Onwards and Upwards
I swear I used to be 177cm tall. But these days I’m a solid 176. 🤷♂️
This won’t do. My life has shrunk enough over the last 3 years, I refuse to let the same thing happen to my height. 😡
So I got myself a fresh new haircut, and now I’m up to 178. 🙌
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Just Call Me Master
Writing a postgraduate dissertation about modern China - as a foreigner, living in China, at a Chinese university - isn’t exactly easy these days. But creativity will always find a way.
I’m happy to have threaded the needle, and have finally received my Masters in Philosophy. Big thanks go to my supervisor, my professors, and everyone in the School of Humanities at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.👨🎓🎊
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I’m so sorry, Bugs Bunny
As part of a Mosaic of China podcast recording in Chengdu back in early March 2022, I was told by my delightful guest that 300 million rabbit heads are eaten in Sichuan Province every year. So I figured… I should at least try it once.
I’m so sorry, Bugs Bunny. 😵🐰
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The Mosaic of China Podcast Enters its Third Season
Like many of us in Shanghai, I’ve been feeling thoroughly displeased for the last few months. But I’ve decided that it’s time to come out of mourning for ‘life before COVID-Zero’ and to start living again. Or at least to enjoy whatever window of freedom we have been granted for this moment.
Luckily, I found 200 people who felt the same way, and we gathered in Shanghai to celebrate the Season 03 launch of the Mosaic of China podcast. With a fantastic slate of 30 new guests coming up over the next 30 weeks, this season is the reminder we all needed that there are still some amazing people under our noses, representing 30 unique perspectives on what it’s like to live and work in China. A true Mosaic.
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An Unexplored Corner of Yunnan Province
We explored a part of Yunnan Province that’s not often visited by international tourists. In all eight years of living in mainland China, we’ve never heard stunned exclamations of “老外! [lǎowài - foreigner]” as often as in the last six days. 😮😯
Things to watch out for in the vid:
👨🍳 Sexy butcher
🪷 Lotus season in Yunnan
🇫🇷 French Indochina railway architecture
🧺 Massive fishing basket
🛕 China’s answer to Gaudi
🐴 Working horses, in a village without cars
⛩ The 2nd-largest Confucian temple in China
🍚 Red rice, which is only grown in this region
🇲🇳 Mongolian village 2000km south of Mongolia
👨✈️ Communist cosplay
🐘 ‘Elephant Tusk’ local vegetable
👩🌾 The Hani, one of 25 Yunnan ethnic minorities
💦 Slow-motion splashing
👨🍳 Did I mention the sexy butcher?
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The Humanising Effect of the Well-timed Selfie
I’m posting this photo from an excursion I took in South-West China just yesterday. Before raising my camera, the people on this tourist bus were keeping to themselves. Afterwards, the whole bus erupted into joyful waves and shouts of “hello” in English.
Yes, the timing of this photo coincides with the Chinese government’s belligerent response to Pelosi’s provocative touchdown in Taiwan. Yes, there is a strand of disgusting ugly nationalism that is on the ascendancy in China, just as it is in many other parts of the world. But I’m posting this for the simple purpose to remind everyone that we should never equate a regime to its people. And we should never let the shrill voices of populists and isolationists deafen us to the humanity of others.
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Alamak! SPR RIP 2006-2022
Alamak! Today marks the end of my status as a Singapore Permanent Resident. SPR RIP 2006-2022. 🇸🇬🙏
Filing my final paperwork here at the Singapore Consulate in Shanghai, I couldn’t help but reminisce about what this status has meant to me over the years. Buying and selling two properties, setting up two companies, getting a driving license, employing three domestic workers, raising two dogs, the list goes on.
I haven’t lived there since 2012, but I will always consider Singapore to be a home from home. I will always have unquenchable cravings for mee siam, nasi padang, roti prata and ais kacang. And I will always remember the meanings of MRT, ERP, CBD, PIE, HDB, PAP, LTA, and - now most importantly - CPF.
As a fitting accompaniment to this event, Shanghai offered up a blazing 39℃ afternoon. So I marked the occasion with a sweaty walk home in the sun, a smile on my face and a twinkle in my eye.
Wa seng zao liao! See you again soon, Singapore.
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The Stars are Out
At last some positive news, China's newly-updated COVID-19 Control Protocol has removed the * on our ‘Green Arrow Codes’.
Theoretically, this means that travel will become unrestricted within the Chinese mainland. Until now, the * has denoted that you have been in a ‘Medium Risk Area’, which curtails your ability to travel to certain places. At one point earlier this year, I had collected three of them, and needed to quickly return home to Shanghai before my luck ran out.
Let’s see how this plays out, since the surprise announcement just came out today, and it might take a while for certain Provinces to change their policies. But for now, it’s a small step in the right direction.
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Surly Teenagers in a Mall
I’m posing like a surly teenager whose parents have allowed them to go to the local mall. Because that’s exactly how it feels like to be in Shanghai right now. We’ve been granted more freedom, but we still don’t have any agency, and there still isn’t much to do. So you end up mainly shuffling around like listless teenagers, bemoaning authority figures and their stupid rules. Some of our friends keep getting ‘grounded’ at home, and the same might happen to us, for reasons our teenage brains can’t process. It’s, like, so unfair.
