How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Lockdown: My Two Months of Self-Quarantine in South China
And, just maybe, why you should stop worrying too
I write this from Guangzhou, one of the big four first-tier cities in China[1]. It is now mid-March, 2020, and life is almost back to normal following a countrywide lockdown due to the Covid-19 outbreak. Shops are open again and it is possible to dine inside most restaurants. The streets are restored to the hustle and bustle that ordinarily characterises this southern Chinese metropolis. Some things are different though. Facemasks are ubiquitous in public places and, along with body temperature checks, mandatory for access to all buildings and public transport. Nightclubs, cinemas and live music venues remain shut indefinitely and public events cancelled until further notice. Some cafes and bars are open albeit in a lowkey manner. Schools and universities have resumed, though all teaching is entirely online and will likely remain so until at least May.
But after one-and-a-half months of emergency measures, the state of lockdown has noticeably dissipated, if not altogether formally ceased. And I write this almost with a twinge of sadness, having grown accustomed to life under it. Not in some Stockholm-syndrome sense either — it has actually been an enjoyable and restorative experience.
Wait, what?
OK, let me explain. I write this article because, while things are getting back to ‘normalcy’[2] here in China, the outbreak is gathering pace elsewhere in the world. And it is not just the virus that is proliferating, but the very existential kind of uncertainty that accompanies it, especially when words like ‘lockdown’ start being thrown around. Back in the UK, my home country, this uncertainty has mutated into a full-on mass neurosis with unusual symptoms such as the panic buying of toilet paper; people seem less hysterical about the possibility of succumbing to the virus than by the possibility of having to repurpose bathroom appliances into makeshift bidets (is it because bidets are French in origin??).
But regardless, for anyone facing lockdown in their country (or whatever country they find themselves stranded in as borders close), sharing my experience will maybe help to push the pendulum of panic back in the other direction. I cannot shake the fact that, at least for me, the lockdown hasn’t been all that bad. And, just possibly, it might not be for you either.
Let’s get some obvious objections to this claim out of the way. I have not failed to grasp the severity of the viral outbreak itself; Covid-19 is highly contagious and particularly deadly to the elderly and already infirm, though, it must be stressed, not exclusively so. Nor am I blithe about the economic hardships that have befallen and will continue to befall many due to the outbreak. I am fortunate enough to be employed by a university that is immune to the kind of customer attrition and supply chain disruptions that other businesses will have to endure. This does not prevent me from being acutely aware, and with all of the empathy that one should feel towards his fellow homo sapiens, that a great many will suffer through direct or indirect consequences of the outbreak. But uncertainty does not have to beget hysteria, as the lockdown here has proven. And, on a more individual note, if a month or so of self-quarantine comes attached with minimal contingencies for you, then look upon it for what it is: a suspension from the humdrum, a break from the old routine, a chance for a literal and figurative Spring clean etc.
For some, the idea of a lockdown in China no doubt conjures images of something manifestly totalitarian, perhaps of the populace being plunged into darkness as a giant Orwellian boot descends. But here in Guangzhou, the lockdown has been of an entirely more lenient nature than in other areas of the country, particularly Wuhan, the city at the centre of the outbreak[3]. There was no military enforcement, people were not sealed inside their apartments or given passes that severely regulated their comings and goings[4]. The local authorities here strongly advised people to travel only when essential, though most people stayed at home in a voluntary, mutually-reinforced self-confinement. Supermarkets remained open as did intra-city public transport, though intercity travel was severely restricted. But otherwise, one was free to come and go as necessary. I mention this because these conditions will likely be similar for lockdowns throughout most of the personal-liberty-loving West.
