Covid Case in Our Office Building, So We All Went Home Early

A pandemic worker pulls a cart down the hallway of a quarantine hotel. Image source.

Complete list is here: Index of Posts About the March 2022 Shanghai Covid Outbreak 

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Here's another update about covid in Shanghai!

Basically our apartment complex is still requiring us to get tested every 2 days. And, as I've said before, it's "mandatory" but nobody is actually enforcing it. If you go to some public place, there will be an employee or security guard checking to make sure everyone has a negative nucleic acid test from the past 72 hours, but if you don't go out anywhere, then nobody is enforcing this "mandatory" testing.

Another fun (?) thing is that the area where I work is requiring covid testing on certain days- for example, they're doing "mandatory" testing on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, and that means that when we enter the office on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday we are required to show a negative result from within 24 hours. So yeah, for me there are various overlapping requirements about who needs to see what result, and it basically worked out to me getting tested every single day this week. 

I noticed this week that the testers who came to our complex weren't wearing the whole baymax outfit (ie, the white PPE that covers your entire body). They were wearing some less-intense PPE that still included N95 mask, face shield, hairnet, gloves, thin blue robe, and plastic covering their legs and feet. (So, their neck is exposed to the air, and the part that covers their clothes is much thinner and more breathable than the baymax outfit.) This must be because it's so hot.

Some pictures of what I'm talking about:

The less intense blue PPE outfit. Image source.

The white "baymax" 大白 PPE outfit. Image source.

You can see how the baymax one would be unbearable in 90-degree weather. 

Also, this week our apartment management notified us all that it's VERY IMPORTANT that we scan the location code for our apartment complex every time we enter. Previously I thought it wasn't really that big a deal, I scanned it a few weeks ago, whatever. But apparently they are asking us to take it more seriously now and scan it every single time.

(As I've explained before, scanning the "location code" 场所码 will register your information so there is a record of who was where, to be used for contact tracing. And on June 3 I said "I give it 1 month before everyone decides it's not worth the trouble and quits doing it.")

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Colleagues went to quarantine hotel

A few weeks ago, a waiter at a restaurant near my job tested positive for covid. That meant that all customers at the restaurant for the previous 7 days were designated as "close contacts" 密接 and had to stay in quarantine hotels for 10 days.

6 of my colleagues had been to that restaurant, and thus had to stay at quarantine hotels. I talked to one of them, Ray, about it. He said he had been to the restaurant on Wednesday, and the waiter tested positive on Saturday, so it doesn't make sense- how could something that would happen 3 days in the future affect him? 

The logic is that the waiter might have already been positive during the previous 7 days, even if they hadn't tested positive yet. I am pretty sure waiters and people in those kinds of jobs who are constantly interacting with customers are getting tested every single day, though. And people like Ray, who are going out to public places, have to show a negative nucleic acid test result from within 72 hours. My point is, Ray must have already tested negative multiple times, just as part of the testing we are all required to do in our daily lives, before he even got the call informing him that he was a close contact.

Ray got the call the next Wednesday, actually. A full week after he had been to that restaurant. He tells me, it doesn't make sense, it was a whole week later, that they called him and then took him to the quarantine hotel.

Ray lives in Pudong (this is one of the districts in Shanghai) so he was assigned to a quarantine hotel in Pudong. Other colleagues live in other districts, so they were at quarantine hotels in those districts.

The quarantine hotels are for close contacts of covid-positive patients, and everyone has an individual room, so they can't interact with anyone or infect anyone. The hotel stay is free, and the food is free (3 meals a day) but Ray told me the food was not very good. And they're not allowed to get other food delivered from local restaurants. 

(Quarantine hotels are a different thing from the hospitals where they send covid patients. On my blog I have used the term "quarantine centers" to refer to the makeshift hospitals that were hastily thrown together to house covid patients. The quarantine hotels I'm talking about now are a totally different thing.)

Ray had to stay in the quarantine hotel for 10 days. But wait a minute, didn't they just change the policy recently, so it would be 7 days in the hotel + 3 days of home quarantine? Yes, they announced this change (previously for international arrivals it was 14 days in the hotel + 7 at home, and possibly the same policy for close contacts of local covid cases?) but I'm hearing anecdotes from lots of people who say that actually, what's happening in reality is 10 days in the hotel, NOT 7 days in the hotel + 3 days at home. I heard this from people who entered China from abroad, as well as my colleagues who had to stay in the quarantine hotel due to being "close contacts." In Ray's case, he said his apartment complex told him that if he came back after 7 days, to do 3 days of home quarantine, his family would also be stuck in home quarantine for those 3 days, so it's better for him to stay in the hotel instead. Seems like to some extent, the interpretation of "7+3" is decided by your apartment complex management.

Ray said the internet connection in the hotel wasn't very good- probably because lots of people are using it at the same time. He said when he had meetings on Microsoft Teams, he tried to share his screen and it just made the connection slower and slower until he gave up. And he didn't have a table in his room (just a very narrow stand in front of the TV) so he just had to sit on the bed and work.

But hey, good news, at least no one at my job has covid!

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Covid case in our office building

On Thursday, I was at work, and our IT guy posted in the group chat to say that there was a possible covid case on the 16th floor of the office building. (A test tube with a bunch of swabs in it had tested positive, and one of the swabs was from someone on the 16th floor. Typically for mass testing they do 10 people's swabs per tube, so there was a 1 in 10 chance that this person on the 16th floor was covid-positive. At least, that's what we were told, though the HR manager suspected that they had been confirmed positive and we just hadn't been told the whole situation.)

So, in the message from the IT guy, it said the 16th floor is under lockdown for 48 hours, so don't go to the 16th floor! (Our office is on a higher floor.)

A group of us were sitting at our computers working, and the HR manager came and told us we should take our computers home, and work from home the next day. One of my colleagues was asking her if our office's AC system is connected to the rest of the building- that would be scary! She said no, our AC is a separate system.

People were talking about "is it safe to take the elevator? maybe we should take the stairs" and "oh so scary!"

There was a birthday party planned that afternoon for all the July birthdays in our office, and the HR manager was like "okay let's eat the cake and then we all go home!" Very concerned that if we stayed in the office too long, we might get locked down and be stuck there for days.

Oh, and also: Nobody put on a mask. We're all working there, with no masks, talking about "oh no, so scary, a covid case in our building" and nobody put on a mask in response to it! This seems very illogical! I also did not put on a mask, so I guess I am also illogical.

Instead, we all gathered in one room to eat birthday cake and fruit. (Chinese people love fruit.) Blowing out candles all over the cake and everything.

The more I think about that, the more I'm like, wow Chinese people are not prepared for how to realistically respond to covid risk if the zero-covid policy ends. Right now, the government makes a ton of rules for us, and we just kind of begrudgingly follow them. (And by "begrudgingly follow them," I mean, apparently, we make a run for it so we don't get stuck in quarantine.) The main thing we were concerned about on Thursday was getting locked in our office building for several days- rather than being concerned about the possibility of actually getting covid. If some security guard had come in and told us all to put masks on, we would have done it- but it wasn't something people thought of on their own.

So we're standing around, eating fruit and cake, and our HR manager keeps telling us "hurry up and eat and go home!" And the person who had bought the cake and all the fruit was like "okay each person take 1 container of fruit."

And the HR manager was telling us "if you all get locked in here, it's going to be my problem, go go go!"

So we all packed up our computers and everything, in a bit of a panic, put our masks on, and someone said "the apartment complex next to us has been locked down!" Oh no, hurry hurry hurry, let's get out of here!

Some of us weren't sure if it was okay to take the elevator or not, so we took the stairs. I was in the group that took the stairs, all the way down to the first floor. Some people took the freight elevator, and later I found out a whole group of my colleagues had taken the regular elevator anyway, carrying their extra trays of fruit.

We got down to the first floor and everything seemed normal. There seemed to be a normal amount of people going in/ going out/ standing around. No pandemic workers in hazmat suits or anything. Okay...?

Anyway, I was worried about "is this going to be designated as a medium-risk area? is my health code going to turn yellow?" I was concerned about not being allowed to enter the subway station if my health code suddenly turned yellow, so I took a taxi to go home.

