An Impressive but Unsustainable Spectacle

So we’ve received a ticket which allows one person per household outside our residential compound for a few hours each day. And what greets us there is a facsimile of normal life. The streets are beginning to fill with people, one or two shops have started to open, and makeshift hair salons have popped up on every other corner. Back at home, things are also looking a little closer to normal. As supplies have started to become easier to obtain, we’ve slowly been emptying the fridge of ‘essentials’ and letting it fall back into its natural state: as a receptacle for alcohol mixers and neglected jars of condiments.

It feels like we’re finally coming to the end of our Shanghai lockdown story. When the dust has completely settled on the world’s response to the pandemic, we can have a grand debate about the chaos of freedom versus the tyranny of protection. But right now, the key verdict on the last three months is that China remains in zero-rush to relax its zero-COVID policy, exhibiting zero-interest in reintegrating into the rest of the world. So international folks will continue having a tough time trying to keep one foot in China and the other elsewhere. At this point we’re all Jean-Claude Van-Damme doing the splits on two slowly diverging Volvo trucks. An impressive spectacle, but not one that can be sustained forever.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been focusing most of my creative energy on writing these Shanghai updates for Denny and me. I’ve taken pains to strike a personal and balanced tone, being truthful to our own experience while trying not to misrepresent the experiences of others. This phase is now coming to an end, and I will soon pivot back to my usual creative outlet of producing the Mosaic of China podcast. I’m much more comfortable being a conduit for other people’s voices rather than dominating the full bandwidth with my own. But what will remain constant are the details about life in China that you usually can’t find anywhere else. Thank you for following our lockdown story. Hopefully from now on I’ll be back to posting with a little more variety, a little less frequency, and a lot less intensity.


For the Instagram version, see here.
For the Facebook version, see here.
For the LinkedIn version, see here.