Surviving Covid: The Home (All day, EVERY day) Edition

When Covid first broke out in 2020, we were on winter holiday in Vietnam. We eventually fled to Thailand in the hopes of surviving Covid from afar, waiting it out there from the safety of another country. After several months and what seemed like the worst of the Covid wave passing, we felt that we missed China so much that we came back near the end of 2020. Since that time, we lived a mostly normal life with the occasional face mask required to ride public transportation or the scanning of a green health code in our phone. We’d adapted to those additions to our daily routine.

Fast forward two years and what felt like Round 2, although depending on your definition, it might have been Round 5. At the time of the first draft of this writing, we THOUGHT we were over the worst of the infections and would be able to leave our community within a week. There felt like a light at the end of the tunnel, and boy had this tunnel been dark at times. With daily infection rates finally on the decline and more reports of government plans to slowly reopen public places and transportation, it felt like we were very close to the end. (The end of lockdown, that is. Not the end of our wits. That would come later.)

A brief review of what we had lived through since the end of March 2022:

On Thursday, March 24th, we came home from work to discover that our building was being sealed because some of our neighbors had been in contact with someone else who tested positive. There had been varying degrees of “sealed” reported in the media. Some doors have been literally sealed with tape or metal while others were more relaxed, relying on the honor system. We could open our apartment door but were not allowed to exit the building, even to walk our foster dog Pearl.

The seal was lifted and reapplied a few times within a month. There was a week where we could go to restaurants and stores while a rumor circulated that Shanghai was going to lockdown on a large scale. During that time, we hit our favorite places as often as we could. We ate Mexican and Korean BBQ and went for long bike rides. We grocery shopped at our favorite wet markets as often as we could and soaked up as much freedom and fresh air as we could. It was only a matter of time before we had to go home and stay there.

Other buildings had their turns being sealed and released. At a few points in time, we are able to leave our building but not the community. So we could go out and walk freely around the other apartment buildings within the community. We were grateful for the fresh air and the ability to run/roller skate/sit in the sunshine, but we were soon ready for bigger adventures, like going out to eat and drink and grocery shop.

Where should we go first?

What did we really need: fajitas, BBQ or fresh lettuce? The government answered this question for us. Other neighborhoods had started a new system where one family member could leave the home one day for no longer than four hours to go to a supermarket. Then they had to stay home for the following two days and test to ensure they hadn’t contracted Covid during their shopping time. But the mere thought of walking the aisles of a store, fruits and vegetables at our fingertips excited us. For the previous several weeks, our shopping experience had been a source of great frustration and anguish. I am not being dramatic.

Shopping like an insomniac

Because we couldn’t leave our community to get food, we needed everything delivered. (Delivery drivers and other workers were “essential,” so they were working.) The grocery shopping apps on our phones had specific times of functionality. We THOUGHT those times were set at 6 and 8:30 AM. To give ourselves an advantage, we put things in our carts the night before. Then when the alarm sounded the next morning, we could just click, click, click and try to complete a purchase. We told you a little about this process when we described being Locked Up and Locked In.

The problem was, the rest of Shanghai was also click, click, clicking at the very same time. It reminded me of when I was a kid, trying to win concert tickets by calling the local radio station. I’d call and get a busy signal, so I’d hang up and call again. And again and again. This was no different, except we wore out our thumbs on our cell phones instead of hanging up the rotary phone and giving the dial another frantic seven spins. Or if your house was fancy, hitting the redial button on the cordless. The disappointing result was a little more severe here: Debbie Gibson’s concert would still be amazing without me there but dinner would be unfulfilling without chicken and spinach.

In a never-ending nightmare

More often than not, grocery shopping time would end and everything in our carts would sell out. Eventually the app would gray out and we’d know it was time to stop clicking. Keep in mind, we were not starving, nor were we ever lacking food in the house. We had properly stocked up on many things and the government has sent a few packages of food randomly. Our frustration and moderate levels of panic came from the fact that acquiring new and fresh food wasn’t reliable or consistent. It made us appreciate our lives pre-lockdown, where we just ran out to the store and got whatever we needed immediately. Back when we were able to prep meals and our refrigerator was a work of nutrient-rich, culinary art.

But the stress of not knowing when we would have fresh food, coupled with the feeling of failing to successfully shop took a little toll on us. Our brains were constantly working. When it wasn’t literal work for our school – where we are sending lessons in an online platform called Seesaw – it was grocery shopping. Our brains didn’t stop and it was exhausting.

Temporary hospital in February 2020, converted from Wuhan Sports Center in Wuhan, central China's Hubei Province. — (Photo by Xiao Yijiu/Xinhua via Getty) (Xinhua/Xiao Yijiu via Getty Images)

That’s the sound of the men, workin’ on the fangcang

You might remember the temporary “hospitals” that China constructed so efficiently. Community officials swiftly removed our neighbors at the first sign of infection. We would read about it in the neighborhood WeChat groups. If a neighbor adjacent to or immediately above or below our apartment tested positive, we could also be taken to the fangcang. It didn’t matter if we tested negative. The rationale was that their germs would travel to us across the hallway or up/down the sewer pipes. I mentioned we had a foster dog at the time, Pearl. We lived in constant fear over what would happen to her if should we be taken from our home. Animals did not go to the fangcangs.

We had seen some neighborhoods had made dog kennels outside community complexes for dogs to wait for their owners to come back, but we had also seen less humane ways of handling pets without owners. We wanted neither solution to happen but ultimately we knew we had no control over it, just like grocery shopping.

To quote REO Speedwagon,

Two ladies in required PPE, delivering food in their community in Shanghai, China, 2022. — Masked- and gloved-up for volunteer food delivery duty, we’re just excited to be out of the apartment!

We said “I believe it’s time for me to fly” as soon as we could. We put sweet Pearl in the care of our dear neighbor Kaye and started on our much-needed European adventure that eventually landed us in İstanbul. Peace out, Shanghai!

Do we need text after the photo?

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