This Is Us
Love Can Look Like So Many Things
The dog that saved me, the dog I couldn’t save
When I was five, a kid from my neighborhood was bitten by a street dog, infected with rabies, and spent a month paralyzed in bed before he drowned from his saliva. His doting parents, who continued to share his meals despite his illness, contracted rabies through infected body fluids. They died a few weeks later, leaving his grandparents penniless, ostracized, and heartbroken.
At least, that’s how the well-rehearsed story goes. Rabies has the highest mortality rate — 99.9% — of any known disease. In the decade before my birth, almost 60,000 people died from rabies in China, nearly all from encounters with rabid dogs. When my parents were growing up, less than 1% of dogs in China were vaccinated. Street dogs, then, were at best farmhands, at worst pests, and to some, food. Only in 2020 did China’s Ministry of Agriculture officially designate dogs as “companion animals” instead of “livestock.”
So you can only imagine my mother’s shock when, a month after emigrating to the U.S., she felt a small, furry creature nuzzling at her ankle while taking out the trash. She let out a scream and scurried back inside. My father gave her a cursory look, “just don’t feed it, it’ll go away.”