But no, my health code didn't turn yellow- it's still green. And we realized that maybe we were a bit too panicked and the situation wasn't actually that urgent. On Friday, we were all working from home, but apparently everything was normal at the office. Only the 16th floor is locked down; everywhere else was normal.

The HR manager told us we should all get tested every day for the next few days, just to be sure.

I still don't know for sure if the 16th-floor person was confirmed to be covid-positive or not. I don't even know if it's true that "the apartment complex next to us has been locked down"- people were saying that as we were all rushing out in a panic, but I haven't been able to fact-check it.

Anyway, seems like we'll be back in the office like normal on Monday.

Edit: Oh also, remember in my July 9 post, there was apparently a positive covid case in our office building, so then the whole building was locked down for 7 days and we all worked from home? Weirdly, this time is different- only the 16th floor is being locked down, and everything else is open like normal. Either the rules have changed, or there are some details they haven't told us that make this time different from that time (for example, how much time did the covid-positive person spend in the building?). 

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Links:

Sixth Tone

Ice Manufacturers Revel in Shanghai’s Summer Heat, but for How Much Longer? (July 25)

‘Hot, Hot, Hot’: China Hit with Blistering Heat Wave (July 15)

"A viral photo taken on July 10 shows a volunteer in Shanghai holding a block of ice to cool himself. From Weibo" (image from the article linked above)

SHINE

San Francisco-Shanghai flight suspended over COVID-19 (July 28) "United Airlines' Flight UA857 from San Francisco to Shanghai, which has been suspended multiple times, will be put on hold from August 8 after five passengers on a flight tested positive for COVID-19 on July 18, the Civil Aviation Administration of China said on Thursday."

Baoshan, the new focus of Shanghai's COVID-19 resurgence (July 26) Right now Baoshan District is the area of Shanghai with the most covid cases. Baoshan is pretty far from the city center; the article calls it a "suburban district."

New pop-up window on Shanghai health code to contain COVID-19 spread (July 25) This affects people entering Shanghai from "medium risk" or "high risk" places.

China's COVID-19 vaccines safe, effective (July 24) It's good to see articles like this correcting misinformation and encouraging everyone to get vaccinated.

PCR test history reduced in Suishenban app (July 21) "From Thursday, users can now only look up their test results dating back to July 6, instead of as previously the past three months." This is good- the article says that this will help prevent discrimination against people who had covid in the past. There are a lot of anecdotes of companies who refuse to hire someone because they had covid, months ago- and even though it's illegal, it still happens. But with that history no longer visible on the Suishenban app (health code app), that will help.

Mandatory PCR tests for Shanghai residents extended until August 31 (July 20) This is about the mandatory weekly testing. In reality, though, we're getting tested way more often than that, basically every 2 days. "Citizens are now subject to at least one nucleic acid test every week. Otherwise their health code will turn yellow, preventing them from taking public transport or entering any public areas." (This isn't a change, it's just saying that the current policy will continue.)

That's Mags

Travel Code History Reduced from 14 to 7 Days (July 8) I guess this is old news because it's from July 8, but I didn't hear about it until last week. The "travel code" 行程码 app is now showing the cities you've visited in the past 7 days, instead of 14 days. This is very cool! It will make it easier to travel in China. (In my July 2 post I wrote about another big change in the travel code app- no more star!)

CNN

China's Wuhan shuts down district of 1 million people over 4 asymptomatic Covid cases (July 27) I bet the people of Wuhan are very tired of this.

I Still Wonder Why God Said the Wrong Name

A picture of a 周瑜, an ancient Chinese general, who has for some reason been labelled with the English name "Joey" in this image. Image source. (If you can read Chinese, this page is HILARIOUS.)

So here's a little story about how American evangelical Christians believe in "listening to God" and God giving them indications about what to do:

About 10 years ago, I was traveling in China by myself. In one city I traveled to, I met up with 3 friends: one American (Daniel) and two Chinese (Lily and Xie).

Daniel was a Christian, a white dude with the same evangelical background as me, teaching English at a university in China, probably for missionary sorts of reasons. Lily was a Christian- and, actually, I say her name was Lily because that's what she originally told me when I first met her a year or two before, but when I saw her on this trip, she told me that she didn't want to use her English name anymore. She wanted to be called by her Chinese name, Tingting. And Xie was not a Christian, but he knew the rest of us were.

Daniel and Tingting spent a lot of time together, and Daniel was having a hard time remembering that he should call her Tingting instead of Lily. 

Anyway, the three of us had a good time together, and in the evening it was time for me to go back to another friend's apartment, where I was staying. But they were all very concerned about me going back alone, at night, without a phone. What if I got lost and needed help, or something?

I didn't have a phone with me on this trip. Or rather, I had an American cell phone, but it couldn't make calls in China. This was back when cell phones were common enough that my friends viewed a phone as important for my safety, but not like nowadays where it's unheard-of that someone our age doesn't have a phone.

Anyway, I reassured them all that I would be fine, without a phone. They were still worried, and tried to come up with solutions. Perhaps one of them would come with me and make sure I got there safely. Perhaps they could find an extra phone that I could borrow.

Eventually we all stood in a circle and prayed about it. (Xie was included in our circle even though he wasn't a Christian.)

So we prayed "God tell us what to do" and all that, and then when our prayer was done, Daniel announced, "I just heard, 'Lily, go.'" Seemingly, it meant that God wanted Lily to go with me and make sure I got home safely. (Except that she wants to be called Tingting- we'll get to that in a minute.)

We didn't end up doing that though- and honestly, I wonder if it was because there was a bit of a language barrier there. Tingting and Xie could speak English just fine, but just think about how much American evangelical jargon you have to understand to make sense of the sentence "I just heard Lily go." You need to have these background assumptions:

• When we pray and ask God what to do, God may give us an answer
• Sometimes that answer is in the form of a random thought that pops into your head, and you don't know where it came from
• So "Lily go" popped into Daniel's head, and it could be a message from God
• Hmm it's just a vague 2-word message, how will we interpret it? I guess Lily should go with Perfect Number and make sure she gets home?

But we didn't do that- what actually ended up happening was that Xie's roommate had an old cell phone, and I borrowed it, and had no problems getting home. The end~

Okay, so, this is a thing that happened to me, about 10 years ago, and this one little part has ALWAYS bothered me: Why did God call her Lily instead of Tingting?

Like, I don't even believe in "God speaks to you by making odd thoughts pop into your head" any more, and it STILL bothers me.

Let's try to break this down and analyze it: 

Suppose God wants to tell us the solution to our problem is that Tingting should come with me to make sure I got home safe. Okay, so let's imagine this as an abstract concept, that we haven't put into words yet. Just the concept of her and me going back to my other friend's apartment together- don't describe it in any words yet, just kind of picture it in your mind. Right? If this is the answer from God, then initially it wouldn't be in any human language; it would just be this idea in God's mind. God's native language isn't English or Mandarin Chinese or any human language.

And indeed, I have heard examples of American evangelical Christians getting messages from God (ie, random thoughts that just popped into their head) that weren't words; they were images. So, yes, that's also a thing that they believe, that I used to believe.

But, to communicate it to Daniel, God put it in English. But wait a minute, is it... like, how God would say it in English, or how Daniel would say it in English? Because, surely God would call Tingting by the name she wanted to be called by. Right? Oh my, unless this whole thing actually means that God believes Tingting's desire to be called Tingting is wrong, and God refuses, and calls her Lily instead- wow, that's mean. Like at least Daniel was trying to call her Tingting, but just couldn't break the habit of calling her Lily. What's God's excuse?

Is it like, God has this *idea*, and then as it passes into Daniel's brain, it gets filtered into the way Daniel speaks English, including his bad habit of calling Tingting by the wrong name, and then that's what Daniel hears as the random thought that pops into his head? Is that how it works?

But... I'm not sure that makes sense either. If the filter from "God's idea" to "random thought in Daniel's head" is in Daniel's brain, they why doesn't Daniel have access to it? I've experienced this myself- praying for God to give me an answer, and then having a thought in my head- but it's words, and they leave room for interpretation. There's no sense that "here's a larger concept, and here are words to describe it"- no, all you get is the words, and they don't always make sense, and you have to try to figure out what God meant. What Daniel heard was "Lily go" and it was up to him to figure out what that meant. If God had given him a whole *idea* and then his brain filtered it into the words that Daniel typically used, then wouldn't Daniel also have an awareness of the *idea* and wouldn't need to wonder how to interpret the words?

