All three represent a kind of sensational, medicalized, twenty-first-century Yellow Peril. It riffs on the 2003 SARS coronavirus, which emerged in the Guandong province of China, and seems to foretell, as many have noted, the COVID-19 crisis. Though Candace takes the West Nile virus as referent, the Fever falls closer to another set of illnesses. And as the pandemic worsens, Congress passes a travel ban that prohibits citizens of Asian countries from entering the United States. The fungus Shenidioides - whose very name prompts us to think ethnically - originates in Shenzhen, a city best known for its rapid growth as China's first Special Economic Zone (SEZ). Still, the infection takes on a racialized, anthropomorphic quality. Shen Fever is not viral but fungal it travels not from mosquito to person, or person to person, but through spores in the air.
It had been "in the news through the summer," Candace recalls at an office-wide meeting on the subject, "like a West Nile thing." 1 Except it's not really like the West Nile virus at all, as Spectra's CEO points out. Shen Fever enters the public consciousness slowly and unassumingly.
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