In retelling my experience, I should start at the beginning, since it would be close to the point in the cycle that most countries in the West are now, barring Italy. The notion that something was wrong slowly trickled into social reality at first and then came gushing in. A look back over my social media bears this out. I left Guangzhou on 14th January to go travelling in Taiwan, unaware that anything was wrong. On 18th January, I messaged my girlfriend back in Guangzhou, warning her of an outbreak of a SARS-like virus in Wuhan I had read a news report about. On 22nd January, we discussed how the situation in Wuhan was escalating, as transport in and out of the city had been suspended. On 23rd January, we advised each other to buy facemasks; she was due to travel across the country to her hometown in the north of China for the Spring Festival, now a potentially hazardous undertaking. That day I made two separate trips to the 7–11 to buy facemasks; it turned out that the first pack was the wrong kind, meant to exclude dust, not bacteria — and I was roundly mocked by friends on social media for my ignorance. After 7 years of living in Asia, I was not even aware that there was a difference, which may be evidence of the cultural norms at play in the East/West divide over the adoption of facemasks during the outbreak[5]. By the 25th January, everyone everywhere in my then-current port of call, Taichung, was wearing masks, though ample supplies of these still hung from the shelves of 7–11s. When I arrived in Hong Kong on the 26th January, there were no masks to be found in any shops.
By this point, the virus had spread to other parts of mainland China, along with the proliferation of emergency measures beyond Wuhan and its neighbouring cities in Hebei province. Rather than return to the mainland from Hong Kong as planned, I decided to wait for a couple of days to see how the situation developed. I was due to fly back to the UK from Guangzhou on 4th February, but I feared that I might become trapped there if the city was locked down due to an increase in the number of cases (there had been relatively few by this point) or as part of precautionary emergency measures being implemented on a countrywide level. If I did become trapped there, I was genuinely concerned about my ability to fend for myself, particularly as a foreigner with embarrassingly limited Chinese language skills. All of my friends and colleagues had returned to their hometowns for Spring Festival, so I would be facing it alone too.
A couple of days in Hong Kong turned into a week as I kept extending my stay. I considered rerouting my travel back to the UK from there, but it had become prohibitively expensive by that point. By 2nd February, flights in and out of Guangzhou were still running, with no indication that they would halt anytime soon. I bit the bullet and headed back to the mainland, walking across the border at Luohu Port in Shenzhen, possibly the only crossing on Earth where you can pass from one territory to another via elevator. A human barrier of avuncular security guards, of the kind common to mainland China, was there to administer body temperature checks for all arrivals. If anyone has been bestowed a renewed sense of purpose by the outbreak, it is the legions of normally somnambulant middle-aged men that guard public spaces all over the country. They were now among the frontline custodians of public health.
Luohu Port, a major transport hub for the country, was a ghost town. I boarded a high-speed train to Guangzhou, sharing a carriage intended for a hundred or so passengers with only two or three. The sense of uncanniness continued as I made my way through the empty city streets of Guangzhou back to my university campus. I was reminded of the opening scenes of the film 28 Days Later, as Cillian Murphy wanders through a desolate London. Thankfully nothing has since transpired reminiscent of later scenes in the film.
February 4th came around, my supposed day of departure. At this point, a little more was known about the virus, particularly how it proliferates and who was most at risk if caught. So I was faced with a dilemma. I was little concerned about catching the virus myself, a cavalier attitude at the time because I had already caught and survived pneumonia in China a couple of years earlier. While not exactly fun, it was nowhere near as excruciating as the IBS which I have to regularly contend with. But I was worried about the low-risk, high stakes possibility of carrying the virus with me back to the UK and passing it on to my friends and family, some of whom were in the most-at-risk bracket. I could self-isolate when I arrived back in the UK, but where? Staying in a hotel would hardly be effective. I began to imagine the front covers of newspapers carrying my mugshot as the guy who introduced the virus to the UK from China. And so, I decided to stay. I watched my flight time come and go that evening in my apartment, clutching a bottle of cheap red Great Wall, a common brand of wine from Hebei province.
I was a little deflated at the prospect of not seeing my family. I had not returned home to the UK for Christmas due to other commitments, deciding to delay my trip until February in order make a longer sojourn out of it. There was relief that I would not have to endure the 24-hour journey in each direction of travel, not to mention the inevitable 3–4 days of jetlag that followed each of these. I had three weeks left of my teacher’s vacation, which were no longer going to be three weeks of frantic travelling and catch-ups while trying to shoehorn in all the work from a part-time PhD I had fallen behind on. A lush, golden vista of uninterrupted ‘me’ time had opened up, the kind of which I had not known for as long as I could remember in my recent adult life.