Or is God limited to only using words that Daniel himself would use in his own speech and thoughts? God wants to have the thought "Tingting go" pop into Daniel's head, but the neural pathways in Daniel's brain resist the idea of referring to Tingting as Tingting. Daniel just doesn't think of her as Tingting, and so it's extremely difficult, or maybe even impossible, for God to make Daniel hear the words "Tingting go" in his brain.

HOW DOES IT WORK???????

This still bothers me! I don't even believe in it any more and it still bothers me! Why did God call her the wrong name???

If you're curious, the main reason I don't believe in this "random thoughts in your head could totally be God trying to tell you something" is because it's terrible for people who are prone to anxiety, like me. When you have anxiety, it means you often have random thoughts pop into your head, about possible dangers lurking. And then, if you believe there is a possibility that random thoughts could be messages from God, you have to focus on these anxiety-inducing thoughts and carefully analyze them, to decide if a thought is really from God and you need to take it SUPER SERIOUSLY because you could LITERALLY DIE if you don't heed the warning, or if it's just your mind being weird and you need to ignore it and calm down.

Seriously, things are A LOT better for me now, in terms of having anxiety, now that I no longer believe that I'm required to pay attention to every doomsday scenario that crosses my mind, because it will be MY FAULT if I ignore it and it turns out it was God trying to tell me something and then some horrible tragedy happens. 

Like, oh my god, I am SO GLAD I stopped believing that WAYYY before my kid was born. It would be just AWFUL, being a parent and believing that. As a mom, I'm always aware of possible dangers to my kid, and aware of the fact that sometimes children die, and that's terrible. I think about it a lot- my son has no idea; he just lives his happy life, while I check the childproof locks on the windows and drain the water from the bathtub immediately when he's done with it.

Can you imagine, how awful it would be, believing that all these thoughts that run through the back of my mind, as a parent, about potential dangers to my child, were actual real things that were really about to happen and my son could actually die and God was trying to tell me and I need to go get him RIGHT NOW and make sure he's safe?

Anyway...

Yeah so anyway, that anxiety stuff is why I don't believe God speaks to people in that way. (Also, what if you had a random thought that was, oh I don't know, just to make up a completely hypothetical example, "take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love, and sacrifice him as a burnt offering?" We wouldn't want anyone to think something like that was really from God, obviously.)

So yeah, in reality, I think Daniel just had a random thought, and it wasn't from God. But I have always wondered, if it was from God, well, how does that work? Why would it use the wrong name for Tingting? Do messages from God also contain the hearer's own flawed patterns of thinking? Doesn't this call the whole "a random thought is a message from God" thing into question?

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Related:

I'm SO HAPPY I Won't Be Praying During Childbirth 

"The Author of Leviticus Would Have Been Cool With It"

That Time God Told Me the Name of the Guy I Would Marry

Blogaround

1. Lightyear Changes EVERYTHING about the Pixar Theory! (June 24) "But it also means that the entire plot of the movie 'Lightyear' that we see is actually a live-action movie inside of the Pixar universe. Like, within the movie, Buzz Lightyear is being played by a real actor, like in the same way that Chris Evans out here in the real world plays the character of Steve Rogers."

2. New AI-generated horsies (July 22) "How to combine a four-legged horse with a two-legged rooster? Maybe as a three-legged animal."

3. Dutch collector ordered to return Buddha statue (July 20) "For local villagers, the statue is a significant cultural relic that had been at the Puzhao Temple in Sanming, Fujian province, where they could honor and worship it before it was stolen in December 1995, according to the high court."

4. Chinese Paddlefish That Outlived Dinosaurs Now Extinct, IUCN Says (July 22) "'The world’s failure to safeguard sturgeon species is an indictment of governments across the globe, who are failing to sustainably manage their rivers and live up to their commitments to conserve these iconic fish and halt the global loss of nature,' said Arne Ludwig, chair of the IUCN Sturgeon Specialist Group."

5. Next time I fall (July 23) "We can’t get up to present our 'personal testimony' about walking down the gangplank onto Ellis Island, but we can tell about our 'struggle' with sexual purity. And so, in a sense, the personal testimony of every child-convert, once they pass into adolescence and youth group, becomes something akin to that Seinfeld episode about being 'master of your domain.' We don’t have the conversion narrative expected by first-generation converts, and so we start to sound like we’re sharing at a 12-step MA meeting."

6. Woman detained for commemorating tablets to Japanese war criminals (July 25) [content note: genocide]

7. Chinese astronauts enter Tiangong space station's new lab module after dock (July 26) Cool!

Buzz Lightyear and the Years We Lost to Covid

Buzz Lightyear pilots a spaceship, with Sox the cat, Izzy, and 2 other space rangers. Image source.

[content note: spoilers for the movie "Lightyear"]

I recently watched the new Pixar movie "Lightyear" and I loved it. This is, in the Toy Story universe, the movie the fictional character Buzz Lightyear came from, and therefore the inspiration for the toy Buzz Lightyear in the Toy Story movies. 

In the movie, Buzz's spaceship is stuck on a mysterious planet, and Buzz blames himself because he was overconfident and refused to accept help from others, and therefore crashed the ship. Buzz is determined to find the correct fuel mixture and do a hyperspeed test run, so that they can then use that fuel to power their spaceship and get everyone off the planet. Every time Buzz does a test run, about 4 minutes pass for Buzz, but on the planet, 4 years pass because of time dilation.

Meanwhile, the hundreds of people on the spaceship settle down on the planet. They build a society and make a life for themselves there. Buzz's best friend, a space ranger named Alisha, gets married, has a son, eventually has a granddaughter, grows old, and eventually dies there, with Buzz popping in to see her every 4 years between his test runs. (Alisha marries a woman- very cool to see this LGBTQ representation!)

Eventually, Buzz meets Alisha's granddaughter, Izzy, and they work together to fight enemy robots and such. There is one scene where Buzz tells Izzy that he regrets that he was never able to finish his mission and get everyone off the planet, and that he failed Alisha and she lost everything because of him. Izzy is shocked that Buzz would say that about Alisha; Izzy says Alisha had a good life. She had family and friends. We shouldn't talk about Alisha like she was a failure, just because she never got off the planet again.

Later Buzz comes to accept this too. There's a scene at the end when Buzz is fighting the villain, Zurg (who is actually a time-traveling version of himself, from the future), and Buzz destroys the hyperspeed fuel, to stop old-Buzz-from-the-future from getting it. Without the fuel, Buzz loses his hope of completing the mission and getting everyone off the planet. But old-Buzz-from-the-future wanted to use the fuel to go back in time and fix his mistake, so that they were never stuck on the planet in the first place, and Buzz no longer wants that. He realizes that the people stuck on the planet made the best of it and had lives that were meaningful, and it would be wrong to undo all that just to get rid of his own guilt over his mistake.

Anyway, that's the summary, and it makes me think about how the covid-19 pandemic has screwed up my life plans. Well, all over the world, the pandemic has screwed up people's life plans. It's likely that you, reader, also had plans that were totally ruined by the pandemic.

Anyone remember in 2019, when I wrote a blog series called "6 Years Later" about the things I've learned about privilege and culture, as a white American living in China as an immigrant, and how I'm basically ready to be done living in China now? And now look, it's 2022 and I am still in China. I am stuck in China. I've been living in China for 9 years now, and during the pandemic I haven't even left China at all, not even for vacations or anything. (In the Before Times, I went back to the US twice a year.)

(Let me clarify, when I say I'm "stuck in China"- it is definitely possible to leave. I know people who have left China recently. It's just a much more daunting thing when the world has changed so much because of covid, and because it's so difficult to get back into China.)

But during the pandemic, China has been a better place to be than the US. At least during the first 2 years of the pandemic- when we got to March 2022 and the Shanghai lockdown started, Shanghai was very much NOT a good place to be. But before that, from 2020 to early 2022, we were fine. Nobody had covid. We had to wear masks everywhere, and there were some tedious rules about testing or quarantine if you want to travel, but we didn't have to worry that we would actually *get* covid. It was much better than in the US, where something like 1 million people have died of covid.

