Emerging from Isolation (Partially)
I’m sat writing this in Larry and Friends, my favourite neighbourhood coffee shop, with a caramel macchiato and a peanut butter toasty on the way. It’s a pleasant little shop that was my first find on the day I moved here, in a long-distant past, just under four months ago.
Perched at the window, in my favourite corner seat, I can write in peace while watching the world go by; cars driving back and forth, pedestrians with shopping bags full of groceries, a street cleaner sweeping up fallen leaves from the beech trees that spill over from the garden opposite.
Usually, this would be an unremarkable scene, and yet it’s a far cry from the very same street just a week or two ago. In fact, it’s the first time I’ve been inside a restaurant or cafe since early January. Back then the city was shutting up shop for Spring Festival. As things turned out, it would stay that way long after the holiday ended.
Two weeks ago Shanghai was still in partial lock-down: businesses were closed, restaurants were take-away only, and pedestrians were few and far between.
Back then I was working from home. It saved me a long commute and I had to do a lot less laundry but it was an awkward situation having started work at a new company, in a new city, without ever having set foot on the premises, or having met a single colleague in person.
The fact I could go ahead and start at all makes me a lot luckier than many.
In the weeks since, China’s most populous city has been taking clear steps to return itself to business as usual. Gone are the shelves at the gates to my community for delivery drivers to leave their packages; they’re now being allowed inside once more to deliver directly to their customers’ front doors.
Gone too are the unwelcoming rows of dim, unlit shop fronts and the sense of a city on standstill. As the Qingming festival approaches, everything is finally opening up again, like flowers in bloom after the first spring rains.
While I still need a pass to get into my community and a face-mask to get outside, just the fact that I can sit here typing with a coffee close at hand symbolises a remarkable return to life before the storm.
Other aspects of life are gradually recovering some semblance of normalcy too. My office reopened two weeks ago. For the first week my colleagues and I were commuting in style, going to work each day by taxi, paid for on the company Didi account (~Chinese Uber). But last week the subway reopened and I’ve been sardining myself ever since.
This raises an obvious point. This virus has not gone away. In fact, globally, it’s more serious than ever. While China, as the source of the original outbreak, may be a few weeks, or even months, ahead of the rest of the world, it would be naive to assume that the situation here suggests a timely end to this disaster.
Shutting down huge sectors of the economy and bringing life as we’re used to it to a standstill seems to have effectively slowed the spread of Covid-19 and given the health system some vital breathing space to recover, but it’s not sustainable in the long term and it’s not eradicated the virus either.
Despite a regrettably predictable minority on social media who, through a mix of nationalist hubris and petty schadenfreude, seem to hold and be reveling in the idea that this is now exclusively a problem for the rest of the world to deal with, the sober consensus is that the storm is far from having abated; we’re merely in a man-made eye that will soon too pass.
It feels like only a miracle will stop cases from soaring once more now that public transport and non-essential industries are cranking into gear. Getting the tube every day certainly concerns me, and with predictions that this could end up effecting anywhere from 40% to 70% of the world’s population, I’m starting to shift my hopes to recovering when we catch it rather than avoiding it altogether.
Maybe I’m being pessimistic, but I’m certainly not panicking. Whatever happens will happen, and for now I’m just trying to stay fit and healthy. To which end I went for my first run last night since the turn of the decade; yet another return to the old routine.
Hopefully next weekend my significantly better half will finally be able to join me in Shanghai. It’s already been over six weeks since we last saw each other and that, for us, has been the most difficult part of all this. We were going to be separated regardless, but the outbreak has slowed down the relevant paperwork and extended that time, as well as added uncertainty to proceedings.
For now, I’m going to enjoy my freedom and health, and to hope that everyone else, especially those in worse affected areas and situations, stays well and makes it through as unscathed as possible. Although, at the end of the day, I know that hope isn’t likely to be much use.
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