Like a lot of people, I take on too many commitments, heroically seizing every opportunity because you never know which one of these might lead to untold riches, fame, clout, Valhalla etc. Saying yes to everything is a form of madness particular to an age when we’re all meant to be go-getters. I have my part-time PhD, two teaching jobs, various freelance work, all supplemented by endless impositions on my time that I can’t find decent enough reasons to refuse. Before the lockdown, this all equated to a sense of being busy without any genuine productivity, not to mention a disproportionate amount of energy being diverted towards listless procrastination. Exercise was always something to be done tomorrow. My apartment was in a permanent state of disarray. I was a mess, in other words.
But here, in these three weeks, lay the very real possibility of breaking these old patterns and turning everything around. I drew up to-do lists. I began and ended each day with a short burst of exercises. I tried meditation. I put my phone on flight mode and disconnected my router for hours at a time while I got down to writing my PhD thesis and tackled the complexities of electronic music production, something I had long wanted to do but never had the time. Little by little, I regained my attention span, like some long-dormant superpower.
Of course, the environment was different too. My campus apartment is close to a dual carriageway that usually thrums day and night. There was perfect silence for the first time in the four years I had lived there. I would venture out once a day to buy food from somewhere in a radius no further than one or two metro stops away. Although most restaurants had shut, some remained open offering take-out meals instead. The city streets and train stations remained as empty as when I first arrived back in Guangzhou, but the eeriness had given way to serenity, a sense of life merely suspended rather than erased. On one occasion while out and about, I discovered that a popular, upmarket shopping mall was still open. A few shops inside were open but there were no customers. I roamed around the empty mall, muzak reverberating into infinity. It was the most cliched Vaporwave aesthetic but entirely unsimulated.
Daily life was still infused with uncertainty. The numbers of reported cases and death tolls from around the country were climbing every day. But hysteria remained at bay, as far as I could ascertain from social media and in my daily video calls to my girlfriend, stranded at the opposite end of the country. There were even fun exchanges with the security guards on the gate of my campus. On one occasion, I had gone out to dinner after a shower and worn a woolly hat to cover my damp hair, thus preventing a head cold that might be indistinguishable from the virus. When I returned to campus, a guard took my temperature from my forehead as usual. The electronic thermometer read 37.1 degrees. We looked at each other incredulously, unsure of the next move. He motioned for his colleagues. I went outside the campus gate, removed my hat to expose my head to the night air and began downing a bottle of cold water. After a couple of minutes, I went back — 36.8 degrees, still too high. The security guards that had gathered were muttering to themselves, evidently discussing the next course of action. I went back outside and downed more cold water. I returned to the gate again and my temperature was now 36.1 degrees. Everyone chuckled with relief as I was allowed to enter.
Perhaps one of the reasons hysteria around the emergency measures never took hold in China was the timing. The severity of the situation dawned just as Spring Festival was getting underway, with many businesses already shut and people back in their family homes in a more sedentary state. Enacting emergency measures effectively meant perpetuating a situation that was not too dissimilar to that under lockdown and, indeed, the initial measures were an official week-long extension of the public holiday until mid-February.
Regardless, emotions found more definite expressions in grief and anger on 7th February, when news of the death of Dr Li Wenliang began to circulate on social media. Li had been one of the medical staff in Wuhan who identified the emergence of a SARS-like disease in December and had tried to raise the alarm about it among his colleagues and superiors — only to be reprimanded as a troublemaker by local authorities. As articles about Li’s death began to fill up my WeChat newsfeed that evening, so China’s online censors went into overdrive. Clicking article links — each bearing the same photo of Li, concerned eyes peering over his medical mask — took potential readers to a screen informing them that the content had been deleted for breaching content sharing rules. But the effort to censor these appeared to have stalled by the next day, with most article links remaining live. News of his death was then reported through official state outlets such as People’s Daily[6], indicating that, in some manner, the powers-that-be had officially acknowledged the situation[7].
Perhaps it is possible to interpret within the official acknowledgement of Li’s death a more tacit one of the mistakes that had been made in the initial stages of the outbreak. Whether this is an indication of deeper soul-searching around the relationship of social order to public discourse remains to be seen. But it demonstrates how a viral outbreak in motion cares little about ideology, narrative, spin or any other choice interpretations of reality. This is something that other governments are learning, particularly those of a more populist bent — witness the recent floundering of both Trump and Johnson in getting to grips with the situation in the US and UK respectively. With the bifurcated insanity of the Culture Wars, perhaps a global pandemic is exactly the kind of brute cause-and-effect reality needed to restore something akin to a shared subjectivity, lest we are “beaten like seaweed against the solid walls of fact”[8].
