Field Notes from a Pandemic

by Ethan Lou

  My waipo had finished breast-cancer treatment just weeks before the coronavirus outbreak. Her legs are bowed, and she had a bad fall some years ago. She doesn’t move around easily. My waigong, eighty-seven and a university professor, still works, but he’s a little slower and thinner every time I see him. Both also take an assortment of medication for the variety of random ailments you get as you age. My mother worried for her parents: With healthcare systems overwhelmed by the virus, who would take care of her parents’ regular medical needs? What if they caught something at the hospital? What if they caught something at the grocery store? There was no choice but to shut out the world. And that’s not a viable solution, especially for the aged, who often need ongoing medical care of one form or another. In New York, for example, when the crisis hit, media reported that the exacerbation of an overwhelmed healthcare system with the real fear people had of going to a hospital with anything but COVID-19 symptoms resulted in an untold number of deaths — from heart attacks, seizures, and other life-threatening conditions— that might have otherwise been prevented. One source of optimism, a straw of hope on which to grasp, was that even in isolation, my waipo and waigong had each other. They weren’t handling this alone, like so many other older people.

  * * *

  —

  The day after my family and I got evicted from the seniors’ home, the second day of Chinese New Year, was traditionally the day married daughters are supposed to return to their maiden homes. My father’s older sister, who still lives in Shijiazhuang, had planned to visit my grandparents at the seniors’ residence, but that was obviously not an option anymore. Instead, our extended family had a hotpot lunch at my grandparents’ former apartment, which was only a short distance from the seniors’ residence. All their old furniture was still in place, but the home is only occupied when their faraway children visit. There, my father proudly showed us the little wooden chair he had insisted my grandfather buy for him because my aunt also had one. It still bore my father’s name at the bottom.

  With chopsticks, we dropped raw ingredients — thin beef and lamb slices, dumplings, mushrooms, vermicelli, and meat balls — into a communal pot of boiling abalone soup, eating as we cooked. I’ve always loved the sesame sauce we dip each bite into — particularly for its thickness. Because everything you eat in hotpot is fished out of the soup, the dipping sauce gets watered down quickly. The merit of any sesame sauce, I’ve always believed, lies entirely in its viscosity.

  We also had garlic stems, sliced tofu, century egg — its flavour derived from hydrogen sulfide and ammonia, truly an acquired taste — and a sort of glutinous cake specific to Shijiazhuang, which only my father likes. We washed it down with a brand of lager called Snow. It was a glorious meal for everyone except my grandparents. At the seniors’ home, my grandfather lay motionless in his bed. My grandmother could join us only via video call. Still, with my aunt’s entire family present, my uncle, my parents and me, it was the closest thing to a reunion we had had in nearly fifteen years. My grandmother wasn’t eating because it was before her scheduled time to do so, but she watched us through the entirety of the meal.

  * * *

  —

  We left the city — an abrupt change of plans — not just because my grandparents were off-limits to us but also because, around the country, what had started as a sort of precautionary worry about the virus had morphed into a full-blooded, into-the-valley-of-death-rode-the-six-hundred alarm. The previous night, after ejection from the seniors’ home, we heard some intercity passenger buses were being shut down. My uncle worried that private cars would soon be banned as well, more or less preventing us from leaving the city at all. My parents and uncle’s plan had been to spend the whole week in Shijiazhuang. My plan was to spend two weeks there, seeing my grandparents, taking it easy. Now, it was off to Beijing. There, even amid a lockdown, my uncle figured we could still get to the airport at least, or that was the idea. Like everyone else, we were caught unprepared in a dramatic escalation of events over which we had no control. Nobody knew what was going on or what was about to happen.

  2

  Chinese New Year is based on the lunar calendar, the cycles of the moon. The exact date of the celebration is thus different every year, although it is usually in January or February, when the new year is marked by a new animal zodiac sign. Also called the Spring Festival, Chinese New Year is a bit like Asian Christmas, but like everything in China, it tends toward extremes, and not just because it’s a country of 1.4 billion people. Over decades, the rapid development of urban centres had resulted in a mass of outward internal migration from rural areas, rich and poor, skilled and unskilled alike seeking better lives. China’s post-Mao city population spike of hundreds of millions was called “likely the largest in human history” by one researcher. The very fact China restricts internal migration through its Hukou household-registry system points to people’s doing it too much. The return home for the New Year thus represents a massive migration. The whole country is given a week-long public holiday. All sorts of travel tickets sell out quickly. The move to online systems for train tickets had been criticized for alienating migrant workers who might not be technologically savvy or even own a computer or smartphone. The New Year migration is the sort of journey that every Chinese person knows, a shared experience regardless of social class.

  Going home for the festivities is such a big deal, the Chinese even have a word for it: chunyun. This year, before the Chinese New Year, the same as every other year, hundreds of millions of people left their cities of work for their hometowns. While those living elsewhere, like me, may not do so every year — in fact, this was my first time — anyone else with family in the old country has probably done it at least once. The annual migration almost defines Chinese identity, like a pilgrimage to Mecca. The fact that the virus happened during chunyun is a cruel joke; now, as hundreds of millions were planning on going back to their cities of work, many found they could not do so.

