You know, China isn’t reporting their real COVID-19 numbers yadda-yadda mumble, mumble conspiracy theory bullshit.
We need to hold China financially accountable because of things and stuff and yadda-yadda mumble, mumble conspiracy theory bullshit.
When I hear or read stuff like this, my response is: You know, I really don’t fucking care. I just don’t have the time. What is really important to me is my day to day life, what I can see around me at this particular moment. That’s about all I can manage. After I can barely do that, I worry about my friends and family back in America. As I write this, I am sitting behind a computer in a city on the southern bank the Yangtze River, Jiangsu Province, China. That river flows out to the Yellow Sea. That body of water connects to the Pacific, which is responsible for sending waves that wash against Washington, Oregon, and Californian shores. This province of more than 80 million people had once flattened its curve to zero without a fatality. That doesn’t mean the threat has gone away. As I write this, Jiangsu has relapsed and now is home to 20 new cases with two recoveries and 18 that are still active.
How did this happen? The reporting I read daily differentiates between local and imported cases. In the public Chinese mind, COVID-19 has now shifted to being a foreign disease, and those new 20 Jiangsu cases were all expats and Chinese nationals returning from overseas. A majority of those cases were caught at airports in Shanghai and Nanjing and then transported to secure hospitals for treatment. As a result, the Chinese government has instituted a temporary ban on foreign entry. When my local friends ask me how I feel about that, I tell them the truth: whatever it takes to defeat this virus is necessary. This is just another case of staying in place to prevent the global spread. As Samuel Jackson once opined on YouTube: Stay the fuck at home.
This just speaks to what some might call the new normal. In that regard, I thought some people might find the current expat-in-China reality informative. Everything I am about to say is neither criticism nor advocacy of the Chinese government. It’s just daily life for me. I can only speak for myself and where I live.
Before the temporary ban, people trying to return to work from abroad were required to do a mandatory 14-day stay-at-home quarantine before being allowed out in public. This goes for both Chinese citizens and foreign residents. Once the government realized it had documented cases of COVID-19 coming back, the stay-at-home mandates for foreigners were shifted to monitored quarantine centers. In my city, it was a luxury hotel that was not free. People were essentially sealed into their rooms and the only visitors they had were health care professionals taking their temperature or staff bringing food. Some took this like troopers, and others did not. Hey, we all are human, and isolation can be a mind killer. It does, however, make for an interesting rereading of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” some other time.
As an expat in my city, your passport number and the date of your reentry are things that need to be memorized. A majority of businesses have reopened, but there are regulations in place. For example, shopping at Metro — a high-end German supermarket — requires foreigners to sign into a log book. I have to write down my name, telephone number, nationality, and date of reentry. I used to be pissed off about this and wrote I NEVER LEFT in what I thought were menacingly blocky letters. Then, I got over it. First, the Chinese security guard telling me to do this likely can’t read English. Also, this: saying I NEVER LEFT actually isn’t true. What I was trying to convey is that unlike some other foreigners, I did not go home for Christmas before the outbreak in Wuhan. So, I started simply writing 2019-7-16 in standard Chinese date order. That’s the last time I went through Chinese customs after returning from visiting family in America. I also carry a picture of my passport’s red immigration stamp on my phone should anybody want to look at it. However, that was a personal choice on my part, not one that was mandated.
Speaking of phones, I also have to show people a city-issued QR code a few times during day to day life. These vary by color: red means infected, yellow means under quarantine, and green means you’re healthy. Everybody has to have one, both foreign and Chinese. Expats had a hard time getting these at first when this rule was being rolled out, but most people largely have them now. Sometimes, I have to show that green QR code just to leave my housing estate. Everything relates to that code: going to the bank, eating in some restaurants, and more.
Restrictions on movement have slowly been eased, but there are still places like shopping malls that check your temperature at the door. In my housing community, only one entry and exit remains, as the others are still locked and blocked off. A majority of people have gone back to work with new containment policies put in place by their employers. For example, as of this writing, I have been teaching online for my university for five weeks now. Public schools with offline classes are set to reopen soon. Rules demanding that you wear a mask outside have been relaxed a little. However, because I am a westerner — and this is now considered a foreign illness -- I wear a mask religiously. A small minority of Chinese people view laowai suspiciously, and me wearing a mask is just proactive common sense. It’s “don’t give people reasons to suspect you” logic.
To anybody who wants to scream “Orwellian” and “China bad!” please remember that I don’t fucking care and there is a global pandemic afoot. Surviving and containing and then beating the virus are the first priorities people should be worrying about. If this is the price of my current safety and security, it’s a cost I will gladly pay. It’s also my responsibility to follow the rules and do my part in a country that pays me a living wage.
This country gave me a home when I was in a truly dark place in my life. It gave me the opportunity to start over after facing years of adjunct hell underemployment, short-sale foreclosure on a home, a death in my family, and divorce. I’ve now lived in China for six years. Long before the pandemic, I used to tell fellow expats that working abroad is a privilege and not a right. That’s something growing up around the American military in Europe taught me. Behave badly and break the law, and that privilege gets taken away. Besides, that’s not just China, that’s any country that you are not native to. That was true then, and it’s still true now.