The emergency measures brought about by the outbreak has required adaptation to new practices in everyday life here in China, and it is possible these might lead to more permanent cultural changes. Online teaching, even at university level, has required a level of unsupervised, independent learning from students that was previously unknown in the rigid Chinese education system. Many office workers have had to continue their jobs from home during the lockdown, giving a glimpse into the possibilities of flexible working patterns; one hopes it might reopen a debate around work/life balance (and the so-called ‘996’ culture) that came and resignedly fizzled out last year[9]. Where commuters in Guangzhou used to squeeze as much body mass into the MTR system as possible during rush hour, now people wait patiently on the platform for the next train before carriages are even close to being full. It will be interesting to see how long such changes in behaviour brought about by social distancing will last. On a personal level, after three weeks turned into nearly two months of lockdown, my life is more ordered, productive and serene than at any point in the last decade. I dearly hope that this particular change persists.
Uncertainty lingers on, of course. There is always the possibility of a second wave of the outbreak or that Covid-19 might even mutate into something more virulent[10]. Perhaps the outbreak has simply exposed uncertainty as a basic feature of human existence, the contingency that underlies all our activities, both personal and en mass, in the everyday and the historical — and the manner in which we cover up this contingency with our plans, ambitions and projections of the future. But if nothing else, the fact that things are returning to normal after two months of lockdown in Guangzhou should offer some comfort that things will do the same in other places around the world.
And I would like end by assuring all readers back in the UK that not once has anyone here run out of toilet paper throughout the whole ordeal.
[1] Chinese cities are classified within a four-tier system, based on various measures of economic development, population and area. The first tier contains the four biggest cities: most readers will be familiar with Beijing in the north and Shanghai in the east; Guangzhou and Shenzhen are both located in the southern province of Guangdong.
[2] A US English anomaly, the word was popularised by Warren G. Harding in his 1920 presidential campaign promise of a ‘return to normalcy’ after World War I. Given the rhetoric around a ‘war’ against the disease, it seems apt here.
[3] Prior to the outbreak, Wuhan was distinguished by being a model ‘2nd tier’ city — a rapidly developing economy and a key hub for China’s high-speed rail network; anyone with an interest in China’s fertile indie music scene would also know the city as home to the band Chinese Football (https://chinesefootball.bandcamp.com) and one of the country’s main stop-offs for international touring bands, Vox Livehouse. I travelled to the city to see US singer Bill Callahan/Smog play there in 2015, and enjoyed the city’s laid-back, almost bohemian vibe.
[4] https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-china-slowed-coronavirus-lockdowns-surveillance-enforcers-11583868093
[5] Differences in attitudes to wearing masks between East Asian cultures and others has been an interesting aspect of the outbreak. A recent Time article explores this phenomenon: https://time.com/5799964/coronavirus-face-mask-asia-us/
[6] http://en.people.cn/n3/2020/0207/c90000-9655399.html
[7] A similar incident happened again in early March, as a document from one of Li’s colleagues went viral, shedding more light on the problems faced by medical staff in Wuhan in raising the alarm about the virus. Again, the censors went into overdrive on social media, erasing all instances of it on WeChat. This time, however, the online community resorted to a whole host of ingenious, aesthetic strategies to encode the document and bypass the censors. A couple of days later, a story referencing the events detailed in the document was published by Caixin, one of China’s more rebellious mainstream news agencies, though their content is still subject to the scrutiny of the authorities. Once again, this suggests that there is, in some form, official acknowledgement of the problems surrounding the early stages of the outbreak. https://www.caixinglobal.com/2020-03-10/wuhan-doctors-say-colleagues-died-in-vain-amid-official-coverup-101526650.html
[8] Richard Jeffries, The Story of my Heart (1883). Whatever its literary merits, Jeffries’ screed positions nature as having primacy over civilisation, something that the outbreak reminds us.
[9] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-11/in-china-tech-996-means-work-work-and-more-work-quicktake
[10] I recommend this interview with Amesh Adalja, infectious disease specialist at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security, for predictions about the outbreak: https://samharris.org/podcasts/191-early-thoughts-pandemic/
