Beating the Beijing Quarantine

More catchup work today. The topic? The Beijing quarantine, which is now infamous among travelers to China, but about which I said little on this blog for a handful of different reasons.

Though I posted on the threat of a quarantine and linked to the related State Department warning, it was a cursory treatment and indicated nothing of the real threat I felt, nor of the miserable couple of days I went through trying to decide whether to expose our young boys to the threat of detention and forcible medical treatment by an authoritarian government.

Here's what happened. Eight days before we left to pick up our daughter, we got an email from our agency about the new State Department travel warning. The email started like this:

We wanted to update our families who will soon be traveling to China that the U.S. Department of State has issued the following travel alert for U.S. citizens preparing to travel to China:

Current quarantine measures in China include placing arriving passengers who exhibit fever or flu-like symptoms into seven-day quarantine. The selection process focuses on those sitting in close proximity to another traveler exhibiting fever or flu-like symptoms or on those displaying an elevated temperature if arriving from an area where outbreaks of 2009-H1N1 have occurred.

This means that if you are sitting near someone on the plane who has swine flu or even just a fever, they can detain you at the airport, or COME GET YOU FROM YOUR HOTEL for up to seven days after you land in China. I was already aware of this, as it had happened to another family who brought their kids to China and whose blog I was obsessively following.

But the State Department warning went even further than that, though at first I almost missed it. When you're adopting, you get so many red-tape related emails that it's easy to start skimming them. You're so busy, sometimes even very important details fall through the cracks. Details like this, which I grasped on my second or third read through:

In some instances, children have been separated from their parents because either the parent or the child tested positive for 2009-H1N1 and was placed in quarantine for treatment. This situation presents the possibility of Chinese medical personnel administering medications to minors without first having consulted their parents.

Oh, and just to up the ante a little bit, if your children are separated from you forcibly in China, the conditions may not be very salutary, and the U.S. government will not be able to help you:

The Department of State has received reports about unsuitable quarantine conditions, including the unavailability of suitable drinking water and food, unsanitary conditions, and the inability to communicate with others. The U.S. Embassy will be unable to influence the duration of stay in quarantine for affected travelers.

Oh, my word. I was sick. Literally nauseated. Immobilized. Berating myself for getting my family into what felt like a no-win situation. I didn't want to risk quarantine with the boys, but for their sake and for their new sister's, I didn't want to make this trip of a lifetime without them. There were no good options, but the more I agonized, the more clearly I realized: the only way out of this is through it. The only way to get everything we wanted was to aim high and persevere. We just had to keep going.

Check back tomorrow for Part II, in which we undergo the "Bejing health survey."