Eric Fong has done many things. He is a national TV host, a
martial arts student and part-time business manager of a local
martial arts school.
And, for the time being, he is stuck in the middle of an
international health crisis.
Fong is the only University of California student out of 44 to
remain in Beijing, China after the Education Abroad Program closed
its offices there due to the rising threat of a new infectious and
potentially deadly disease, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome.
SARS, a new form of pneumonia, has infected over 6,600 people
and killed over 480 as of Tuesday, the majority of them in
Asia.
Fong, a former fifth-year English student at UC Santa Cruz,
explained he had to withdraw from the UC system when he decided to
voluntarily remain in Beijing after EAP closed its offices there
April 18.
“I’m not ready to go just yet,” he said in a
phone interview from his apartment in Beijing.
Fong initially went to study in Beijing in June for a semester,
hoping to gain a better appreciation of Chinese culture and
language. He ended up becoming so enamored with the country that he
decided to extend his stay at Peking University for the rest of the
year.
In Beijing, Fong took a job as an assistant at a local martial
arts school and became the co-host of a nationally aired TV program
called “Sports English,” which seeks to teach Chinese
people English terminology for sports. The program is supposed to
help promote the 2008 Olympic Games which are being hosted by
Beijing.
But what seemed to be a promising study abroad experience took a
sudden turn with the appearance of SARS.
Fong said he was aware of SARS as early as November through news
reports on the Internet.
“We’ve actually known about it for quite a long
time. A lot of us EAP students keep pretty up to date with world
news,” he said.
For a long while, though, students didn’t take SARS too
seriously even as it slowly spread throughout Southern China. EAP
monitored the situation but didn’t give the students any
indication that they should be too concerned.
Ben Kong, a fourth-year economics and international area studies
student at UCLA who studied with Fong in Beijing until Kong
returned April 25, said people were very nonchalant and unconcerned
about the disease.
“If you wore a mask around, people would think you were
weird,” he said.
And then suddenly, things got worse.
“About the end of March or early April is when it started
to get really bad,” Fong recalls. “(EAP) started to
give out travel warnings and students were given the option of
leaving China.”
When a faculty member at Peking University was diagnosed with
SARS, EAP called a meeting for the students and handed them a piece
of paper with two options: return to the United States with the aid
of EAP, or stay in China and withdraw from the UC.
Students were given 24 hours to decide.
Fong said many of the students were caught unprepared by
EAP’s decision and felt hurried by the tight deadline.
“That was a real tough decision for a lot of students
because they weren’t ready to go home. They had a lot of
other things going on,” he said.
Although many EAP students actually wanted to stay in China
despite the risks, the threat of losing their financial aid
persuaded them to come home in the end. Fong, however, was too
attached to his commitments in China to leave.
“To me, it would have been the same as if I had been at my
home campus at UC Santa Cruz and the university told me to pack up
and go to China,” he said.
Ron Fong, Eric’s father, said his son carefully weighed
the risks and benefits of staying in China before he made his
decision.
“I asked him: Is it really worth all this trouble just to
stay another month or two? And his answer was yes,” he
said.
Both Ron and Eric’s mother, Janet Kokosinski, said they
support their son’s decision to stay. Neither was very
concerned about the chances of Eric catching SARS and they felt the
media has blown the crisis out of proportion.
“I’m more worried about Eric driving in the streets
than him dying from SARS,” Ron said. “A lot of this
world is full of Chicken Littles: they panic over the slightest
thing.”
Fong agrees that the SARS crisis in China has been overblown.
Although streets and public transportation are relatively deserted
and people are being careful about quarantines and disinfecting
rooms, they try to live their lives normally, he said.
“It sounds like the American media is really hyping it up
a lot and making it sound a lot more severe than it is,” he
said. “People aren’t dropping left and right here.
It’s just a lot of people are getting really sick and going
to the hospital. And most of them are recovering.”
Kong concurred that the streets of Beijing are calm. Although
there was some paranoia, most of the students and civilians were
relatively calm when he left.
“It’s nothing like what I read in the papers
now,” he said.
However, both Fong and Kong say that EAP made the right decision
in shutting down the China program. Even if they don’t feel
the risk of infection is high, SARS has disrupted daily life enough
to detract from the study abroad experience.
“The whole situation’s really different,” Kong
said. “You can’t really carry on as normal.”
Fong plans to return home around May 20 when his student visa
expires. Then, he hopes to re-enroll at UCSC, finish his degree,
and graduate.
He adds that, even though his trip to China included an
encounter with a deadly disease and his forced removal from the UC
system, he plans to return to Beijing.
“I’m definitely coming back here in 2008 for the
Olympics,” he said.