I wrote in 2019 that I chose to come to China to get out of my comfort zone or whatever, and I gave up a lot of privilege- the privilege of being in the majority culture, being a citizen, a native speaker- but "my life in the US is still there, still available, I can go back any time." Because of the pandemic, that was no longer true in 2020. I had never imagined it wouldn't be true. But yes, in 2020 and 2021, China was a better place to be than the US.

And I've just kind of been, like... waiting it out. I have life goals that I can't make progress on if I'm in China, but I'm not sure if it's too risky to be in the US because of covid, especially because I have a little son.

And now it's been 2 and a half years of this, and this isn't how I wanted my life to go. The planned timeline for my life is now impossible because of this delay.

But just like Alisha and the other residents of the new planet, we just have to accept that this is the world we live in, and do the best we can. We used to live on a planet without covid, and now that world is gone, and that's just... the way it is. Buzz refused to live on the new planet; the only thing he could think about was getting back home- back to normal. And so he missed out.

It's not the life you wanted to have, which is tragic, but after you accept that, you can still have a good life. You just do your best, care about people, love your family, make the world better.

And these 2 and a half years that we've been "stuck in China", I don't think of it as wasted time. We've had a good life here. Our baby has grown into a little boy, and he's doing great. And I feel lucky that our situation during the pandemic hasn't been as bad as a lot of other people's.

We really are working on moving to the US. It's not like in the "Lightyear" movie, where they were stuck on the planet for about 100 years, omg, no I am not going to be stuck in China for that long. It's going to happen soon, really. But these 2 and a half years mean my life plans are already messed up- but we just have to make the best life we can in this world.

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Related:

Homesick 

Culture, Objectivity, God, and the Real Reason I Moved to China

Blogaround

1. 周杰倫 Jay Chou【最偉大的作品 Greatest Works of Art】Official MV (posted July 6) New music video from Jay Chou (in Mandarin Chinese).

2. When concordance-ism eats itself (posted July 14) "And that was not allowed. Pearson came to reject a core evangelical doctrine based on his best attempt to apply our core evangelical methodology and that got him kicked out of his Pentecostal associations and banished into the outer darkness with all the other people who don’t believe in banishments into the outer darkness."

3. Immoderate (posted July 14) Here's a fun little post about how badly-designed the comment moderation filter on Patheos is. "It’s always, on some level, funny when you have to pause and think before realizing that the prudes always turn out to be much dirtier-minded than the rest of us."

4. Webb telescope shows off Jupiter in new image (posted July 18) Everything about this telescope is amazing.

5. Speaking of suicide: How institutions harm people they were made to help [content note: abuse in the medical system, discussion of suicide]

6. What does fasting tell us about the state of scientific literacy? (posted July 18) "But how was I to talk responsibly about this benefit, this personal success story, with so little academic research to back it up?"

7. The Hypocrisy of White Asexuality (posted May 27) "When you’re in a community as white-and-North-American as the asexual one, I think it’s only fair to point out that it’s sauce for the goose to expect that we devote at least a little of our hyperanalytic navel-gazing powers to reckoning with racial identity if we’re going to expect people to sit through our overly-complicated vocabulary lesson."

8. THE Domino Sudoku (posted July 11) This is a cool little puzzle. (35-minute sudoku solve video.)

2022 Reader Survey Wrap-Up

Hello readers! Thanks so much to those of you who took my 2022 Reader Survey. I really loved reading all your responses, especially about what kinds of blog posts you have enjoyed on this blog.

I will try to take your feedback into account when choosing topics for future posts. In particular, several responses said they were interested in reading about my faith now (as an ex-evangelical Christian). I also want to write about that. :)

Other topics that people liked: asexuality, purity culture, responses to evangelical ideology, life in China, covid. Yes, I will definitely keep writing about all these. Honestly I'm tired of writing about covid (blah aren't we all), but I realized that people outside of China don't have much awareness of what China's pandemic control efforts look like, in terms of the practical effects on people's lives. So, ya know, the Lord laid it on my heart to blog about it or whatever. (And the Shanghai lockdown was a major historical event so obviously I had to blog about that. But SO GLAD IT'S OVER!) 

One of the questions on the survey asked for your favorite Toy Story movie, because my son has been watching all 4 of them A LOT (especially during lockdown, when his daycare was closed and my husband and I were working from home full-time). So, I would like to recommend 2 other short Toy Story movies to you: "Toy Story That Time Forgot" and "Toy Story of Terror." These are each about 20 minutes long, produced by Pixar, set sometime between "Toy Story 3" and "Toy Story 4." Here are the trailers:

These are both very good. I found the full movies here on Youtube: Toy Story That Time Forgot and Toy Story of Terror. (Not sure if the full movies will be removed from Youtube though, that's why I also linked the trailers here.)

Anyway, thanks for reading, everyone!

Still Doing Nucleic Acid Testing Every 2 Days, Also It's Really Hot Here

Medical workers wear head-to-toe PPE at a nucleic acid testing station. There are giant blocks of ice on the ground around them. Image source.

Complete list is here: Index of Posts About the March 2022 Shanghai Covid Outbreak 

---

Heyyy everyone, here's another update about covid in Shanghai. Basically, I feel like things are pretty much the same as what I said last week. We're hearing about a few dozen covid cases found each day, we see people posting on WeChat about getting locked down, we're doing mandatory testing every 2 days, all of that.

---

Working from home

As I said last week, the office building where I work got locked down. We still don't know the exact reason- but at least we know that there wasn't a covid-positive person in our company's office. Must have been elsewhere in the building. So our office was not sterilized, which is good, because we don't want chemicals sprayed all over our stuff.

So I've been working from home all week. But Monday we are allowed to go back to the office, so I will.

---

Mandatory testing

So, to recap, here is how the policies on mandatory testing have changed:

(I might not have the dates exactly right, btw)

During lockdown (ended June 1): We were required to do nucleic acid testing every 2 days, and rapid antigen self-tests on the other days.

Policy that was announced when lockdown ended: If you're entering a public place, then you need to have a negative nucleic acid test from within the past 72 hours. (If you're not entering a public place, then no requirements for testing.)

June 11: Pudong New District (where I live) had mandatory nucleic acid testing. (ie, testers came to our apartment complex to test us.) It was announced that everyone is required to get tested at least once every 7 days, otherwise your health code will turn yellow. In practical terms, this means our apartment complex will conduct mandatory testing every Saturday morning. (Other districts in Shanghai are doing similar things, though not exactly the same.)

July 6 to now: Our apartment complex is doing mandatory nucleic acid testing every 2 days.

So it's "mandatory" but really, how mandatory is it? This isn't like lockdown, when everyone was at home with presumably nothing to do except come outside and get tested on command. Now you have all sorts of valid reasons that one might not show up to the mandatory testing: Maybe they got tested already at a different location that day. Maybe they're not even in Shanghai now. Maybe they're staying overnight somewhere other than their apartment. And I don't see our apartment management actually keeping track of everyone closely enough to make sure everyone is getting tested every 2 days like we're supposed to. During lockdown, they had somebody sitting there checking off names on a list as people passed through the line, but I haven't seen anyone doing that recently either.

They're been doing the testing from 5:30 to 7:30 in the evening. So if you're at work and you're not even home before 7:30, you're supposed to find a different location to get tested at some point during the day. (There is a 24-hour location a few blocks from where we live.) But what if you don't? Is anybody going to come find you and make you do it? Seems not.

Maybe it's more of a way to remind people that they *should* be getting tested every 2 days, rather than a way to actually *make* them get tested every 2 days. Because hey, we're all busy, it's easy to forget about getting tested and then realize, crap, it's been more than 72 hours since my previous test. (Especially if you're working from home and aren't going anywhere that is asking to see your negative result.) Maybe it helps to see the apartment building volunteers posting about it in the group chat every 2 days.

---

Lockdowns here and there

Everyone knows someone whose apartment complex or building is locked down now.

