Going Viral.
Summary of Events and Other Things:
- Learning is fun
- Monthly reading
- A brand new job
- Living in lock-down
- Missing my wife.
First off the bat, I miss my wife. She's been back in Fuzhou for 20 days at time of writing and that represents the longest time we've spent apart since we got married late last year.
I appreciate it's not a great deal of time in the grand scheme of things, but it feels all the longer due to the fact I'm stuck at home, on my own, all day every day; unless you count asking the bao'an at the community gate how on earth their parcel filing system works, I haven't talked to another human in the flesh for almost three weeks.
We've lived apart before, and while I'm not overly given to sentimentality, neither of us wants to be in that situation ever again and hopefully it won't last much beyond another two or three weeks.
Which brings me on to the elephant in the month: isolation. Why haven't I spoken to another human being, in person, since my wife returned to work in a far away city?
Well, in case you've been living under a rock for the near entirety of 2020 so far, China's experiencing a viral epidemic which in the last few days has begun seriously threatening to upgrade itself to a pandemic.
As a result, people's lives here are now hugely restricted, and the entire country is on at least some level of lock-down, with self-isolation the norm. Many offices remain shut and non-essential visits to the great lands of the overhead sun are at least frowned-upon, if not outright banned (it depends where you are).
I'm not here to whine about this; no one I know is sick, Shanghai hasn't been hit hard, and my job's started, so I'm theoretically still making money, without even having to commute (although my first payday hasn't rolled around yet and I'm expecting my bank to go into meltdown when presented with a foreign name that they already have records for, as they for some reason like to do).
In terms of my own experience, the company I work for has been operating a work from home policy since the Spring Festival ended and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. So while I can't go outside very much, I'm no longer in employment limbo.
Shanghai's huge and most people use the metro to get to and from work. Understandably, the authorities want to avoid a scenario where millions of commuters are cramming themselves into close contact with each other in giant, sealed sardine cans every day.
I registered with the Residents' Committee (居委会) for my community to get what, for want of a better word, I've been calling a mask ration card, although it was single-use and only good for five face masks, so more of an emergency contingency than a practical way of getting back to work. The reason this measure has been necessary is that ever since mid-January, it has been more or less impossible to buy face-masks, unless you know someone living abroad who can buy and then send them to you through the post.
The Residents' Committee also called me up last week and informed me that I needed to get an entry-exit pass (出入证), without which no one is to be allowed back into the community should they leave, for example, to go to the supermarket. There's no limit on how often residents are allowed out and back in here just yet, although I'm aware that many Fuzhou communities have what I'm going to call an excursion limit of one trip out every two days, which is obviously an issue if you have to go to work, which employees of my old company there started doing a fortnight ago.
One of the obvious upshots of all this, and a major issue for those who live here, is that plenty of businesses, those which can't operate via remote working, are taking a hit, and along with their employees, are now facing uncertain futures. The economic impact of this epidemic and the measures used to contain it on small businesses and the innumerable families who are in unpaid limbo, waiting for things to go back to normal, is going to be significant and will almost certainly have painful, long-term effects.
I'm lucky; I work for a massive corporation whose areas of business are not so obviously affected by staff working remotely, and 99% of my job is hammering away on a keyboard and staring at a screen. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people in a far less certain situation than I am.
And that, runs semi-smoothly into theme of the month numero drei: my new job.
I was originally slated to start work before the Spring Festival but then my work permit didn't come through soon enough, and so I had to wait until after the holiday. Then I was supposed to start on the third, but then the epidemic threw everyone's plans into disarray. By the time my second new start-date rolled around on the tenth, everyone had figured out this wasn't blowing over anytime soon and had belatedly made arrangements to do all the admin remotely and get everyone working from home.
So, I have now been working for three weeks, and I am yet to meet any of my colleagues. This is an awkward arrangement, to say the least. But te shu qing kuang call for te shu measures, and so far work seems to have been going pretty well. We've been having daily video meetings so I'm not actually feeling as isolated and unsure as I otherwise might have been.