So when people ask me how I’m doing, I usually find myself answering just like a teenager. I mumble something about being ‘OK’, while it’s quite clear that I’m being antisocial, short-tempered and petulant. But putting one foot after the other and ‘getting on with it’ is how I survived my teenage years, and that’s what I’m doing now. It’s an awkward phase I’m going through.
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An Impressive but Unsustainable Spectacle
So we’ve received a ticket which allows one person per household outside our residential compound for a few hours each day. And what greets us there is a facsimile of normal life. The streets are beginning to fill with people, one or two shops have started to open, and makeshift hair salons have popped up on every other corner. Back at home, things are also looking a little closer to normal. As supplies have started to become easier to obtain, we’ve slowly been emptying the fridge of ‘essentials’ and letting it fall back into its natural state: as a receptacle for alcohol mixers and neglected jars of condiments.
It feels like we’re finally coming to the end of our Shanghai lockdown story. When the dust has completely settled on the world’s response to the pandemic, we can have a grand debate about the chaos of freedom versus the tyranny of protection. But right now, the key verdict on the last three months is that China remains in zero-rush to relax its zero-COVID policy, exhibiting zero-interest in reintegrating into the rest of the world. So international folks will continue having a tough time trying to keep one foot in China and the other elsewhere. At this point we’re all Jean-Claude Van-Damme doing the splits on two slowly diverging Volvo trucks. An impressive spectacle, but not one that can be sustained forever.
For the last few weeks, I’ve been focusing most of my creative energy on writing these Shanghai updates for Denny and me. I’ve taken pains to strike a personal and balanced tone, being truthful to our own experience while trying not to misrepresent the experiences of others. This phase is now coming to an end, and I will soon pivot back to my usual creative outlet of producing the Mosaic of China podcast. I’m much more comfortable being a conduit for other people’s voices rather than dominating the full bandwidth with my own. But what will remain constant are the details about life in China that you usually can’t find anywhere else. Thank you for following our lockdown story. Hopefully from now on I’ll be back to posting with a little more variety, a little less frequency, and a lot less intensity.
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All the Feline Feels
You may have heard reports that Shanghai has ‘opened up’ following its harsh citywide lockdown. Let me quickly explain what this means.
There is a patchwork quilt of realities. Some lucky people have indeed already received 临时出入证 (temporary exit/entry passes), allowing them to leave their compounds, usually for a short time once a day. Others have been allowed out, only for that permission to be immediately revoked once some unknown local official begins to feel nervous about the optics of people exercising their right to freedom. And for residents whose compounds remain in total lockdown, they have the exotic torture of being congratulated on their freedom while sitting under continued house arrest.
In our case, the local neighbourhood committee has opened the lock on our gate, but has not removed it. So it continues to hang ominously, silently proclaiming: “We can easily lock you up again, whenever we want”. We haven’t received any official passes, so our notion of freedom is entirely synthetic. But we took the chance to take an unofficial walk around the block, and the cat in the window of this local pet-shop sums up our emotional longing all too accurately.
The logical interpretation of an open lock is that it’s a ‘hopeful sign’. Maybe it is, and maybe we will receive our official 临时出入证 soon. With no residents in our compound testing positive for COVID-19 in all 64 days of lockdown, we’ve been conditioned to not seeing any correlation between hopeful signs and happy outcomes. And for the time being, shops, restaurants, and even parks all remain closed. So the best case scenario is that we can visit this cat through the glass again tomorrow. 🐈🪟
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Piazza Privilege
This post is about privilege. Today we decided to use our tiny balcony to pretend that we were in an Italian piazza rather than stuck in our Shanghai apartment. This weekend we made a feast out of the fanciest cheeses and cold cuts from our fridge. We’ve recently watched Dune, The Power of the Dog, West Side Story and CODA, all from the comfort of our (increasingly sagging) couch. And we’re surrounded by neighbours in our compound who have been very kind and supportive to one-another throughout these harsh few weeks of confinement. Even though we’ve lost our freedom for a total of 56 days and counting, we’re still luckier than 99% of people in Shanghai.
Living for so long in China starts to make you a little inured to the all-pervasive miasma of state power. So your messages of support over the last couple of months have not just been a massive morale booster, but also a useful reminder that this hasn’t been ‘normal’, and there is such a thing as individual human dignity. Having said that, it has been a little uncomfortable to read comments about our “bravery” and “endurance”, when in fact for the most part we’ve been able to wallow in the luxury of denial and disassociation. That’s the power of privilege, even in times like these.
We’ve certainly had our lows. This whole time, Denny has been working from home with a broken hand. And while I’ve been telling myself that I’m functioning fine, my body has been telling me that I’m not. One day let me regale you with all the fun and creative symptoms it came up with. But for now, I’m taking a cue from the weather and am starting the week with a sunnier disposition. Parts of Shanghai are supposedly opening up this week. No doubt there will be many days of continued false hope and confusion before this means anything to us. Until then, I’ll be in my Italian piazza. Finché c'è vita c'è speranza.