  My uncle drove my parents and me back to his apartment in Beijing without issue. The government never did ban private car travel between cities as feared. But in other parts of the country, confinement and clampdown were seen like never before. At least fifteen more cities in Wuhan’s Hubei province had some sort of travel restrictions imposed, bringing the total number of people locked down to more than 50 million. It felt, at the time, like the kind of thing that could only be possible in China, which has both the necessary resources and tight central-government control to carry out its will. Later, of course, it proved possible in many other countries too.

  We might not have been in Wuhan itself, but things were only marginally better in Beijing. To leave your apartment, more often than not, you needed to register and get the equivalent of a permission slip from security. To an outsider, it may be unclear where the building management gets that authority. But this is China, where historically, the State owned and planned everything and the concept of private ownership was nonexistent. The post-Mao reforms have drastically changed that status quo, but the past lingers. For many people, their apartments are still tied to their employment. It remains a country where many things link back to the government. Beijing, densely urbanized, is also a city where few people live in single-family houses, and where even detached homes are usually part of some sort of gated compound. The so-called neighbourhood committees looking over these compounds are effectively extensions of the local authorities, which derive their power from the State. Big Brother is not exactly in your bedroom, but he’s close by. I could only imagine what would have happened if one or all of us were from Hubei.

  The restrictions on coming and going were a hurriedly assembled smattering of rules. It seemed to be a bottom-up effort by local officials to conform to what they thought the central government wanted. What worked for one apartment complex might not work for another. If you could drive, you could bypass the rules slightly, but licence plates, which got scanned at
the gate, were still linked to personal details, and you still had to submit to a temperature check when you returned, just like when riding the subway or entering the airport. Sometimes, security at apartment complexes insisted drivers get out of their cars to get permission slips to leave as well, but they relented if you resisted.

  In Beijing, restaurants were enforcing identification checks. At one eatery, the server told me they needed to know where we were coming from. Most Chinese identification cards — which everyone has — include hometown addresses, labelling people more explicitly than any accent. Chinese telecommunication companies later launched a feature that could generate a list of provinces recently visited, based on your phone number, which they track. Officials at a train station, for example, would demand passengers’ location lists. If you were connected to the affected province, you were a leper of the second-class kind. One Hubei woman said, in a widely circulated social-media post, she had been rejected by more than ten hotels. Everything felt a little dystopian. China is where everything is recorded and linked to everything else, and there is only a faint shadow of the concept of personal privacy. The pandemic had brought all of that eerily to the fore, demonstrating just how much oversight the government has over its people. The Hubei woman eventually found accommodation, but only because the so-called Internet police quickly saw her post and intervened.

  At the Beijing restaurant that checked our identities, my family and I had a main course of zhajiangmian, dark, soybean-paste noodles with slivers of pork belly, and a brownish stew of fatty pig intestines, noted for its slight sourness. A man at a table behind us had the same stew and a small bottle of domestic rice liquor. He was playing popular Chinese music from his phone and was obviously drunk, quickly becoming incoherent and rude to the waitress, although not to the point that it required intervention. He was the only other customer in the restaurant besides us, and the whole scene was just eerie and a little bit apocalyptic, considering the circumstances. That meal would turn out to be the last we ate outside of our apartment.

  My parents left China three days later to return to Singapore, as scheduled. My uncle and I saw them to the airport, but we didn’t get out of the BMW. I can’t remember whose idea it was, but the rationale for remaining in the car was pandemic-related: the less interaction with strangers, the better. It was thus a subdued goodbye, said between car seats. My uncle and I did, however, stay in the BMW in the parking lot until my parents texted to say they’d cleared airport security and got to their gate. In these uncertain times, you never know what can happen.

  I thought of changing my flight to leave earlier but decided against it. I was young, fit, and healthy. I hadn’t seen a doctor in five years. I’d be departing in a week anyway, and I figured it wasn’t worth the trouble.

  I spent the days in my uncle’s apartment, just the two of us. My uncle is married with two children, but both wife and kids are living in New Jersey, having more or less emigrated. My uncle remained behind to work, which isn’t as uncommon as it may sound. Academics have a term for it: “astronaut families,” in which one member endures separation, often not entirely by choice, to “maximize their earnings,” as one geographer described it. My uncle is a lawyer in China, but — with laws unfortunately being tied to countries and whatnot — his career just isn’t something easily transferrable to the United States. He is also a workaholic, and thus doesn’t have a lot of downtime during which he can fly halfway around the world for a visit. He actually hasn’t seen his family in person for years, which is, I admit, a little extreme, even by astronaut family standards. To make up for his physical distance, my uncle emails his children with life advice almost every day, both to exercise his paternal responsibilities and to practice his English. His emails read like philosophical essays, full of practical advice mixed with questions about life itself. While in Beijing, I helped him edit those emails, which added some levity to an otherwise dark situation. One of his essays was on the importance of brushing your teeth every day: “It was your parents’ duty to give you a whole body; then after that, it is your turn to protect yourself from being destroyed — any part of it — or you would be handicapped, for even the lack of a single tooth makes you less whole.” Needless to say, my uncle is known as the family eccentric.

