Fung was allergic to quinine and could do nothing but “cover up and sweat it out” when he was stricken with malaria. At his sickest, he weighed 60 pounds and was suffering from both malaria and dysentery—alternately shaking with chills, burning up with fever, and boiling water to drink as he fought “a double whammy” of dehydration.
That was the worst physical point in my captivity. I had never had a death wish before, but I was debating, “Do I want to fight this or do I want to just let go and forget the whole thing?” Adding up the pros and cons, the only thing that tipped the balance was my curious nature. I wanted to see what the next day would bring; whether it was good, bad, or indifferent, I just wanted to know. So I hung in there. Of course, I could have been worse off than that. A lot of the other fellows got beriberi, pellagra, and dengue fever. We were just lucky we didn’t catch cholera from the natives. When I heard that people were dying wholesale, it horrified me because of what my mother had always warned me about cholera. People would vomit and excrete, as if they were dying at both ends. You could literally see them melt in front of you and fade away. After cholera broke out in one of the British camps, you could smell that camp for miles. And before they cleared out of the camp, they had to burn people who were not quite dead yet. But they had to leave, and they couldn’t take any chances. There was only one other time that I lived in mortal fear of my life: I had run out of water when I was out on a working party and I came across a running brook. Remembering my Boy Scout training, I figured this had to be purified water because it had been running for miles. I took a drink, and from that moment on, I lived in apprehension for days, worrying that I might get cholera. I swore from then on, every drop of water was going to be boiled—never again!
Excerpted from The Adventures of Eddie Fung, edited by Judy Yung (University of Washington Press, 2007).
