 |
| Bloomberg photo from May 2, 2022, showing empty highways in Shanghai. Image source. |
Complete list is here: Index of Posts About the March 2022 Shanghai Covid Outbreak
---
March 16-21, 2022: First lockdown. 6 days.
March 23 - May 31, 2022: Second lockdown. 69 days.
---
On March 16, 2022, I wrote I'm in Lockdown. And... it lasted for 2 and a half months.
What to say about it? It was bad. I don't want to go read my blog posts from then to summarize how bad it was. Actually just now I checked Wikipedia, and their article covers it well: 2022 Shanghai COVID-19 outbreak. Though, I will say, the Wikipedia article mentions food shortages, but just from the words "food shortage" you don't understand how bad it was.
I remember going outside to take out the trash every night- we were only allowed out of our apartment building to take out the trash and pick up deliveries- and there were no traffic sounds at all. No sounds of people walking down the street. Only birds. It was so quiet. So bizarre.
Little Square Root would watch all 4 Toy Story movies every day, while my husband and I worked from home.
And the vegetables we were able to get- they were raw, so raw. Dirt all stuck to the bottom. On more than one occasion, I found a live snail in the vegetables.
I wanted to decorate Easter eggs, but no, we didn't do that. Because we had no way of knowing when we would have the opportunity to buy more eggs. We couldn't use up any eggs on that.
And, I eat mushrooms now. I never really liked mushrooms before, but during the lockdown, that was what we had, so I ate them. And now I am fine with eating mushrooms.
And the fear and the anxiety... every day seeing all these things on social media- so many of them that the government couldn't censor them fast enough- and just stuck in our home wondering if it will happen to us. Will we need medical care and the ambulance won't come? Will our son test positive for covid and be taken away from us? Will we have to go to quarantine, and desperately try to find some pet service who can take our cat?
Something I was thinking about recently, is this: It feels so weird to think that everyone in Shanghai had similar traumatic experiences. Everyone. Every random person you see on the street. Every waitress at every restaurant. Every person you sit next to on the subway. They all have a story about what terrible things happened to them in March-April-May 2022.
Usually, with trauma, you don't talk about it because other people won't understand. But this is different. If I'm talking to someone in Shanghai and I mention something about not being able to buy food during lockdown, they will nod along, because they know. It happened to them too.
A few weeks after the lockdown ended, I was out with friends, and someone there was visiting from Beijing. He said he had heard all kinds of stories from people in Shanghai. "One of my colleagues from Shanghai organizes international training courses for hundreds of people," he said. "And then I heard that during the lockdown, she was organizing all her family members to click on an app at the same time, to try to buy some eggs." And we are all like, yeah. Yeah, that's what happened. That's what happened.
It's a weird thing, having a whole society of 25 million people, that all experienced this bad thing. Yes, some people had it worse than others. Some people continued to earn a salary during lockdown, some did not. Most people were locked down at home, but some were sleeping on the streets, at the airport, at their job. Some people already knew how to cook from scratch with Chinese vegetables, and some people didn't even own a pot. Thousands of people tested positive for covid and were taken to quarantine centers with terrible conditions. Some people had emergencies and couldn't get anyone to come help.
So, some had it worse than others, but still, it was bad for everyone.
I guess this is also what happens when a natural disaster strikes an area. Everyone there has a story about how bad it was for them. In my hometown, there was The Ice Storm. I'm too young to remember it, actually, but everyone who is from my hometown and is older than me knows about The Ice Storm.
You could say the same about the covid pandemic itself. Everyone in the world was affected by it, except maybe some isolated groups of people who have no contact with the rest of human society, I guess.
And for international people in China- Every single one of us has a story about how we weren't able to get out of China and see our families for 3 years, or about how we jumped through so many hoops to get back into China and then stayed 14 days or 8 days or 21 days alone in a quarantine hotel (or, even worse, with a small child in a quarantine hotel). Or about getting stuck outside of China, for months, while your spouse and child are still in China. Or about going to another country in early 2020 to "wait it out" and then the border closes and the only thing you can do is find a shipping service to ship whatever things you really need from your apartment in China, and abandon the rest. Every international person in China has at least one of those traumas.
Such a strange thing... We don't talk about it, but we all lived through it. And if someone did talk about it, everyone would nod along and say "that happened to me too."
---
Links:
China Briefing
China to Resume Issuing All Types of Visas for Foreigners (March 14) Okay, this is HUGE, why can I not find a decent English article on it? There's just this paywalled Wall Street Journal article, and "China Briefing", a site I have never heard of. Also this one from Reuters but it's not exactly what I'm looking for, though it does generally cover the same information. (The perspective I was looking for was, "YOU GUYS. Here are the new visa policies" which is what the China Briefing article is, though in more formal language.)
Anyway, this is HUGE! Tourist visas to China! And if you had a tourist visa issued before March 28, 2020, that visa is now valid again (as long as it's not expired now- these are 10-year visas). Important background info on that is, on March 28, 2020, China banned all foreigners from entering the country, even if you had a valid visa or residence permit.
This is like, wow. Getting very close to "back to normal."
The New York Times
U.S. Will Lift Covid Testing Requirement for Travelers From China (March 8)
Sixth Tone
Past the Peak, China’s Schools Prep For a Normal Semester (February 13)
That's Mags [not sure if this will load if you are outside China- I couldn't get it to load with VPN on]
6 Countries Scrap PCR Test for China Returnees (February 28) On February 28, Chinese embassies in Cambodia, Hungary, Malaysia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Sri Lanka announced that travelers coming from these 6 countries will not be required to get covid-tested to enter China. It's likely that more and more countries will be added to the list, as time goes on.
SHINE
Up close with Disney characters once again (March 6) So, during the past 3 years, when you go to Shanghai Disneyland and meet characters, there are marks on the floor showing where you have to stand, to social-distance from the Disney characters. (And this is enforced! There are only 2 places I've seen social-distancing enforced in China. The other one was standing in line for covid-testing during lockdown.) Apparently that's over now.
Hong Kong to lift mask mandate from March 1 (February 28)
No comments:
Post a Comment