It also helps that I've been doing a similar job for the last two years and only really need to acclimatise myself to the idiosyncrasies of a new company, and not the actual work, which I'm mostly comfortable with already. One aspect that hasn't changed since my last job, is that part of my duties include playing games on my phone, which is hardly arduous, if I'm being honest.
Having said that, I'm not naturally inclined towards mobile gaming, being more of a console, single-player, story-mode kind of guy. Still, needs must, and I've genuinely enjoyed many of the games that working has obliged me to play (although some of the later ones I played in Fuzhou really were awful), having become unhealthily addicted to one of the old company's SLGs while I was working there and heading in the same direction with my first game here.
That game is an asymmetric survival horror game, based around running away from some variety of scary big bad while trying to perform time-intensive tasks in order to escape, tasks which require you to stand, vulnerable, in one place for a prolonged period, thereby ratcheting up the tension. It's not a style of game I'd ever played before.
It's a simple yet effective formula, and unlike with SLGs, it's one that allows you to dip in and out as and when you please. Although, if it weren't for reading and writing, I'd probably still be spending an inordinate amount of time playing it.
Reading, writing, segues. So the blog's been up for over a month now, which, at least in my eyes, is an achievement. Sure, there's not a lot of substance on here yet, but I am pleased with my post on book recommendations for modern Chinese literature and, while probably not all that appealing, I did manage to use some fancy words in my not quite review of Frank Dikötter's People's Trilogy (tldr: read River Town and China's War with Japan).
I also posted a short piece in Chinese that I wrote a good year or so ago now but never got round to posting on my old Jianshu blog. It's one of the shortest, and I think one of the clearance and best presented, pieces that I've written (correlation worth noting there), and seemed pertinent as it focuses on giving up on writing because I suck at it, more or less.
It was written in relation to my Chinese, but still holds relevance in other areas and so I might translate it one of these days. Anyway, rediscovering it (I had genuinely forgotten that I wrote it), spurred me on to write my first piece in Chinese for a very long time indeed, and that should be proofread and up next month, from which point onward I'll try to get a piece up each and every month.
With regards to reading, it's been a bit of a slow month, but I did get around to reading Mao's Talks at the Yan'an Forum on Literature and Art in Chinese and The Penguin History of Modern Vietnam in English.
As you might expect, the former was dry, dogmatic, and full of Marxist buzzwords, making for less than smooth and enjoyable reading. What surprised me was just how little concrete information there was on Mao's vision for socialist literature, but then, the more I learn about Mao, the more intentionally vague I realise he was.
The Vietnamese history book was a lot more interesting, if not comprehensive. The earlier parts were fine, but I had hoped to learn more about domestic changes once all the wars had finally ended.
Any modern history of Vietnam is invariably going to focus on that long period of conflict, covering as it does French, American, and Chinese interest, intervention, and invasion, and no general history aimed at a non-academic audience is going to cover individual events in minute detail for reasons of length and a fear of overloading the target audience.
In terms of providing a broad overview from which to learn more about specific events and time periods, the book represents a decent start. It puts Vietnam's historic role in the region in context and explains its relations with its neighbours and the wider world with clarity. As someone with a near zero prior knowledge of the nation's history, I found it useful.
I also began reading both The Great Tangshan Earthquake, in Chinese, and C.T. Hsia's seminal work, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, in English, but as I haven't finished either yet I'll save talking about them until next month, at which point I'll probably have earnt the right to relax with a novel while I figure out what to tackle next.
That just leaves me to sum up the state of my "self-improvement". My Vietnamese continued to come on in leaps and bounds during the first half of the month but has taken a backseat to work and reading over the last couple of months. I'm still studying and making inroads, but this feels like a short period of "digestion" while I prepare for another sudden burst just before my wife finally moves in.
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