When the flu hits

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This morning Hong Kong woke up to some unusual news: all the schools in the country had shut down, following the death of three children, apparently from the flu. The reassuring thing is that it's normal for flu to cause fatalities and we are told there is nothing to worry about (in 2003-2004 about 160 under-18 year olds died of flu in the US, which means the numbers here are not disproportional, though personnally I still find that shocking to hear in our day and age the standard flu can still kill). The schools were closed in order to limit the contagion of the flu, and also to take an opportunity to clean them out properly.

It does obviously let the mind wander back to the outbreak of SARS and chicken flu from a few years back. There is no particular panicky feeling, we are surrounded by reassuring facts and messages (such us the US stats I mentioned above, or interviews with World Health Organisation specialists). We got an email today from human ressources advising us of the situation. (Here, initially I started writing about the fact they also mentioned a distribution of hand sanitizing products and surgical masks etc but then thought it sounded a bit scary :-).

Anyway, unusual times..

On a brighter side, I have a funny story. I often run into a lady who works on our floor stocking up the kitchen etc. I try to speak a few words of (very limited) Cantonese to her when I see her. When she sees me inthe afternoon she always asks: "Have you had your lunch yet"? Usually this would be at around 3 pm so I think she is obviously just trying to engage conversation, given that by 3pm it's likely we would all have had lunch already. So everytime I go into very elaborate detail of what I have eaten, what I am going to eat that night, miming the words I do not know in Cantonese, and finally asking her what she had eaten.
But last week, I found out that the question "Have you had your lunch yet?" is just a way to say "Hi, how are you?". Nobody expects and answer (it's a bit like "how do you do" in English I suppose) and that made me imagine the lady painfully and patiently having to listen to my blabbering about what I had for lunch when all she meant was to say "Hi".

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Comments

[nadejda]

real funny
I had a good gigle reading the lunch story :).....

[ElisabethV]

lunch
Incredibly, she is still asking me :)