Bumped into a friend from Singapore. He was looking run-down and tired, like he was hung-over. Immediately I saw him, I thought
SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome).
Funny how that has happened. Suddenly Chinese = SARS.
At once, I understood the panic around Chinatown - that the businesses there are going broke because so few people will go for a meal in the area based on some paranoid notion that they will catch SARS by just eating Chinese food... but I guess it's just a brain trick. At the moment all of our images of China and Chinese people relate to SARS.