Every time there is a positive covid case, the pandemic control workers identify close contacts and secondary close contacts, and impose lockdowns on buildings or complexes where the positive person, close contacts, and secondary close contacts live. The lockdowns vary- for example, if you live in the same building as a positive covid person, you will have a longer lockdown than if you lived in the same building as a close contact. I don't know the exact details though (and the guidelines often change anyway).

---

The text message

A lot of people have been getting a text message from the pandemic control system that says "you might have come in contact with a covid-positive person or a close contact, so you must notify your apartment management and your workplace that you got this text message, you have to get tested twice in the next 3 days, and if you have a fever then when you go to the hospital you have to tell them that you're doing health observation due to the risk of having gotten covid" [my paraphrase].

My husband also got this text message.

But... wow, SO MANY people have gotten this text, does it even matter? It doesn't really say anything you have to do differently than all the mandatory testing we're already doing. Just that you need to notify your apartment management and your job. My husband has no idea where he might have gone which prompted the powers-that-be to send him this text. It didn't mention anything specific. (I guess that's good, it means they're not freely spreading around everyone's personal information. Like, yes, they were very closely tracking everyone, but they don't share that information unless necessary... uh, hopefully?)

So anyway, he told our apartment management, and then later someone called him from the apartment management office and asked where he had been in the past few days. He said the person on the phone also doesn't know what specific circumstance prompted them to send this text message.

So, uh, okay...? I'm not sure how this system is supposed to work. I think if you actually have covid, they question you a little more closely.

---

Rumors about a big lockdown

Official account debunks massive Shanghai lockdown rumors (July 11)

So there were rumors that after the gaokao (college entrance exam) and zhongkao (high school entrance exam) were finished (July 12, I think), there would be huge lockdowns. I didn't believe it, because it's not China's style to set a date for a lockdown in advance- they're more the spring-it-on-you-with-zero-notice type.

But anyway, as you see in the SHINE article linked above, the Shanghai government-approved media has assured us that this rumor is not true. To which everyone replied, yeah we remember when you said that in March, and look what happened.

Yeah, not too much trust in the government right now...

Personally... ugh I can't even bring myself to think about the possibility of another city-wide lockdown. Some people are like "we bought a second fridge" which is a good idea if you're preparing for a lockdown, but I can't even make myself think about that. It's like I'm blocking it out. I don't want to give serious consideration to the question, "What should we do to prepare, in case we get locked down again?" Because, ahh geez, it was bad. I can't imagine having to go through that again. Which is maybe not a practical perspective on my part- just because I "can't imagine" it doesn't mean it's not going to happen.

Or rather, let me clarify: If it was just our complex being locked down, for a fixed period of time like 7 days, with food deliveries from all the normal restaurants and grocery stores still available (but with the small inconvenience of having to walk to the main gate to pick them up), I could handle that. But if it's the entire city in lockdown... and you can't get food... and you need to become a social media wizard just to get basic necessities... and if you need help, there's no one to help you because the outside world is also in lockdown... and you have no idea when it's going to end, because they keep making up new rules... That was awful, and I never want to go through that trauma again.

Sometimes I think about our vegetable peeler... a few months ago, we couldn't find our vegetable peeler, and I looked all around the kitchen for it, couldn't find it, and decided not to waste time looking for it because maybe someone accidentally threw it away, and so I ordered a new one online, and we received it the next day. And then, about 2-3 weeks later, the lockdown started. And I just keep thinking about... what if I had clung to this hope of "surely our potato peeler is around here somewhere, let's keep looking, I don't want to spend money on a new one"... 

Man, can you imagine, being in lockdown, with our only access to vegetables being these big mystery bags of extremely raw veggies, with dirt still on them and everything- can you imagine having to deal with that, if you didn't even have a vegetable peeler?

And that happened to some people. There are a lot of people in Shanghai who are living the young, single, spend-all-my-time-at-the-office life, and therefore they just don't have basic cooking equipment at home. I read stories during lockdown of people who couldn't cook anything, so they ate instant noodles, for weeks. I read about someone who didn't even have a pot, and then several weeks into it, their neighbors found out and gave them an old one. In our building, about a month and a half into the lockdown, someone posted in the group chat that they needed a big bowl for washing vegetables.

During lockdown, there was no way to buy things like that. All you could do was ask neighbors if they had an extra.

And I think about, wow, we dodged a bullet there, when I ordered a new vegetable peeler 1 day after realizing ours was missing. That's kind of out-of-character for me; usually I'm like "oh but I don't want to spend money" but for some reason, this time, I said "well if I can't find it in any of the obvious places, the most likely explanation is that someone threw it away accidentally, so I won't waste any more time on this, I'll just buy a new one."

Turns out it was the right decision.

I am so not ready to have to live through that again.

---

It's HOT here

It's been in the 90's every single day. (But China uses Celsius, so everyone is walking around saying "it's 40 degrees" and I don't really have a sense of how hot that is, WOW HOLY CRAP I just googled it, and 40 C is 104 F. Wow no wonder I always feel unbearably hot outside.)

It's hot, it's humid, and people don't want to wear masks, obviously. For people who have to be outside the entire day, rushing from one place to another, like delivery drivers, a lot of them don't wear masks (or they have it pulled down so it's under their chin). The rules are that they're required to wear masks, but ... yeah I get it. It's hot, and they're just carrying deliveries alone, not in crowded places.

I think most people are still wearing masks, even outside. If I'm outside and there are very few people around, I usually pull my mask down under my chin.

But here's a question: What about the medical teams who come to our complex to do the mass testing every 2 days? The testers have to wear that big white PPE outfit (people who wear it are called 大白 as a slang term in Chinese, and I have been calling them baymax). And to wear it *correctly*, they need to put the whole outfit on at their base, then get in a car and travel to the location where they are testing people, and then throughout that whole time, they are not allowed to take it off, not allowed to eat or drink or use the bathroom. And this covers their whole entire body. No skin is exposed at all.

(That's if they wear it *correctly*. During lockdown, a lot more people than usual had access to the white PPE outfit, and I saw LOTS who were not wearing it correctly.)

During lockdown I occasionally heard about someone in the baymax outfit passing out from dehydration. And wow, now that it's so incredibly hot, and they have to wear that, and can't drink water, wow that is not good. The human body should not be subjected to that.

At the mass testing in our apartment complex, they now have giant blocks of ice, sitting in open coolers under the tables where the testers sit. They also have big fans pointing at the testers, with a tube of water built into the fan so it's constantly spraying a mist of water at them.

Also, a few days ago, when I was in line to get tested, I saw someone putting on the baymax outfit. I guess they changed the rules, so now the testers are allowed to put it on when they get to the testing site, instead of having to put it on beforehand. Also I saw her drink some water, right before she put on her mask. And I saw a volunteer from our complex handing out water bottles to all the testers- maybe the rules have changed, and they're allowed to drink water. (Or maybe the testers at our complex are breaking the rules.)

Obviously, though, those rules are there because if you take off your mask to drink water, you're unprotected for a moment and there's a risk of getting infected with covid. But realistically, it's just unbearably hot here. Have to change some rules.

---

Links:

Sixth Tone:

China’s Lockdowns Are Fueling Record Growth — in Inequality (July 13)

How China’s COVID Quarantine Rules Have Evolved (July 11)

SHINE:

Shanghai cracking down on entertainment venues flouting COVID-19 rules (July 14)

Shanghai vows no discrimination against recovered COVID-19 job candidates (July 11)

First Omicron BA.5 community case detected in Shanghai (July 10) Well that's worrisome.

"You Weren't There, the Night Jesus Found Me"

Wow for some reason I found myself listening to Cece Winans's song "Alabaster Box" and I have FEELINGS.

[video above is a 2021 live performance, but the song is from all the way back in 1999]

I love it. Which surprises me, because I always have complicated ex-evangelical feelings about the worship songs I used to love. But for some reason, right now, this song, I just feel the joy of loving Jesus. And some of you wrote in your responses to my Reader Survey that you want to see more posts about the Christianity I believe in now, so, okay, sure, let's go ahead and blog about this, even though I'm not sure I really understand my feelings yet.

