Hong Kong's darkest hour: Sars and the suicide of an icon

One August morning in 2000, a Hong Kong boy called Yu Man-hon ran away from his mother at Yau Ma Tei MTR station, travelled up to Lo Wu and darted across the border. He was 15 but autistic; his mental age was that of a two-year-old.

The authorities on the Shenzhen side caught him and returned him to Hong Kong, where he was questioned by immigration officials. Man-hon cried, threw food around, urinated, couldn't speak coherently. Assuming that he was a peasant mainlander, the Hong Kong officials sent him back across the border. In those days, you could do that; three years after the handover, the special administrative region was determined to keep itself inviolate, a state within a state.

Man-hon's mother began searching for him in Guangdong. I interviewed her that Christmas in her Lok Fu flat, and the following spring I spent a few days with her at the Railway Station Hotel in Shenzhen, where she'd based herself. Every day, she handed out hundreds of her son's photographs to passers-by and dealt with the endless phone calls (begging, blackmailing, abusive) that resulted. She'd told me she wouldn't stop until she found out what had happened to her son and she kept looking, commuting back and forwards across the border, until early in 2003.

Then she started to hear rumours of a mysterious illness. No one knew what was causing it, no one was allowed, officially, to discuss it. People said two things: the disease was deadly, and vinegar might help to disinfect the poisoned air, although demand was so high, supplies were already, in late January, running out. Man-hon's mother, now frightened of what she might find in Guangdong, came back to Hong Kong and sat in her flat, waiting for what was to come.

She didn't tell me this until months later, when it was over, but I often think of her fearful expectancy while the rest of us continued in ignorance of what was going to happen. And what happened, initially, was – nothing. February 2003 was a month when two superpowers simultaneously played propaganda games with the rest of the world. The United States insisted there was a global threat where none existed; and China did the opposite. On February 6, Colin Powell, then US secretary of state, told the United Nations in New York "the facts, and Iraq's behaviour, show that Saddam Hussein and his regime are concealing their efforts to produce more weapons of mass destruction".