AT THE HEIGHT of the Sars outbreak last May, millions of Hongkongers were saddened by the death of 35-year-old Joanna Tse Yuen-man, the first public hospital doctor to succumb to the disease. Many grieved. One was moved enough to make a film about her life.
'When I saw the news about her death, I was very shaken and also moved by what she did,' says director Adrian Kwan Shun-fai. 'A lot of medical workers worked very hard and sacrificed a lot during Sars. What made Dr Tse's story different was her personal life. I don't see her as a heroine. I just see her as someone full of love and this was what made me want to find out more about her.'
Kwan's research into the doctor's life has resulted in The Miracle Box, which opens today. This isn't a documentation of Tse's battle in the Sars wards at the Tuen Mun Hospital. Instead, Kwan has chosen to look at the love story between Tse and her husband, Albert Chan Hon-hing, also a doctor, who died of leukaemia barely a year before her.
'Her story could have been told in a film like Outbreak, but I wasn't interested in telling a story about Sars and looking at who should be blamed for what,' Kwan says. 'As a director, I had to decide which stage of her life to concentrate on. Sars was an important stage and also her last stage, but the story behind it that was important.
'A friend told me that Dr Tse's mother once said that no matter what honours we bestow on her daughter, it cannot console her about the fact that her daughter is no longer alive. What consoles her is the belief that her daughter and son-in-law are together in heaven.'
Tse and Chan, both members of the same church, met in the late 1990s. He was diagnosed with leukemia soon after. A bone marrow transplant staved off the disease and the couple married in December 2000. However, the cancer returned and he died in mid-2002.
