China Under Quarantine

The following is what life has been like in Qingdao since I’ve come back. Many of my friends and family have been constantly asking me what it’s been like here, so here it is. Apologies if it’s a bit on the long side.

I flew back to Qingdao from Cambodia on February 10. There were rumors that very soon, either China would cancel all incoming international flights, or Cambodia would stop its service to China. From everything I was seeing, it looked like the coronavirus, as it was still called then, was about to spread throughout Asia and I did not want to be stranded in Cambodia. While it has made great strides in the last two decades, its health care system still falls far short of other Asian countries.

Boarding the flight in Phnom Penh, I was asked to fill out a medical form about my recent travel history. They also took my temperature three times and a mask was required from as soon as I set foot in the airport. My flight connected in Shanghai, where I had a four-hour layover. As I deplaned, and before I entered the terminal, my temperature was taken again and I filled out another medical form. My temperature would be taken yet again as I went through Immigration and Customs.

Shanghai Pudong Airport is normally one of the ten busiest airports in the world. After I successfully made it through Customs, I took the shuttle to the main terminal for my connecting flight. I went through security and the other side looked like a ghost town. It was 9:00 am and just past the security check, there was no one to be found in either direction.

My flight from Shanghai to Qingdao was close to empty. Upon arrival, I had my temperature taken twice more. I picked up my luggage and caught a taxi home. My apartment complex is roughly half a city block with nine large towers of homes. There are two gates on every side, none of which have ever been closed or locked since I moved in a year and a half ago. When the taxi dropped me off, though, I found that only one gate was open; the others had been padlocked shut with barbed wire strung over the top.

At the gate, three men in security uniforms asked to see my passport. They wanted to know if I lived in the complex and where I had come from. They again took my temperature and made me sign in on a ledger tracking everyone that had come through the gate that day. After they made sure I wasn’t trying to sneak into the complex, they told me that I would have to self-quarantine myself for 14 days. I was not to leave my apartment for any reason. Finally, I was home and was able to take off my mask after wearing it for the past 11 hours.

I behaved myself and stayed in for the next two days but on day three, my cupboards were almost bare and I needed to restock. I decided to take my chances and walk to the supermarket across the street. I donned my mask and made it past the security at the gate without an issue. They barely looked up as I walked through. I still had to get back through, but at least I would have groceries at that point.

At the supermarket, I had to go through the same procedure as my apartment. I filled out a form and they took my temperature. The large supermarket was almost devoid of shoppers. I was worried about runs on staples like bottled water and toilet paper but both were stocked to the gills. Actually, other than the lack of a crowd, the supermarket looked completely normal. I bought enough food to last me the next two weeks and headed home.

I didn’t have the same good luck when I approached my security gate. There was a woman there that I hadn’t seen before and apparently she was the boss. She asked me when I had arrived and then scolded me for breaking my quarantine. If I needed food or supplies, I was supposed to ask a neighbor to go to the store for me. Finally, she let me go with the threat that if I was caught out again, the police would be notified and I would be forced into the government-supervised quarantine, which entailed checking into a motel that the government had taken over. I would be locked into a small room with no refrigerator or microwave, be served three barely edible meals a day, and then be billed for the stay at the normal motel rate upon checkout. A friend was unlucky enough to suffer this fate.

I spent the remainder of the two weeks inside. Although it was the middle of February, so it’s not like I’d have been spending much time outside anyway. On day 15, I felt myself going a little stir crazy and decided to go out and see what the neighborhood looked like. The security guards smiled and waved as I walked past them with my head held high. I was no longer a rule-breaker.

I live in a fairly busy part of the city. There is a large mall and the streets are usually constantly busy with traffic. Here I was, though, late morning on a weekday and it was silent. No cars. No people. The few I did see all wore masks, hurried to get where they were going, and they kept a good ten feet between each other. Every restaurant and shop I walked past was shuttered. As a rough guess, I’d say there are about 200 restaurants within a quarter-mile from my home, all of them were closed.

In late February, as businesses began to reopen, the government started using an app to track everyone’s health and movements. Wechat is an all-in-one app combining messaging, mobile payment, and social media. It is ubiquitous in China, with over one billion active accounts. The tracking app was run through WeChat and it was required to enter any business or public transportation. You would swipe your phone and, hopefully, it would respond with a green signal. This meant that you had been successfully tracked as well as confirming that you hadn’t been in close proximity of anyone that has tested positive for Covid-19.

On average, I scan this app about five times a day, meaning my location is being tracked everywhere I go. My temperature is also taken at all of these places, so about five times a day. As someone who is fiercely pro-privacy, this has been a lot for me to accept and I am very wary of its abuse. Still, moving to China, I knew I would always have to forfeit a lot of the privacy rights I enjoy in the States. Many Chinese are also apprehensive about this tracking app being abused and with good reason. One city, Hangzhou, has already proposed making the use of the app permanent. Its citizens responded with uproar, though, and when polled by a local news service, 95% of the Chinese responders were against it.

Things slowly got better. By the beginning of March, the first restaurants started opening, first for delivery, then by seating tables several feet apart, and finally, by the end of the month, it was back to normal. Except, it wasn’t. Normally, restaurants in China are always packed at night. It’s the main social gathering place for men. They will sit for hours, chatting, smoking, and drinking Tsingtao beer. Even now, the restaurants are, at best, half-full during peak hours.

Before the spread of the virus, I was scheduled to start back to work after the Chinese New Year holiday on February 5. We started teaching short online classes in late February, but I was only working about 2-3 hours each week. That has gradually picked up to the point where I hit 12 hours one week. Now, they have finally announced that school will start back full-time and in-person next week. Summer vacation has been canceled and kids will resume classes once their school passes a stringent safety inspection.

There is some good news. Weather-wise, today has been the best day of the year: 75 degrees and sunny. I went for a long walk around my neighborhood and through the large park that sits in back of my apartment complex. For the first time since this started, I saw more people without masks than wearing them. Also, handshakes have come back. And concerts. Well, small scale anyway. Last week, I went to a small punk club that could maybe hold 100 people to watch a friend’s band play. It was packed wall-to-wall and only a few wore masks. If that is happening in China, it is only a matter of time, hopefully, things will get back to normal in other parts of the world.

Many here are afraid of a second wave and there are lots of precautions being taken to avoid one but people are going about resuming their lives. It took four months of everyone staying in to flatten the curve. When we went out, we were aggressively tracked, required to wear masks, and health markers were checked multiple times a day. From what I’ve seen in the States and other countries, many of the precautions being taken are extremely reasonable. Stay home as much as you can and stay safe and this too will pass.