We last met in December of 2015 at what by that point was "our hotel." As usual, he'd ridden his bike to our meeting. He brought along a small laptop and spent much of our time together showing me, with evident pride, pictures of recent surgeries he had performed. At the age of 84, he still loved being a doctor.

I can only imagine what it must have felt like for him to witness the outbreak and spread of COVID, the history repeating itself in the early days during the cover-up, the silencing of the whistleblower Dr. Li Wenliang in Wuhan or the chaos that attended the end of China's "zero-COVID" policy that led to his own infection and likely to his death. I found myself wondering what might have happened if someone of his seniority had spoken out earlier in Wuhan. I wondered what he made of how badly the U.S. had handled its own outbreak.

Two decades since SARS and three long years into COVID, with the walls of secrecy and silence Jiang pierced now rebuilt, his funeral on March 15 was small and closed to the public. I have seen no mention of his death in China's official media. During the height of his celebrity in 2003 when people around China called him a hero, Jiang was fond of saying he'd be content to be remembered as a doctor who told the truth. We'll have to try.