Hong Kong (CNN) - I moved to Hong Kong on the day of a huge Chinese National Day celebration on October 1 and thought it would be probably the craziest experience I have had all year. Two months later, during Hanukkah, I discovered that I had breast cancer. So while the global coronavirus crisis was the hardest thing that happened to almost everyone on the planet in 2020, it barely made it into my top five.
I knew my life was going to change, but not that way. My plan was to take my life back from over a decade in New York and move it to the other side of the world.
The first two months were spent on logistics - finding an apartment, figuring out how to pay utility bills, learning which bus line was best for getting to the CNN office every day. Too tired to do tourism, I told myself that once installed in my new place, I could embark on a real discovery of the city.
I found the apartment. And soon after I moved in, I found something else - a lump in my right breast. It was likea large, heavy, flat stone had sprouted inside me overnight.
In one week, there were a series of appointments - mammography, ultrasound, biopsy, results, referral. But I knew what it was before anyone told me. I knew it in my deepest being, like knowing that I am in love.
The day of a CNN Hong Kongholiday party, I got the news I was waiting for - stage 2B, requiring six months of chemotherapy, followed by surgery and radiotherapy. I told my parents, 13 hours away, by email.
My sister, who had never set foot in Asia before, flew from the United States to be with me during the first two weeks of my treatment in early January. After her arrival, the jet lag from a Raleigh - San Francisco - Tokyo - Hong Kong route which took a whole day, she entered my apartment and went directly to clean up the vomit.
Before cancer, I was not a person who liked inspirational quotes or go-get-'em-tiger speeches. After cancer, I still wasn't. But something that my illness did forced me to give up some of my insecurities.
There was no longer the possibility of hiding when I felt embarrassed. The person I was bathing with as a toddler now watched me vomit 20 times a day, and he didn't judge me for it. By the time I received my diagnosis, it seemed to me that easily a third of the medical staff in Hong Kong had seen me topless. And soon my friends would see me in my most vulnerable states - with mouth sores, hemorrhoids, nausea and muscle numbness - and they still wanted to go out with me anyway.
As I sent my sister on her return flight, I didn't know I was driving an invisible clock. We all were.
The virus outside, the disease inside
A few weeks after starting my treatment, we started hearing news at the office about a new virus spreading across China. Our office manager sent us all to work in our tiny high-rise apartments. All public Lunar New Year events in the city have been canceled.
At this point, many Hong Kongers - myself included - thought the city authorities were too cautious because of the way SARS had been mismanaged. People weren't wearing masks unless they were sick, there was no mandatory temperature control, and most businesses stayed open.
Several friends have planned trips to Hong Kong to visit and help me. But as the coronavirus looms and Asia begins to shut up, each flight is canceled one by one.
My hair started to fall out after two weeks of chemo, around the Lunar New Year. I decided to bite the bullet and shave it all. All the salons in my neighborhood were closed - I guess because of the holidays, because everyone in town has a week off - except a hair salon. The hairdresser looked confused and surprised to see a woman come in. He didn't speak English and I didn't speak Cantonese, so we communicated via the Google Translate app on my phone.
"It's bad luck to cut your hair during the New Year," he replied.
"I'm already unlucky," I replied. When he no longer shook his head, I raised the characters from "cancer". He immediately nodded and got to work.
Ten minutes later, I was bald. The hairdresser did not charge me.
"I'm sorry," he tapped. It would be one of the hundreds of times I have heard these words in the next six months. However, what I could not yet express was that I did not feel sorry. I was lucky. Thankfully for having health care, for having a support community in Hong Kong - many of whom were the CNN colleagues I had just met - and for having a good long-term prognosis. Of course, it was surreal. But in 2020, everything seemed surreal.
I was wondering how I would explain my new look to everyone in the office, but the coronavirus made it unnecessary. Our office has decided to remain closed indefinitely as the virus spreads.
This special tour of Hong Kong offers travelers the chance to get up close and personal with one of the busiest ports in the world.