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Dystopia Level Silver
So we’ve reached the crappy milestone of our 50th day of lockdown in Shanghai. That’s 9 days in March, and 41 consecutive days since April 1st. Dystopia Level Silver unlocked.
Despite official reports that the number of cases are going down, the lockdown has perversely become even stricter. In our district, more barricades are going up; fewer deliveries are being allowed; and now if even one person tests positive in your building, *everyone* gets carted off to central quarantine. It’s yet another doubling down on the exponential lunacy of Zero-COVID. What once could be seen as a policy with some degree of merit has long since become detached from the bounds of logic. The same singular strategy that has prevented us from stepping outside of China since February 2020 is now preventing us from stepping outside of our compound. Zero-COVID has overtaken Omicron in terms of its indiscriminate menace.
We’re surviving on a diet of cheap distractions. Denny has something called a ‘job’, which appears to keep him busy. Apart from that, it’s down to the basic routines of eating, drinking, and looking at willies on the internet. The whole city has taken a bumpy nosedive down Maslow’s pyramid, and we still don’t know when we’ll reach rock bottom.
We’re so lucky to be locked in together. We’re a good team: he does most of the cooking and cleaning; while I do most of the deliveries and dishwashing, and quiet sobbing in a foetal position. Despite a universe of anxiety, our little solar system is still spinning on its constant axis of jokes and hugs. I would rather not have another 50 days of this. But I’m grateful that we’ve been through it together.
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China as an Overbearing Parent
A few residential compounds have started to open up in Shanghai, and there’s hope that this represents the beginning of the end of this harsh city lockdown. In our case, one of our neighbours has been entrusted with the key to the lock on our gate, and she has started to leave it unlocked at random times of the day. We have no idea how this seemingly arbitrary decision got made, or by whom. But we’re in no mood to enquire; we just want to take a walk around the block.
There’s no thought of celebrating yet, while so many of our friends remain behind closed doors. Besides, the streets remain empty; shops remain closed; and everyone is nervous that the slightest uptick in positive COVID cases may put us all back to square one. And square one is where most of the city still languishes, just by luck of the lockdown lottery.
The two questions we’ve recently been asked the most are: 1) Why is China doing this? And 2) Why would anyone now wish to remain in Shanghai? To answer the first question, I would need to explain how China works, and only an idiot would try to suggest one unifying theory. So here’s mine.
China seriously cares for its people. That’s a fact. But it cares for them as a 1.4 billion collective, not as 1.4 billion individuals. China is an overbearing parent looking after their single child. They only want the best for it. They let it play, albeit under very tight supervision. They tell it what to do, and scold it when it steps out of line. No nuance; no negotiation. Does an overbearing parent always know what’s best for their child? And when other parents offer them unsolicited advice or criticism, does an overbearing parent get offended?
It’s an only child: the child is one; the child is indivisible. The parent does not need to understand each of the 1.4 billion individual cells that constitutes their child. Why would the concept of a cell even occur to them? The same goes for certain clusters of cells, certain organs and systems. If the parent feels that they’re keeping the child in general good health, does it matter to them what a tonsil does? Or a gallbladder, or an endocrine system? So long as China feels that it’s keeping 1.4 billion people in indivisible harmony, then what do the needs of a specific minority group matter? Or a city? Or a functioning system of public discourse? There’s a fundamental disconnect between the pure parental love of the child, and the complicated tangle of biology beneath its skin.
Most people outside of China (and some of us within!) just view the situation from the perspective of the cell. But in making this entirely accurate assessment, we’re also missing half the picture. The cells are also the child is also the cells. So an average individual in China feels both loved and unloved at the same time. Hugged too tight, and heedlessly ignored. Schrödinger was late to the game, the Chinese have understood the paradox of yin and yang for centuries. Today’s China is a mixture of Confucius, Han Feizi and Mao. While from the outside, we only see it through the prism of Beckett, Kafka, and Orwell.
So having lived through China’s recent metaphorical heart attack in Shanghai, we need to turn to the second question: why would anyone who has a choice decide to remain in China?
This is a question that every person must answer individually, so I can only speak for myself. My answer is that cross-cultural experience isn’t just about traveling the world comparing delicious desserts. You can learn more from panic attacks than you can from patisseries. Would I prefer to be eating pear tarts in Paris right now? Oui. But do I also value being able to think like I do, and view the world like I do? And at exactly what point does that privilege come at a price that I’m no longer willing to pay?
Making the decision to stay or leave one place or another is always a question of principle and practicality. When the effects of COVID-19 were ravaging your city, did you break your lease, quit your job, cut ties with your community, and relocate? It would be understandable if you had, but just as understandable if you hadn’t. We won’t stay in China forever; at some point the winds of fate that blew us here will also blow us away. Until then, we’re going to continue making the most out of our time in this land of paradox.
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