China just rang in the Lunar New Year. As a nation, they are stuck in a dark loop of the coronavirus, with this looking more like the year of the groundhog rather than the year of the rabbit. China is three years into COVID trauma.
Even though China is a world superpower whose agenda often runs counter America’s, when I think of how COVID is still plaguing everyday Chinese, I can’t help but feel sad. This tale is personal to me. We lived in Shanghai for several highly adventurous years, and I am thinking of the sea of faces I would pass when I ventured out into our neighborhood in Pudong. Once the baby sister side Shanghai, Pudong is split by the Huangpu River from Puxi, the older, more historic section of Shanghai. Pudong has been the focus of the enormous building boom in Shanghai in recent years. Downtown Pudong is now block after block of glittering skyscrapers.
Amidst all the growth and economic strength, it is very reasonable to blame China, which blew COVID like a poisonous kiss to the rest of the world. Chinese leaders have been anything but transparent about how the virus was born and why they can’t contain it with their extreme lockdown policies, which have made a healthy recovery delayed and complex.
I am not suggesting empathy for the leaders who have fumbled along. But I am asking for a moment of compassion for the everyday people locked in a political environment that can be instantly punishing and is something altogether foreign from what we know here.
Part of our perception gap is that our cultural norms are almost the opposite. We lived in Shanghai during a prior pandemic, the bird flu. At first, I was startled to see people wearing surgical masks everywhere, and my family and friends feared we would get sick every time we passed a masked person. But we grew to feel relief as we understood that surgical masks were worn out of courtesy for one another in a country packed with 1.5 billion people. Fortunately, this was not a global pandemic; it ended, and as time went on, the masks disappeared.
Second, you can’t really imagine how restrictive life is there. When we first moved to Shanghai, the internet was booming in more developed economies. But not there. As most foreigners do, we lived in a housing complex away from locals, in our case, in a neighborhood of strangely European-looking houses. Often we would need repairs to our western-style house, so we had a regular influx of helpful people in and out of our home weekly. One day, during one such repair visit, the three repairpersons shyly pointed to our bookcase and gestured to look at our Atlas. I obliged, and after that – almost the whole time we lived there – we had a steady stream of visitors who politely requested to look at “our book.” It was clear that not so long ago, the average Chinese had never seen a map of China or its geographical place in the world.
Unlike our hosts, when we got sick, we went to foreign clinics staffed by mostly Australian doctors. We had limited immediate access to antibiotics, but we did have access, which was absolutely not the norm for regular Chinese.
I had the very unique experience of working as a journalist while being a trailing spouse. I worked at a small English language unit of a Chinese television station. It was fascinating; daily stories were completely censored, the language changed, and sometimes urgency was played down, sometimes hyped up. I never interacted with the censoring minders myself, but they were there in full force, shaping the opinions of their citizens. This is why it is believable that people accept without question the only option of the mediocre Sinovac vaccine; there are few to no therapeutics to treat COVID, and neighborhoods until recently could be shut down in hours. People are conditioned not to know.
Now suddenly, the borders are open, and restrictions on traveling in China and abroad are gone. COVID is still ongoing, despite what the Chinese government may be claiming. We know that thousands of Chinese are dying each week. But despite this uncertainty, the Chinese are on the move for the first time in three years. Train stations and cars are packed as people visit their families for Lunar New Year, which they haven’t been allowed to do for years. Think of the joy and wonder of returning to the life we knew. My family and I experienced that feeling not long ago, and it was terrific. However, for those average Chinese who are experiencing it now, it remains to be seen how COVID will end in China. Will it be with a whimper of herd immunity or a catastrophic bang of a million deaths? It reminds me that we can collectively share mutual human feelings of joy and confusion with people who live very far away, even during a pandemic.
