Field Notes from a Pandemic

by Ethan Lou

  At the same time, there’s a reason that waterfront properties are prized, that we have balconies, and that even the densest, greyest metropolises have little green parks. We are animals still. Like the orcas whose normally upright fins collapse in captivity, looking at walls and computer screens every day was chipping away at something inside me. On my last night in Beijing, I couldn’t take it anymore. I had to be out in the world, to walk the streets, if only to see the sky and breathe the snow.

  3

  My way into the city, to downtown, was underground. If you’ve ever witnessed the chaotic human-traffic masses of the Beijing subway — which handled 10 million people a day, having built twenty-one lines in eighteen years — you’d certainly never forget the sight of it the evening I was there. It was a little after rush hour, but there were no more than a dozen people on any given train, even though, as the large transparent stickers on the windows assured us, the cars were disinfected every day. The Chinese term sounds harsh when translated literally — xiaodu, to “eliminate the poison.” There was an eerie stillness, a nothingness in the air that said volumes.

  There were red banners at the stations that read, “For the health safety of you and your family, please comply with temperature checks proactively.” Strung across public places, such notices have been a part of government campaigns for decades in China, propagating official messaging and stances. With the coronavirus outbreak, those banners had become more threatening and harsh, which I guess is the whole point. In translating, I’ve painstakingly preserved the trademark rhyming scheme many of the slogans have:

  “Mutual slaughter comes from going to a social gathering; seeking an untimely death is the resultant path of partying.”

  “A meal of wildlife today; in hell, tomorrow, you’ll stay.”

  “If today you go outside to run around, next year, on your grave, growing grass will be found.”

  “Leaving the village is like committing suicide; the safest choice you can make is to stay inside.”

  “Broken legs if to go out you insist; shattered teeth if, verbally, you resist.”

  “To go outside without a mask providing facial coverage — that is not the behaviour of a human, but a creature of garbage.”

  The subway stations blared announcements, saying the surroundings were disinfected five times a day and that the metal detectors — to which everyone in China had to submit if they wanted to ride the subway, even before the virus outbreak — were disinfected once per hour; all staff must wear masks, and all customers were encouraged to do the same.

  In the subway cars, the television screens cycled through virus-related news clips, anchors teaching viewers how to properly use face masks and celebrities in vertically oriented smartphone-filmed videos expressing support for China through this difficult time. Chinese media outlets in general were unnaturally co-ordinated, often depicting selfless medical workers or healed patients flush with gratitude. But there was almost nobody on the subway to watch them, except the blue-vested people whose job it was to stand by the doors. They also wore little red caps and matching armbands. “Customer service management personnel,” they were called. In front of me, a cloth shopping bag, slightly soiled, was left on the seat.

  I could see my masked reflection in the dark subway window. Before I’d left the apartment, my uncle had given me his last spare unused Honeywell H910V Plus face mask, a superior model to the surgical mask but strange looking by usual standards. I found myself vaguely creature-esque, like a Harry Potter house elf, for the mask had tight elastics, pulling my ears forward and outward. I felt as odd as I looked. A respiratory mask like the Honeywell forms a perfect seal around your nose and mouth, protecting against fine, airborne particles. The common surgical mask, on the other hand, is only a simple physical barrier, protecting against droplets. I had been wearing surgical ones for the entire time I was in China. Breathing with a respiratory mask no longer fogged up my glasses, but it felt harder than normal and uncomfortable in its own way. And my ears felt sore.

  Pretty soon, I acclimatized to my respiratory mask. I forgot it was even there. I was fortunate that I didn’t have to endure it for long sustained periods, but for many, such as doctors, service workers, and store clerks, it was required every day, all day. Weeks later, Singapore issued masks to every household and started handing out fines to anyone caught in public without one.

  A few days earlier, someone sent me a picture of an Asian-looking man in Toronto wearing one of those heavy-duty chemical-warfare masks that covers the whole face. We had a good laugh at that guy and his paranoia. Then, while I rode the Beijing subway, I saw two people with the same mask. In the city, I even saw a child, no more than five years old, with an entire plastic sheet draped dangerously over his face. Later, when I was sent pictures of people with water-cooler bottles over their heads or a little dog and its owner all bundled up in plastic, it didn’t seem so funny anymore.

  I couldn’t quite appreciate the extraordinariness of the situation in Beijing until it literally stared me in the face. Perhaps it was because I’d been far away, where you don’t exactly realize how painfully real things are. When my uncle gave me his last mask, I suspect it wasn’t just out of concern for his favourite and only nephew. It was for his own interests, too. He didn’t want to catch anything from me.

  I probably shouldn’t have gone out. After I got off the subway and started walking around the streets, what I encountered was only a husk of the city, a movie set, not real. It was hard to experience the joy of finally being outside the apartment because there really wasn’t any life to see. Some shops had cut their hours, but most had shut down completely. The restaurant at which my family had eaten a week earlier, the one that checked our identification documents, was closed. Most shops that had been open just a week earlier were all shuttered. Some had printed signs, repeating the government line discouraging public gatherings. Some had only simple handwritten ones, saying, “Temporarily closed.” Even the stores that stayed open closed early. Beijing’s famous twenty-four-hour bookstore, Page One, had cut its hours to just seven. Yet it might as well have not opened at all, if the snow outside its entrance was any indication. It was an unbroken film of white, unblemished by footprints. In fact, the whole downtown was a sea of blankness, like an unfinished painting.