Normally on my blog, writing about a worship song, I would say something like, "I see myself back then, a girl giving everything she had in worship to God, and it's so tragic because her faith was so real and passionate but it wasn't really based in anything worth believing. It was an ideology founded in vicious lies against other people. And she really believed it, 100%. She fought for it, not caring about what it cost her. She loved that god with her whole heart, and he took advantage of it." (This post from 2015 was along those lines, and references the song "Alabaster Box.") And yeah, that's all true, but that's not how I feel about "Alabaster Box" now.

Or sometimes I take the approach like "I still believe in the things they taught me- only now I think that 'caring for the least of these' means black lives matter, and supporting all queer rights." Which is true, I do believe that. But my feelings about "Alabaster Box" right now aren't in that direction, the culture-war/ political direction. It's something more basic than that, more emotional.

"You weren't there, the night Jesus found me. You did not feel what I felt when he wrapped his loving arms around me. And, you don't know the cost of the oil in my alabaster box."

It's something that I experienced, and no one can take it away from me. When I experienced God, way back then, there was something real to it, even in the midst of ... an ideology taught to me by imperfect people.

It's choosing to pour out worship on Jesus. I know I said I'd never worship again- which is true- but I mean this in a different way. It's choosing to do it, this one time, because of how I feel. Celebration. Love. And that's real right now, but I make no promises for the future. I've said before, I'm never going to be in a personal relationship with a god again. But I see that maybe I can worship with no strings attached. Just enjoy it for what it is in the moment. It doesn't mean I'm giving my whole life to Them, or anything like that.

And 10 years ago, when I worshipped with this song, I imagined the "you weren't there" was a response to hypothetical atheists mocking me and saying religion is foolish. But now it's... Christians who say I'm not a Christian, or say my worship (or... whatever it is, maybe "worship" isn't the right word) isn't real because I very much refuse to submit my life to God. 

I really do love Jesus, but I'm my own person. And ever since I came to see things that way, as an ex-evangelical, I've felt that there's a tension there. A conflict, a "but". That God wants to control my whole life, and I'm saying no to Them, and They're not satisfied with that. But maybe... maybe They could be. Can I worship God when I want, without commitment, and it's more meaningful because They know it's real every time, rather than being out of obligation?

(My first reaction is "but that's not worship"- hmm, is it?)

(And yes, commitment is totally out of the question, because the trust isn't there. I don't trust Them.)

Looking at myself from 10 years ago, I don't feel like "it's tragic", so maybe that means I've come far enough away from evangelicalism that I can start to see some of these things in a more positive light. I feel like, "She loved God with all her heart, and there's something real and beautiful about that. He inspired her, and He also held her back- and when she realized that He was holding her back, she left Him."

I don't know. Complicated feelings about this- or rather, complicated feelings as I attempt to make sense of the fact that I'm enjoying the song, just totally enjoying it without complicated feelings.

---

Related:

"Moon Knight" and Boundaries With God 

Katy Perry's God-Given Freedom 

The things I've never let myself say about worship

Worship Songs Round-Up

My Identity was in Christ 

"You Are My Oxygen"

Blogaround

A cat sleeping with a little pillow. Image source.

1. 20th-Blogiversary Fundraising Extravaganza (posted July 6) The Slacktivist has been blogging for 20 years, which is pretty awesome. His blog is one of my favorites.

2. Is your activism getting in activism’s way? (posted July 5) "One of the worst offenders in recent weeks is the 'camping' meme."

3. Franklin Graham and Naghmeh Panahi: An all-too-common betrayal (posted June 28) [content note: abuse] "As I got up to leave, the chaplain gazed earnestly at me. He asked, Was I absolutely certain that the marriage was dead? Was there no chance at all for reconciliation?"

4. 'An ingrained fear for your life.' Black men say they understand why Jayland Walker fled police (posted July 10) [content note: murder, police brutality, racism] "Webb said he advises the young Black men he mentors to comply with police when stopped, put their hands on the steering wheel where they can be seen, and answer, 'Yes, Sir' or 'No, Sir.' Still, Webb said, that doesn't guarantee a Black person will walk away from the encounter."

5. Everything Everywhere All At Once (posted July?) [content note: spoilers for the movie "Everything Everywhere All At Once"] "And there were things in Everything Everywhere All At Once that I’d never seen before on the big screen. I’m not talking about the dildo fights, though those were indeed new to me. I’m talking more about seeing an immigrant Chinese mother allowed to fail, and fail repeatedly; seeing a dorky Chinese dad be a badass and a love interest; seeing a Chinese family openly having emotionally vulnerable reconciliations with each other; seeing an entire cast of people from multiple Chinese diasporas coming together to create a movie in which the greatest villain to defeat is the bureaucracy excluding Chinese people from being part of the United States."

6. Brett Kavanaugh Doesn't Even Get To Enjoy His Tiramisu At Morton's, Whaa Whaa Whaa (posted July 8) "Actually if yr Wonkette understands the Dobbs decision, if the all-seeing Founders did not specifically write into the Constitution that every American has the right to eat dinner, then no, Brett Kavanaugh does not have the right to eat dinner without protesters reminding him of his life choices. It’s a bummer, but we respect the Court’s authority." 

7. Relationship Therapist Ranks Disney Romances (posted June 7) Love this! Some really good insights here about what makes a healthy relationship.

"New Rules" vs Purity Rules

Well I guess I'm late to the party because this was released in 2017, but I gotta say I like Dua Lipa's song "New Rules."

It's a song about the rules she made for herself in order to keep herself from getting involved with a specific boy (her ex?) who doesn't love her. Here are the rules:

One: Don't pick up the phone, you know he's only calling 'cause he's drunk and alone
Two: Don't let him in, you'll have to kick him out again
Three: Don't be his friend, you know you're going to wake up in his bed in the morning.
If you're under him, you ain't getting over him.

Well I LOVE THIS because it's completely different from the purity rules I used to follow.

You can tell from Dua Lipa's song that there's history there. The character that Dua Lipa plays in this song has made mistakes and learned from them. These rules are based in facts. She knows herself, so she knows that if, for example, she answers this boy's phone call, it's likely to go in a direction that's not emotionally healthy for her. Therefore she chooses to make a rule for herself, to avoid that very realistic outcome.

This is completely different from my mindset back when I was in college and totally bought into all the Christian "sexual purity" stuff. In that ideology, there is no appreciation of making mistakes and learning from them. There is no concept of knowing yourself, your own needs, your own emotions, knowing yourself well enough to predict how certain things will affect you, and making your own choices about what's right for you. No, instead, the idea of making a mistake with regards to purity was so horrifying that we set up rules based on things we knew nothing about, in order to prevent all possible mistakes.

They told us that if you lose your "purity" then it will affect you for the rest of your life and you'll never be able to have a good marriage. Now that I'm an adult and I'm married, it's almost unbelievable how absurd that is. Like, how could anyone actually believe that? How could anyone actually believe that, oh I held a boy's hand in 2007, and now my husband is all sad about it, forever? Like, what on earth??? No, of course my husband doesn't give a crap about whether or not I liked a boy or kissed a boy or had sex with a boy, decades ago. Like why on earth would that matter? 

But yeah, that's what I believed. I believed if you had sex with someone and then broke up, then part of you is missing, and any future relationships can never be fully happy. And if you kiss, well at least that's not as bad as having sex, but still, it will haunt all your future relationships. And even if you don't kiss, but you do romantic things like go on dates or say "I love you", yep, you guessed it, you're gonna regret it for the rest of your life.

So there is no "it's normal to make mistakes and learn from them" in purity culture. Making mistakes is so extremely bad, that we need to set up rules to make sure you can never get anywhere near a situation where anything sexual could happen. And therefore, no, of course you can't learn what you really want, what your desires are, what your emotions are. Of course you can't know yourself well enough to know what's healthy for you and what's not.

I remember when I dated my first boyfriend, in college. When I went to his dorm room, I made sure not to lay on his bed. Because I had heard some pastor say you should never lay on your boyfriend or girlfriend's bed, because, like, "one thing leads to another" and you might end up having sex. No, I could not imagine any actual situation where, upon laying on his bed, somehow I could be drawn into a whirlpool, out of control, and somehow sex would happen. No, that didn't feel realistic to me at all- but I'd better not take the risk. I'd better listen to what some pastor said, rather than trust that I know myself well enough to know that laying on a bed isn't going to lead to sex.

