Did I say scared? I was terrified.

It’s the fear that I remember most vividly. It wasn’t just that I didn’t understand what we were supposed to do; it was that I didn’t know what was going to happen. Could we leave our rooms? Would we get in trouble if they found us all in here together? What if I got sick? What if the children got sick? Would they be taken away from me? How long until we could go home?

I did leave my room. I couldn’t keep still. I remember chasing the one English-speaking official into his office and cornering him, trying to force him to walk through all the possibilities with me, as though by naming them, I could bend them to my will. He shook his head, refusing to answer, and finally got up and left, waving off the crazy woman who couldn’t just accept that we were both at the mercy of events neither of us could control. How, the look on his face demanded, had I reached adulthood without ever learning to accept that sometimes, you just have to ride the waves?

Quarantine is one of the many waiting rooms of life, and its own special circle of hell for people raised with the illusion that we control our destinies. We prefer to believe that anything can be overcome if we just try hard enough. But there is no trying in quarantine. There is only the sitting, and, if you wish to retain your hold on your sanity, the letting go. What comes next? No one knows. That’s why we have quarantine in the first place.

By Day 4, I had stopped chasing the English-speaking official or frantically calling the embassy. The answer to every question I asked was “it depends,” and the one thing it did not depend on was me.

We began to follow the lead of the people around us, all Chinese nationals. We wore our masks to meals and took walks around the courtyard in the evenings, keeping our distance from the other inmates. (One does not fraternize in quarantine, even if one speaks the language.)

As the days slowly passed, we slid into a routine of cold showers and laying very still on the tile floor in between the twice-daily fever checks, trying to decipher the cartoons on TV.

“Why do you think that plate is floating in the air over the sheep?” someone would ask, and we would contemplate this, yet another of the mysteries of our new life.