  Outside Tiananmen Square, in the prime tourist area of the pedestrian-only Qianmen Street, aside from security and the workers sweeping away snow, there was no more than a handful of people milling around. Many of them were photographers, taking the chance to capture a rare empty Beijing. In some parts of the city, there were more policemen than civilians. There was absolutely nothing to do, and hardly a soul in sight. The traffic was sparse. At times, the only thing moving was the falling snow. There were tracks on the ground. People had clearly come and gone. But even the footprints were shallow, covered by the ice crystals soon after they were made; then nobody stepped over them again. No marks reached the dark ground itself. The parked cars and motorcycles also had thick layers of snow on them. What was normally one of the busiest places on Earth had become a desolate land. Farther away, the Forbidden City and sections of the Great Wall were closed. So was Shanghai’s Disneyland — “The Happiest Place on Earth,” as its slogan says.

  Interestingly, the only places consistently open were the Western chain restaurants, which arrived in the country some thirty years ago, when China’s previously closed economy opened up. These eateries have been the source of much polarization. My grandfather, older than both the People’s Republic of China and the romanization used to spell his name in English, never did have a taste for them. A fan of fatty pig intestines, my grandfather had once told me of what he viewed as the gastronomical pointlessness of hamburgers and pizzas. That food is not for everyone, for sure. Nothing about them is very Chinese, even if they did adjust the menu slightly for local palates. Nevertheless, the chains have been wildly popular in China, pulling
in $150 billion in 2017 and growing by 10 per cent every year. Those franchises were among the West’s biggest cultural exports. They were both novelties and the sum and symbol of economic success. Their mushrooming — a new Starbucks every fifteen hours — was a microcosm of the rapid development that, for those like my grandfather, dramatically transformed the world around them in a way they never would have expected. Those fast food restaurants, many open twenty-four hours a day, have also provided shelter to the homeless and the drunk, rural people seeking their fortunes in the big city, and anyone who cannot afford a hotel room for the night — the so-called McRefugees.

  A little beyond Tiananmen Square, I saw people huddled in a KFC, plugging in their phones and laptops. Not only was this the first of the American chain’s restaurants in China, it was the first fast food eatery by any Western company to open in the country, launched about ten years after the founding father Mao Zedong’s death. Now, it was one of the only places left for these people, who perhaps had nowhere else to go that night.

  When I got to a nearby McDonald’s, I bought a cup of hot bubble tea and sat down to remove my mask and drink it. Then the manager approached. She was slight, with a dyed pixie cut and a look about her that conveyed an odd mixture of weariness and uncertainty. Because of the virus, the restaurant was doing only takeout. Nobody was allowed to dine in, she said. “Young man, you’d better leave.”

  Outside, the moon glinted on the white frost, the lunar light shining through the overcast. The bubble tea was warm both in my hand and in my throat, steaming from the cup’s lid and marking my exhaled breath prominently. That trip to downtown Beijing was like a season in itself, dark and daylong. I walked back in a world suspended, frozen between one snowflake and the next.

  4

  The snow fell through the night, out of darkness and into darkness. Beijing gets the flurries probably just a hair more than, say, the coastal and temperate Vancouver. China’s capital thus doesn’t deal with it well. Parts of the highway were still slick with snow on my way to the airport. My uncle had budgeted two hours for a half-hour drive, and he was wise to have done so.

  My next stop was supposed to be Hong Kong to see my British friend Kevin. Eight years ago, we interned together at a little newspaper in Singapore that now no longer exists, having merged into another. It was only to be a short visit, but I had been looking forward to it, and to revisiting old times covering scandal, murder, and other assorted crimes and improprieties. But Kevin, who now writes for an aviation trade publication, was not in Hong Kong. He had been in the United States for vacation, and because of the coronavirus situation, he had decided to not go back to Hong Kong at all, instead joining his lawyer girlfriend, C.J., in Singapore. The couple lives and works in Hong Kong, but it is common for major companies, law firms, and banks to have offices in both financial hubs of Singapore and Hong Kong, and for their workers to split their time between the cities. C.J. is a Singaporean, and the couple’s plan was to ride out the coronavirus storm — or part of it, at least — in a place where life was still normal. My route to Hong Kong, though, had already been planned, so I decided to go nonetheless.

  I never ended up making it.

  The runway was thick with snow, and it continued to grow thicker. I was supposed to transfer in the northern Chinese city of Dalian to get to Hong Kong, but in Beijing, the plane I was on was stationery for a good hour. Then we had to change planes, for the cold had broken the aircraft. I thought I was going to miss my connection but quickly discovered worse: all Air China flights from the mainland to its special administrative region were cancelled.

