ASK TANYA LIU Hai-juo whether she is excited about being back on the air, and the Phoenix TV reporter's response comes with an equal measure of urgency and impatience.
'Every day I want to go back to work again,' says Liu, who co-hosted Fortune This Week, a financial TV programme for Phoenix, until she was critically injured in a train crash in Britain last year. 'Each day I think perhaps I can go back to Hong Kong. I see my colleagues reporting from Iraq and I feel so excited, and I just want to be with them. I feel I lost out on a great opportunity.'
The 34-year-old didn't make it to Iraq, but she is working on a different frontline - filing a daily live report from Beijing on the battle against Sars.
The fact that Liu is doing a 10-minute segment for the evening news is a miracle in itself. Severely injured in a train accident at Potters Bar north of London on May 10 last year, Liu was declared brain-dead.
Doctors in Britain had given up hope when her family arrived with a doctorfrom the mainland to take her back for treatment. Liu was in a coma for two months before she woke up last July, and couldn't stand or walk without assistance until six months ago.
Liu lives in an apartment above the New World Shopping Centre in Beijing - from where she does her news gathering and reporting. However, three weeks ago home was Beijing's Xuanwu Hospital, where she had been undergoing a comprehensive rehabilitation programme until the hospital started treating atypical pneumonia patients exclusively and non-Sars patients were moved out.