In the last couple of posts, I wrote about our crazy 42-hour journey from Alexandria, Virginia to our home in Beijing, where my family and I had been living before the pandemic began. But even though we’ve returned home, the challenge isn’t over — we’re required by law to quarantine for 14 days and take another COVID-19 test before we’re let outside. And this is real quarantine: no stepping outside our door, no going into the backyard. For the first day or two, a guard stood outside of our house before he relaxed and trusted that we wouldn’t leave. We can open our front door to accept deliveries and put out our trash, which I’m told someone incinerates.
We’re on day 13 right now. And with every hour, as we get closer to the end, it only seems to get harder. Very tempting are the basil plants right outside our front door — I’ve wanted to go out and pick a few leaves from time to time, but even that might count as breaking our quarantine.
The first week was actually kind of nice. We’ve been away for almost eight months, so it felt great just to be home. Our kids rejoiced with endless Legos, board games, and books. They played with their pets, a cute guinea pig named Glance and a rabbit the size of a small dog. (Then, depressingly, they returned to their tablets and Kindle.) My husband retreated to the armchair that he loves to read in. I was happy to have my writing desk back and a fully-equipped kitchen with all my gadgets.
But I didn’t miss much of my stuff, aside from our Jura espresso maker in the kitchen and a few dresses with pockets. Actually, having a cluttered house stressed me out. In the States, we lived for eight months with just the stuff in our suitcases (and a Target purchase here and there). And now back in China, we had so much stuff, coming out of every drawer. I set about de-cluttering and made a huge pile of toys, clothes, shoes, and random knick-knacks to give away.
I haven’t cooked much. I’d cooked nearly every day in the States since mid March, when restaurants were ordered to close in D.C. We never became comfortable with takeout in the States. Perhaps we were too careful, but with coronavirus everywhere, it just wasn’t a chance we wanted to take, especially knowing that had we tested positive for COVID-19, we’d blow our chances of getting back to China.
But now that we’re in China — which fumbled its COVID-19 response early on but has managed to control the coronavirus for now — we’ve been indulging with the help of Chinese delivery apps. Delivery men on scooters will bring pretty much anything to our door within half an hour. (And yes, it only seems to be men. So far, I haven’t noticed a female delivery person.) You can get Skittles delivered from a nearby 7-11 or a fancy 10-course banquet meal from Beijing’s most expensive restaurants. We’ve opted for the dishes we missed when we were in the States: Peking duck, served with mandarin pancakes and a sweet-savory dipping sauce from Da Dong (which famously opened and closed in New York City last year; the Beijing locations are still among the best duck restaurants in the capital); Sichuan stir-fries like kungpao chicken from a local hole-in-the-wall, and soup dumplings from the venerable Din Tai Fung. Not quite as famous but just as good is Black Sesame Kitchen, which one night delivered bottles of wine, red-braised pork, and five-flavor eggplant. For dessert, my kids have ordered Taiwanese shaved ice and flower tofu from Meet Fresh (more on that in a future post!), ice cream from our local corner store, and pastries from our favorite baker. Bubble tea helped with the jet lag. And yes, I’ve been indulging in sweets too. Thank goodness we also had an exercise bike delivered before we arrived!
Preparing for our entry into the outside world, I downloaded an app onto my phone called my “health kit,” which shows your COVID-19 status and a list of places you’ve been recently. We’ll need to show our health kit occasionally when we’re out and about, and Chinese authorities use the information in the event of an outbreak (and to control people’s movements). The app, using a centralized database linked to your phone and your ID, rates you one of three colors. If your phone lights up green, you’re able to move about freely in China. Mine came up yellow, noting that I’d been in Beijing, Tianjin (where our flight had landed), and (in red letters) 美国 - the United States, which leads the world in the highest number of cases. If your screen lights up in red, you’re in trouble: you’ve got coronavirus.
In the States, I didn’t ever feel this sense of confinement. I now understand why house arrest is a form of criminal punishment. To be inside, withering away without sunlight or the privilege of breathing fresh air (even if it might be polluted Beijing air) is to endure hardship.
In the States, we talked about being under “lockdown” but we always had the freedom to leave our front door and drive, walk, or run anywhere we wanted. I went out almost every day during our self-isolation, to do errands, pick up groceries, take the kids on bike rides, and to work out for my sanity. I wore a mask in crowded spaces and indoors but certainly no one made me wear one. The benefit we have in the States is freedom — lots of it. In the absence of any federal guidance and restrictions, that freedom has also given COVID-19 the ability to spread.
People don't have the same freedom in China. Aside from the health kit apps and the 14-day quarantines that anyone entering the country has to undergo, anyone who tests positive for coronavirus is sent to a hospital for observation, regardless of the symptoms or lack of them.
This morning, I looked up the statistics on coronavirus in China. Yes, critics are suspicious about how accurate the statistics are, but regardless of what the numbers are exactly, how they report their statistics shows how differently China is dealing with COVID-19. Baidu, the Chinese version of Google, displays a chart: one that lists the current situation and another that give the total number of cases and deaths since the pandemic began. Under the current situation, the chart lists a total of how many people are currently being treated, with a breakdown of how many are asymptomatic, how many are suspected cases, and how many people are in intensive care. Note the chart does not say “this is the total number of cases that exists in China” — no one for certain can say how many cases there are in any country. The key is that China is actively containing every confirmed case. After all, what’s the use of counting cases if you’re not going to do anything about them?
That means in China, people who test positive — some of them children — are separated from their families and taken from their homes, as my friend Peter Hessler mentions in a recent New Yorker article. Yes, that sounds harsh, but in this case — and perhaps only in this case — a crackdown of this nature makes sense. Everyone else in an infected person’s household stays safe and when infected people recover, they return home. And it has allowed life to return to normal for the rest of the population. People have returned to work, while restaurants and other establishments are operating without the constant fear of infection among employees and guests. Schools are slated to open in September.
It’s possible that another outbreak might occur and we could go back into another quarantine or lockdown in China. But it’s also nice to have a real possibility that our lives will return to some kind of normalcy, for hopefully long stretches. It’s also nice that I’ll be able to go out without worrying about encountering mask-less people who might very well have COVID-19.
For now, looking out my window and watching a few early morning joggers go by, it seems like the price of China’s harsh coronavirus containment plan is worth it. But we’ll get to see for ourselves in the coming months.