  It had been a tumultuous time. After more than half a year of chaos— city-wide pro-democracy protests against the mainland Chinese government — the virus had hit Hong Kong like a sucker punch. I’d been quite plugged in to the situation there due to my work as a journalist. For a long time, there’d been some sort of protest happening somewhere in Hong Kong every day — and some sort of government response as well. The day before I left Beijing, I called Hong Kong’s deputy director of information services, Brett Free — a former journalist originally from Australia — only to catch him right before a press conference. For a city mired in socio-political dissension, the virus had added a whole new level of volatility, the Los Angeles Times wrote. The Hong Kong government, whose name was already mud to many residents, had been catching fresh flak for its allegedly lethargic response to the virus and for not banning visitors from the mainland. In the face of this heat, on the day before I left Beijing, probably at the very press conference into which Free was heading when I called, Hong Kong announced quarantine measures for all visitors arriving from the mainland. They hadn’t taken immediate effect, but flights were cancelled nonetheless. And not all travellers were given notice.

  Some, like me, found out only at the Beijing airport. It was a good thing the cold delayed the first leg of my flight and then disabled the plane. Otherwise, I would have found out only at the Dalian airport, stuck in some random Chinese city to which I’d never been and about which I knew nothing. And Hong Kong was not the only destination to be so affected, I soon realized. Travel restrictions related to China had started to blossom around the world. All sorts of flights ended up cancelled. When I went to get my flight rerouted, I saw that a long queue snaked in front of Air China’s re-booking counter, although any semblance of order quickly faded.

  A Chinese woman, probably no older than thirty, was crying. “I waited at gate C30 for forever,” she said. Whatever her problem was, she left the counter with it unresolved, still in tears. Another woman brazenly cut the queue, four Chinese passports in her hands and a flock of children waiting far behind. She was red-clad, with a look that was both determined and vulnerable at the same time. I did not have the heart to call her out. In front of the red woman, a group of male Kazakh students held up the line, fistfuls of Chinese yuan in their hands, but apparently not enough to get flights for all of them. “If we wait, would there be cheaper tickets?” one asked haltingly. The red-clad queue-cutter tried to help them, but it was of little use. The Kazakhs spoke little Mandarin or English, although I did make out that they’d been at the counter for more than two hours.

  At the counter beside the Kazakhs, a Chinese couple asked for flights out. “Any tickets to Toronto? Or Montreal? Or anywhere in Canada?”

  Another man tried to go to Italy.

  “Are you holding a Chinese passport?” staff asked.

  “Yes, but Chinese people aren’t banned. Only flights from China,” he said. “I can go there if I fly indirect.”

  A Chinese woman, who had American permanent residency, wanted to go to New York. “I have a green card,” she made sure to mention.

  But none of that mattered. The counter couldn’t book any flights to countries with travel restrictions, a staff member said. Everyone was in a face mask.

  Eventually, 90 per cent of the Earth’s population would live in countries with coronavirus-related travel restrictions. And the varieties of restrictions would become worse. Countries would go from rules specific to China to wholesale barring of non-residents unless a passenger had good reason to travel, whatever that meant. Canada, the European Union, you name it. Even North Korea. The United States would make a slew of immigration suspensions. Some countries, such as Namibia, would close their borders to even citizens unless “their mission is critical to national interest.” Airlines around the world would ground their planes, stocks tumbling accordingly. The industry would quickly lose up to $314 billion in ticket sales, according to the International Air Transport Association. South African Airways eventually planned to close up shop, sell off all its assets and lay off all its staff. I was sure my friend Kevin, who reports on and for the aviation industry, would become a lot busier, but I also wondered who would be left to read what he writes. The entire concept of travel would be redefined. Within a few short weeks, the idea of going somewhere purely for the experience
, to meet new people, to take in different cultures or just for a change of environment, a break — an idea that has defined the Western backpacking coming-of-age ritual, an idea that reflects the long arc of our history toward increasing interconnectedness — would be wiped away.

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  At the Air China counter, I was among the lucky ones. I was put on a 3 p.m. flight to Singapore, bypassing Hong Kong, just like Kevin. But it was definitely an ordeal. I had already gone through security and sat on a plane for a whole hour before finding out everything was cancelled. And even at the counter, I waited so long, my phone’s battery died. I’ve never been much of a day drinker, but when I finally got to the Air China lounge, nearly ten hours after I had woken up that morning, the first thing I had was a Tsingtao beer.

  Even there, in what is usually an oasis, an escape from the airport at large, there were signs that not everything was as it should be. The lounge had gotten rid of all its fine china. There were no ceramic mugs, no metal utensils. Everything reusable had been purged. But the sourcing for the disposable dinnerware was clearly improvised. Even in the first-class lounge — I got in only because of some special deal my credit card affords me — all the airline had were metallic takeout boxes and plastic cups so small it was hard to fathom what you were supposed to drink out of them. I got creative and made tea in one of the takeout boxes.

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  —

  In Beijing, and then in the act of leaving China, I had a rare window into what had become a surreal and bizarre realm, an experience, firsthand, of how things got progressively worse, how in the face of the virus, restrictions on the way people lived their daily lives became increasingly heavy, their ability to see friends and family limited. But that experience was more than a gander at the problems of a faraway country. It was a sign of what was to come for the world — like the sharp smell of ozone before a lightning storm.