  Another email was about me, sparked by his fascination with my weathered and well-worn Clarks desert boots. It made me laugh, for it was accurate in a way that had never occurred to me. “Do you know whose leather shoes are in the attached picture?” my uncle wrote. The owner is not a beggar. The owner is, in fact, your cousin Ethan. I read a book by Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, in which the German sociologist attributes success to frugality and discipline. Austerity begets thrift and creation, which you will find in your cousin Ethan’s personality, “manifesting as…wearing a beggar’s shoes.”

  And, of course, there were emails on the subject of COVID-19. This current situation, this to-the-death duel with the virus particles, could have all been avoided, he explained. “If we had left it where it should be, in the host bats’ bodies, we would not need to face the serious choice: they die, or we die.” Humanity has encroached further and further into the wild, perhaps unwittingly violating a metaphysical equilibrium between species, he reasoned. “If one of them is too powerful to co-exist with others, the chain will be broken, and nature will lose its balance. Some unpredictable result will appear.”

  When ants bite a dog, he suggested, and the owner pours boiling water on the colony in retaliation, the insects die without knowing why: “Due to being humble and menial, the ants could not know the function of boiling water, the relationship between the dog and his owner, as well as humans’ power. We humans could decide their living or dying; thus, we are their God, who cannot be recognized by them.” Perhaps by eating bats, as some theories say, we did something to the pets of some higher intelligence, and we are being punished without knowing why, my uncle wrote. “God decides to punish us by coronavirus, as we subject the ants to genocide.”

  My uncle didn’t mean everything that seriously, of course. He made the bat–ant analogy only to illustrate a broader point about the need to “stand in awe of nature.” My uncle is irreligious, and while in Beijing, he had told me that if I could find a stance for him to take — any position on any issue — then he could find the necessary reasoning and argument to defend it. He is that good of a lawyer, he said, “a sniper.” He was, again, only being half serious when he said that.

  I could only imagine what my cousins must have thought when they read the emails. Me — I had faithfully done my best to edit his missives, and to find meaning in them. He did raise a good point about the coronavirus — is there a reason this happened? Why now?

  Perhaps the fact that this had to be asked — the fact that such a threat came so suddenly and caught us so ill-prepared — is a sort of answer in itself.

  * * *

  —

  I spent the remainder of my time in Beijing catching up on some of my own work and reading. My uncle, who also teaches at a local university, worked too. The reopening of school had been pushed back, so he had more time to prepare for his classes. But his legal workload also increased: a client of his sold body-temperature-monitoring devices, of all things, and had fresh orders, so my uncle and his team were busy drafting contracts.

  My uncle likened our experience to being in prison, and I took that as more than hyperbole, for the man had visited Chinese detention facilities many times to see clients. We left the condominium only in the evening to work out at the satellite campus of my uncle’s university, near his apartment. The main campus had been closed. My uncle ran on the track, and I did chin-ups on a yellow bar caked in dust. There wasn’t much else going on, for aside from a security person, I saw — fleetingly and separately — only one other person and three dogs idly hanging around. Of course, condo security checked our temperatures when we got back. Everyone screene
d for temperatures everywhere.

  Then one day, as my uncle and I arrived on campus, we saw the university had closed the satellite compound and tripled security at the gate. My uncle turned the car around.

  By then, early February, the world had more than 17,000 cases of the coronavirus, although 99 per cent of them were in China, where at least 360 had died. Beijing, which had more than 200 infected, had seen its first death a few days earlier.

  I had originally wanted to see friends in the city but was uncertain about etiquette. This was before the concept of physically social distancing had entered the zeitgeist, when the world outside was still carrying on more or less as normal. Even then, though I was not consciously aware of it, I think I already had some sort of inkling of the seismic shift in societal culture that was to come. It wasn’t so much the lockdown rules that were imposed but people’s rapid unity in conforming to them; not just obeying the guidelines, but earnestly believing in them. There are always outliers, of course, but in my social circle, at least, I would later find people isolating themselves more stringently than dictated by their governments and viewing those who did not negatively. Suggesting an in-person social meeting, or even just going outside unnecessarily or visiting grandparents, would be perceived as irresponsible and socially unacceptable — not just on the level of jaywalking or doing recreational drugs, more like not wearing a seat belt or driving while drunk. Germans, for example, stereotypically conformist, “zealously” reported people flouting physical distancing rules, as described by Reuters. As for my social life in Beijing, I felt a little uneasy at the time. It was like hearing distant thunder on a Sunday afternoon. If everyone was worried about contagion, would a message from a friend who had come from far away be perceived as an obligation, making people say yes to meeting up, but reluctantly? I erred on the side of caution and never told anyone I was in Beijing.