A travel editor who doesn't travel
Even when I was vomiting and sleeping 10 or 12 hours a day, my travel itchalways wanted to be scratched. I had planned to take advantage of Hong Kong's central location and excellent airport to explore more places in Asia, and as editor in chief of CNN's Travel section, I also hoped to report from different places. In the United States, it was normal for me to fly at least once a month. So it was no longer an option for me - or anyone.
Another friend who had recently moved from the United States to Hong Kong became my partner in the local adventures we organized whenever I felt good enough to go out. We took ferries to the nearby small islands, Po Toi and Cheung Chau. Although museums and other businesses were closed, we had all of Hong Kong's rich outdoor life to choose from. We hiked, swam in the ocean, climbed hills, explored temples.
Ironically, Covid-19 was the perfect cover to be sick. My oncologist told me to wear masks, use hand sanitizer and protect myself once my immune system was compromised, then overnight it was like the whole city had cancer with me. None of my colleagues knew that I was responding to emails from my oncologist's office instead of my office or that my happy social status was mainly smoke and mirrors. The expensive wig I had chosen for the office only made occasional appearances on Zoom calls. Contactless grocery delivery has become the norm as the coronavirus continues. And sometimes, just sometimes, whole days went by when I forgot I was sick.
Although I could not backpack in Laos or relax on the beach in Bali, I had the gift of getting to know my new home better than I expected. One weekend, a group of us tackled the famous Dragon's Back hike on the southwest section of Hong Kong Island. At the end, we arrived on a beach and although it was in March, it was already warm enough to enter the water. I had brought a swimming cap just for this special occasion, but instead, I took it off and jumped, bald and happy, into the sea.
This year, I learned the word joss, or luck. A colleague to whom I had confided brought me red joss paperprinted with flowers and pineapples - to represent growth and prosperity - as a New Year gift. You are supposed to burn it as an offering to your ancestors, but I did not have the heart to do it and I have it hung on the wall of my apartment instead. I felt like I was living in the eye of a hurricane. In a city of seven and a half million people, only four have died from the virus. My Hong Kong bubble was filled with joss.
Find joy in an unexpected place
People think cancer makes you wise. Just watch all the skinny and pale and bald and holy martyrs on TV, giving life lessons before dying quietly - Dr. Mark Greene on ER, died nobly during a trip to the beach in his arms lover, was my first pop culture experience with cancer.
There is something to look closely at your own mortality that is supposed to make you deep. But the truth is that sometimes people get sick. Nice people get sick and stay nice. Rude people get sick and remain rude.
This was one of the reasons why I was reluctant to share my diagnosis with people, especially once the coronavirus was profiling. Internet commentators have wondered whether the coronavirus was real or "deserving" of obtaining it. Despite the relative security of Hong Kong, with everyone masked, I always felt a bit paranoid every time I left my apartment. It was better to be ill in secret, I thought, than to have to live vulnerable in public.
In April, when I had four months of chemo, Hong Kong recorded a week of zero new cases of coronavirus. The restrictions put in place started to lift slowly. Restaurants could again fill up to full capacity as long as they put dividers between tables, and the maximum crowd size increased from four to eight.
The city has woken up, too. My hair grew back slowly, in patches - legs first, eyebrows, armpits. I watched videos of cancer patients in the United States ringing to celebrate their last chemo session. But all I wanted was to step out into the light as if it was just a normal Wednesday. Sometimes I feel like the whole time I had cancer was a strange dream. The world closed, I locked myself in my apartment and everything stopped. It was too hot to wear wigs, so I just started to be bald in public. Sometimes people stared at me, but most of the time everyone treated me like I was a woman with no hair.
If you had asked me a year ago what I expected me to move to Hong Kong, I would have talked about all the fun trips I was going to make to Asia and the crazy adventures I would be doing in the city. But life, to use the phrase, is what happens when you are busy making other plans.
Falling ill with coronavirus and being able to always get first-rate medical care and continue living my life reminded me that there is joy in everyday life. Being able to shop for me was a gift. Going out for a walk was something to celebrate instead of a mundane task. Cancer has shown me what a strange and charming miracle it is to sleep at night and find out that you woke up in the morning.
The seasons have changed. The sun rose and set. My tumor shrank so much that I had to have a lumpectomy instead of a mastectomy. The children returned to school. And life, as it tends to do, continued to move.