Those were the kind of rules I followed, back then. Christian leaders constantly warned about all sorts of things that supposedly could lead to sex. None of them made any sense to me- but I believed I couldn't trust my own judgment. Trusting one's own judgment leads to sex.

And yes, I now see that a big part of this is that I'm asexual. Perhaps for people who do have sexual attraction, there is more of an intuitive understanding about what sorts of things would realistically lead to them desiring sex and/or getting physically aroused. (Oh, by the way, back then I definitely did not know about arousal.) So perhaps for people who have sexual attraction, this isn't just like... 

1. Totally mundane thing
2. ???
3. SEX! Which ruins your life.

I remember when I was just starting to reject purity culture. I realized that a lot of it was based on fear of the unknown. If I am alone with a boy I like, then through some unknown mechanism that no one can explain to me, I might have sex with him, which would be life-ruiningly terrible. If I decide to date a boy, what if in the future, for reasons that are impossible for me to predict now, we break up, and therefore I won't be "emotionally pure" and so I can never have a good marriage? So many of the rules were based on these vague wisps of a hypothetical, and all the fear I had piled on top of them.

I decided I couldn't live my life that way, with rules restricting me from doing anything because someone somewhere claims that it could result in a situation where I lose "purity."

So back to Dua Lipa's rules. They're grounded in her own experience. (Or, rather, the character she plays in the song- obviously just because somebody sings something, that doesn't mean it literally is how they feel.) She knows that "if I do X, then it will lead to Y, which isn't good for me" because she's done X before, and it really did lead to Y, and she is aware and in control of her own life to know that she doesn't want Y and therefore it's a good idea to avoid X.

And I've had experiences like that before- some romantic situation or action causes me to have feelings I didn't expect, so then I choose to be more cautious about that in the future. Really that's what everyone should do- evaluate your feelings, evaluate the things that are influencing you, decide what's healthy for you and what's not.

And if you mess up, it's not the end of the world. In the song, Dua Lipa says, "Practice makes perfect, I'm still tryna learn it by heart." She's not able to follow these rules 100% of the time, but you know what? When that happens, it's not like "OH NO it's a SIN and you are a BAD PERSON and you've wronged your FUTURE HUSBAND and this will follow you for the REST OF YOUR LIFE and nothing can ever truly heal it." It's not like that. When she doesn't follow her rules, it hinders her progress in "getting over" this boy who doesn't deserve her love. That's it. It affects herself; it's not a "sin" against anyone else. And she can recognize her mistake, learn from it, and move on. No life-ruining damage like they warned us in purity culture.

Don't be so scared of everything! It's okay to try things a little bit to see how they affect you, and gradually gain more and more information about what you actually want, what's good for you and what's not.

You can trust yourself. You can trust yourself far more than you can trust some pastor who has never even met you but apparently knows how all your sexual and romantic desires work. Like, what on earth, why did I ever believe that? Why did I believe their warnings over my own asexual cluelessness? Trust yourself. You know your own needs better than anyone else.

Make your rules based on experience, not fear. But of course, in purity land, that can never work, because experience is the worst thing you can have. 

---

Related:

For This Asexual, Purity Culture Was All About Fear

Miss me with your "we are all sexually broken" hot takes. I'm asexual. 

"How Far Is Too Far?" My Story, And What I Wish I'd Known

Well I Spoke Too Soon About the 0 Covid Cases

A resident receives a delivery over the gate of a locked-down area. Image source.

Complete list is here: Index of Posts About the March 2022 Shanghai Covid Outbreak 

---

Ah. Well. Remember last week when I posted about how Shanghai is totally at zero covid, and zero covid works, and everything is great?

This week is different. This week, more covid cases and lockdowns and mandatory testing.

Stats:

(I'm only posting the stats for local covid cases, not imported, as I explained last time.)

July 1: 0 locally transmitted covid cases
July 2: 2 
July 3: 3 
July 4: 8 
July 5: 24 
July 6: 54 
July 7: 45 
July 8: 59 

Does this look kinda like exponential growth, which is a bit worrisome?

---

Daycare is open, and I am back to work in the office

But first, some good news. My son's daycare reopened on July 4. It had been closed since mid-March; 3 and a half months.

Hooray! Finally I can send him to daycare so I can quit working from home, and I can go to the office and actually see people and be able to focus on work.

Little Square Root has been saying he doesn't want to go to daycare. He cried on Monday when my husband dropped him off there. But he'll be fine. He's slowly getting used to it. Before the lockdown, he was very happy at this daycare.

So this week, I've been at the office, Monday to Friday. I gotta say, it's really great getting work done without a small child always asking you for things.

I have been bringing my work computer home with me every night, though, because now we know how fast the situation can change. Every single day, you know there's a possibility that you won't be allowed to come to the office the next day.

At my job, nobody wears masks in the office. I also did not wear a mask Monday to Thursday, but I wore it on Friday because things seemed to be getting worse in Shanghai- we'll get to that later in this post. 

And also, last weekend (July 3) I went to a party with about 15 people, and we didn't wear masks. Because, as I said last week, Shanghai is at zero covid, so it's fine! It's safe! We are all tired of wearing masks!

On the subway, everyone wears masks. It seems that the psychology is, when you're around strangers, you wear a mask, and when you're with people you know, you don't wear it. Which is not really logical, but that seems to be the pattern I see.

---

July 5

So when I was at the office on Tuesday, July 5, several of my coworkers got phone calls or texts from their apartment complexes, informing them that they were required to get covid-tested that day. Our apartment complex didn't require it, though.

Also, on July 5, a lot of companies were notifying their employees that on July 6, they would be required to have a negative nucleic acid result from the past 24 hours in order to enter the company. 24 hours. The normal policy, for the past month or so, is 72 hours. My husband was notified by his job that he would be required to have this too, so he got tested at the testing location in our complex when he came home from work (July 5).

The office building where I work said they hadn't changed their policy- it was still 72 hours. I had been tested on July 4 and was planning to get tested again on July 6- this is the routine I have for myself; in order to guarantee that I always have the valid 72-hour result, and accounting for delays between when you get tested and when you get your result, I have decided to get tested every 2 days. (It's free.)

So no one was requiring me to get tested on July 5, but I went out and did it that night anyway, just in case the policy suddenly changed and I would need a 24-hour result on July 6. I had to wait in a long line. (The policy at my office building didn't end up changing though- still 72 hours rather than 24. So it would also have been fine if I hadn't gotten tested on July 5.)

Most parts of Shanghai to undergo urgent PCR screening (July 5)

So yeah, on July 5, people were all rushing out to wait in line and get tested, but we didn't really know why. We assumed that there had been a new bunch of covid cases discovered, and they were testing everyone because they were worried that it had already spread- but there were no details yet.

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July 6

Anyway, on July 6 we read the details:

Super spreader KTVs spawn dozens of COVID-19 risk areas in Shanghai (July 6) "Shanghai designated 26 high- and medium-risk areas of COVID-19 on Wednesday after detecting a host of new infections linked to a KTV and a teahouse, which are under investigation for alleged illegal business operations."

KTV means a karaoke place. I love going to KTV in China- you go with your friends and rent a small room, and you're all in there singing and drinking and eating snacks, putting your mouth all over the microphone shared by everyone, definitely not wearing masks. Yeah, definitely seems like the kind of business that would be last on the list of places that are allowed to reopen after a covid outbreak.

It's been reported that the KTV's in this outbreak have not been following all the rules about checking everyone's 72-hour negative result and making everyone scan the location code.

And, yeah, a lot of places I have been recently have not been strict about checking that everyone who enters has the 72-hour negative result and making us scan the location code. Usually, there's an employee standing at the door, and all the customers kinda vaguely point their phone screen (which shows their green health code, the status of their most recent nucleic acid test, and displays the name of the location if they scanned the location code correctly) in this employee's line of sight. But the employee isn't really looking carefully at each person's phone to make sure it's all there. I am sure they can tell if the color is green or not, but beyond that, they're not really close enough to see any of the other details.

(The job is boring as hell; it's not that surprising that they aren't motivated to do a good job of it...)

