video capability, and he’s holding it in front of his face while talking into it instead of, well, how you normally use cell phones. But the book doesn’t write it like that. It’s just cell phone chat, sudden ability to see the other guy’s face. It’s not even a particularly necessary detail, because you can convey the same things with just tone of voice.

It does say the phone has a camera, which he waves around over the not-yet-snapping other infected so the guy can get a look. And only then does it say that he’s talking to the guy’s image on his cell phone, or more accurately, that the image has just been cut.

His buddy says to stay put, get everyone’s name, and lock up the infected, people will be by to deal with it. They show up within an hour to take everyone away. They seem to have things quite under control, in fact – they bind and gag each of the infected, then strip everyone else for signs of bites.

One old woman yells at them that it’s punishment for Fengdu, a necropolis that was flooded by the dam. Except, again, the people there aren’t yet aware that the sick kid was actually an undead kid. It sounds ominous and all, but it just doesn’t make sense.

If they were treating the kid as an angry dead, a lot of this starts to work. But they don’t seem to, or else they don’t mention it. In fact, this reads a lot like your typical white guy in China situation, where he can barely understand the words of anyone or is only getting the occasional line the translator bothers to tell him. He has to struggle to get any information out of these people, and he describes their speech to each other as generic murmuring, no details.

Anyway, he recounts a story of his colleague and him during the war, and how it meant he knew a particular code phrase his friend said meant things had gone to hell and this isn’t the first outbreak. It’s kind of unnecessary, actually, because that was already clear from how the other guy reacts as if he knows what’s wrong. Anyway, he takes the chance to call his daughter and tell her to get out of the country as soon as possible.

That’s the end of the tale. There’s then a note that he was arrested and didn’t escape until after the outbreak had spread beyond China.

Keeping it a secret is another popular trope which I’m dubious about. Sure, the first time and the second time, but once you have multiple outbreaks and it’s getting clear you haven’t contained the disease or even figured out where it’s coming from, warning people is your best bet. If the aim is to avoid hysteria, there’s only so many villages you can empty before you’re causing just as much panic.

In that respect, this would work better without his friend warning him. The warning is done to give him that chance to tell his family to flee, but there’s no reason in the story that was necessary. Government officials believing they had it under control and there was no need to do that works better in context. They clearly knew what they were doing when it came to the disease itself. Overconfidence makes more sense.

The obvious reason to warn the friend is if the Chinese government is enforcing both its quarantine and information blackout by massacring everyone involved. That’s what I was expecting from the setup, because it’s a good way to explain the disease’s spread – people more afraid of the government than the sickness flee infected areas and refuse to go to hospitals, and their family members hide them as they worsen. In that case, the friend should be told to leave immediately after locking the bodies up. If there’s some reason to get him imprisoned, maybe have the government killing people in the infected villages then rounding up the surrounding areas for quarantine and he’s caught in that net.

In sum, this chapter is typical zombie fiction. It’s strung together out of various tropes with minimal consideration for how much sense they make. It does well at conveying atmosphere, but doesn’t hold up to any examination. Still, it’s an interesting scene.