\n The phone rang at 5:30 a.m. on Saturday, July 18, jarring me out of an uneasy sleep. My husband and I had been dreading this call. It was our 14-year-old daughter, Olivia, on a language study trip in Beijing. She is usually calm and upbeat. Now she was frantic and crying:<\/p>\n
\u201cMommy, I have a temperature and I\u2019m coughing, and they\u2019re taking me to the hospital. I want to come home.\u201d<\/p>\n
I told her to take a deep breath, even as I was shaking. We had feared Olivia could get caught in China\u2019s swine flu dragnet; now those fears had come to pass in what would become a nightmare of bureaucracy and language barriers, against the sleep-depriving backdrop of a 12-hour time difference.<\/p>\n
As a White House correspondent and former science writer for The New York Times, I have a professional understanding of international relations and how epidemics spread. My daughter and I are getting a deeply personal lesson in both. Here \u2014 as a mother-daughter journal, with Olivia\u2019s dictations from a phone in the hospital \u2014 is our story. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sheryl Gay Stolberg, White House correspondent for the New York Times, writes a personal account, together with her daughter, Olivia, of Olivia’s experiences being quarantined for swine flu while studying in Beijing. From her introduction: The phone rang at 5:30 a.m. on Saturday, July 18, jarring me out of an uneasy sleep. My husband and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[116,6,5],"tags":[769,8039],"class_list":["post-42949","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-world","category-sci-tech","category-society","tag-foreigners-in-china","tag-h1n1","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"yoast_head":"\n
Sheryl Gay Stolberg: Swine Flu Diary: Caught in a Beijing Dragnet<\/title>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\n\n\n\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\n