So yeah, it does not surprise me that a place with a covid outbreak wasn't checking closely enough. Because TONS of places I have been to don't check closely enough. The places with the outbreak are definitely getting in legal trouble because of it though.

KTV, tea house licenses revoked over COVID-19 cases (July 6)

On July 6, our building volunteers posted a message in the group chat that said everyone in our apartment complex is required to get tested that night. Doctors would come from 6 pm to 9 pm to test us all, and we would get called in sequence according to what building we lived in, just like we were during the lockdown.

Okay, lol, that's a bit ridiculous, because it was the middle of the day on a Wednesday. People are at work. They're not going to magically be at home when their building number gets called at 6 or 7 or whenever.

Anyway, people in the group chat started posting "I already got tested today, do I still have to do it?" and the answer was no, if you already got tested that day, then you don't have to do it. And honestly it looked pretty disorganized to me- the volunteers asked that if you already got tested, you send your name in the group chat, so they can keep track, but I think it would be easy for someone to just not get tested, and nobody would even know. They said it's mandatory, but I didn't see any mechanism for making sure everyone actually does it.

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July 7

On Thursday, July 7, my husband found out that a covid-positive person had visited the office building where he works, so the building would be closed. Everyone would have to work from home on July 8.

He didn't really get any details beyond that- like, they were not told when exactly the covid-positive person was there, or for how long. (Though we do know that they were not at the company where my husband works- they were somewhere else in the same building.) But fortunately for my husband, it just means he has to work from home, and it doesn't cause him any trouble beyond that- for example, his health code is still green, he is not required to quarantine, and he is not labelled as a "close contact" or "secondary close contact" or anything like that. So that's good.

On July 7 and 8, I started seeing posts in some of the big WeChat groups- people saying "our complex has been locked down." I also heard from one of my coworkers that some buildings in her complex are locked down, but residents in the other buildings are free to come and go.

Also, our complex announced that we are doing mandatory testing every day from July 8 to 10. (We are not locked down, fortunately. No covid cases have been reported in our complex from this recent mass testing.)

Oh also the gaokao is going on this week. The gaokao is kinda like the SAT, except more intense- like one's entire childhood is spent preparing for it, and it determines one's whole future. (That's a bit of an exaggeration, but overall yeah that's the impression I get.) It was supposed to be in June but was already delayed because of the Shanghai lockdown. There are a few special pandemic-related accommodations for students taking the gaokao. Special vehicles to take them to the exam site in a "closed loop" way if their complex is in lockdown. Also, students get their own individual test tube when they do the nucleic acid test. (Normally it's 10-20 people's swabs all together in each test tube, because it's expected that they're all negative, so no need to waste resources testing them all separately. But if one person is positive, you don't know who it is, so you have to track down everyone from the tube and re-test, and that's just something you don't want to have to deal with if you're in the midst of something as important and life-changing as the gaokao.)

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Office building is locked down

Okay, lol, I wrote this whole blog post and I was like "okay it's basically finished, I'll just come back and edit it when I have time later" and in the hours since then, I've checked the messages in the group chat for my job, and it turns out our office building is locked down now.

The official notice that was posted by the office building management doesn't say the exact situation, but it says they are closing for 7 days in accordance with the pandemic control, and they are in the process of identifying close contacts- so, sounds like there was a covid-positive person somewhere in the building.

Luckily, I have not received any text message saying I'm a close contact or anything like that. So it doesn't affect me, except that I'm going to have to work from home for at least part of next week (they said 7 days, but hey maybe it will turn out to be shorter).

Some people in the group chat were like "Are they going to be spraying disinfectant in our office? We have electronic equipment running in there" and HR said that if our company doesn't have any positive cases then the building management won't enter our office (and the building management doesn't have a key to our office anyway). So, hopefully that's true.

I now feel a little less weird about being the only one wearing a mask at work on Friday.

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OKAY SOMETHING IS GOING ON

Lol, you guys, another update, as I'm still in the process of finishing this post. Pudong New District (where I live) has announced that the entire district will be doing mandatory nucleic acid testing on July 10.

And I just saw a bunch of people in the big WeChat groups talking about more places they know that have been locked down.

It is starting to feel like whatever is going on is worse than what they've told us so far.

[let me real quick go delete all the parts of this post where I said everything is fine]

Or- optimistically- maybe they are being really intense about the lockdowns and testing right now so that this WON'T get worse. So then very soon everything will be fine.

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Overall feelings

So that's the situation. Overall, this week, most people are still going about their lives like normal- the subways are crowded, people go out to restaurants to eat, we're working in the office instead of at home (well, unless they literally lock down the building)- but we are a little bit afraid. [okay, speaking for myself, more than "a bit" afraid at this point]

I don't want to be in lockdown again. It was bad. Just last night, my husband bought a bunch of ice cream and put it in our freezer, and said, "When we were in lockdown, there was no way we could have gotten ice cream like this." And that's true. The option to just go out and buy ice cream whenever you want ice cream- that was so incredibly far from the way we lived during lockdown. We had very very few options for food- like, here's a huge bag of random vegetables, take it or leave it. And we certainly didn't have access to anything the apartment management didn't view as "essential". Like ice cream.

It was bad. And I'm not one of those expats all gung-ho about "China needs to end zero-covid"- I think covid is still dangerous, and I accept that theoretically, lockdowns could be a good thing to use to fight covid. But *this* government doing a lockdown? I don't trust *this* government to do it right. Sure, I could imagine some utopia where a government implements a lockdown in a non-f***ed-up way, but I have no confidence that it would play out that way here. It was bad.

So... maybe it will be this way for a while, in Shanghai- living with the threat of lockdown hanging over us, because the number of covid cases isn't *exactly exactly* zero, and that means it could suddenly break out again.

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Beijing's vaccine mandate 

Beijing Requires Proof of COVID Vaccination to Enter Public Places (July 7)

This is in Beijing, not Shanghai, so it doesn't apply to me personally. But who knows, maybe they'll make this the policy in other Chinese cities too.

I'm not sure what to think about this. On the one hand, it's a good thing because the vaccination rate for elderly people in China is too low, which is the biggest reason that ending zero-covid would be disastrous. So if this policy pushes more elderly and vulnerable people to get vaccinated, that's good, and it's a necessary step toward ending zero-covid. (Eventually. Someday. I don't see it happening any time soon.)

But on the other hand, ughhh the amount of rules we have to deal with already, living in zero-covid China. I personally haven't had any huge problems, because I'm tech-savvy enough to figure out all the apps we need to use just to prove our "low risk" status so we can enter public places, and because I'm lucky enough that, for these pandemic-related apps, I haven't had any of the problems that international people often run into with Chinese computer systems which require real-name verification. Ugh, the Chinese systems are very much NOT set up for people who don't have a Chinese id card. If you change your passport number, if you enter your name slightly differently than how the computer system expected (does my last name go first or last? am I supposed to use all caps? spaces or no?), then it doesn't work. It's like, a labyrinth of bureaucracy, and here, let's add another requirement on top of that- you have to show proof of vaccination.

Like, if it was just "if you're vaccinated, then no problem" that would be one thing. But, knowing how things work in China, it's also possible that it's "if you're vaccinated, good luck trying to get the app to work to prove that you're vaccinated."

But hey, maybe they'll surprise me and the system will work totally fine for everyone, including international people. The rollout of the whole "scan the location codes" thing went way better than I expected, here in Shanghai.

And my other concern is, okay, what if someone who isn't vaccinated has some kind of emergency? We've heard stories of people who needed medical care but weren't allowed to enter a hospital because they didn't have a negative covid test or green health code or whatever. Is this going to be more of that?

It's a good idea, but I can't say I really trust *this* government to do it in a non-f***ed-up way.

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Links:

Sixth Tone

Shanghai Job Ads Discriminate Against Applicants Who Had COVID (July 5) Wow NOT COOL.

‘Thank You for Your Cooperation’ (June 19) This is a very good video. It's interviews with people in Shanghai, talking about their overall experiences during the lockdown.

SHINE

Disney denies rejecting a recovered COVID-19 job candidate (July 6)

US, Canada flights to Shanghai grounded over COVID-19 (July 2)