Shanghai Lockdown 2022

As I assume many of you know if you are reading this blog, I moved to Shanghai in October of 2020. For the past few years, the pandemic has not affected my life TOO greatly. Sure, I haven’t been able to leave China, and we wear masks more frequently than my friends in the States have to, but life has felt more or less “normal” since I got here. (Just look at all of the amazing places I’ve traveled to and things I’ve gotten to do!) And then, well, spring of 2022 hit. For most of the world, the phrase “spring of 2022” does not strike fear, panic, and memories of endless cabbage into their very souls, but for those of us in Shanghai, we had a very different year…

This is an experience that I’ve gone back and forth on how to share. I think it’s important, before I begin, to say once again that I have loved living and traveling through China. I have learned so much, met so many amazing people, and had experiences that I will treasure for the rest of my life. As I’ve said before, my intentions with this blog have always been to cultivate an enthusiasm and curiosity in my readers, to share stories about a part of the world many have never been to and know little about. That being said, there were things going on here during lockdown that I think a vast majority of the world outside of Shanghai were not witness to; things that I think it is important to share. In a country where voices are often silenced, I do not want to also stay silent about what the experience was like. But I want to preface this by saying: I still live in Shanghai, and I will for at least a few more years. I still look forward to traveling around the country and learning about the amazing history and cultures here. The actions of one are not necessarily supported by all, no matter how much the media tries to convince you of that. This is not a chance for you to say “well WE would nEvEr do something like that here” – nope. Knock it off. I’ve seen just as much unbridled nationalism in the States as I have over here. People are people, everywhere, and the fact of the matter is: what the people of Shanghai experienced from March-June of 2022 created trauma whose ripples will be felt for years and years. I do not ask for your pity or righteousness; I ask for your attention and compassion.

In early March, we all started getting the sense that things were getting a little weird. Our first sign that this might be bigger than the usual underlying COVID aversion was the second week of March, when our school let us know that we should no longer take public transportation or go out to restaurants/malls/public areas — the school would reimburse all taxi charges so that we would get to and from school coming into contact with the fewest number of people. A few days later, while at school, we were told that we would be undertaking a 14-day health observation as a campus. (We were not the only school to be doing this – it seemed as though everyone was, just some started a day earlier or later than we did.) This meant that the entire school – students, staff, admin, security staff, cafeteria workers, everyone – would need to receive NAT tests, on campus, multiple times throughout the 14 day period. After they announced this, we all were instructed to return to our homerooms with our homeroom classes and wait there until further notice. We would not be able to leave campus until all of the tests had come back negative.

At this point, we were feeling uneasy. We had heard of office buildings being locked down – workers forced to sleep on the floors of their cubicles, trying to clean up in shared office bathrooms, maybe getting a blanket or small pillow if they were lucky – and so it would not be unheard of for us to be stuck at school overnight with all 450 of our students. Luckily, around 7:30 pm, we were released and able to return home. The next day, I brought in a small extra bag with a toothbrush, toothpaste, and a few extra pairs of underwear.

Due to the NAT testing schedule the school would have to comply with during our 14-day health observation, we knew that we would have to come in on Saturday for testing – just a few hours, test and then go home. On the Friday of that week, my friends and I were soaking in the beautiful weather and walking the few hours home when we received a text in our campus chat: when we were in for the testing the next day, we should instruct all of the students to clean out their lockers, and we were to bring everything home that we would need for online teaching. We’d had a few bouts of online teaching before, usually around big holiday travel times and only for 1-2 weeks, so this was not entirely unusual. I asked a colleague on the campus leadership team if we had an estimate on how long we’d be online so I knew how many online rehearsals we’d need to incorporate for our spring musical; he said they weren’t sure, but it would probably be until after spring break, the first week of April. At the time, I remember being shocked. (Oh, you sweet summer child…)

Though we were teaching online, life was more or less normal-ish. We didn’t go out to eat, didn’t really go OUT at all, but could go on walks, order food, work from home… not too bad. On March 17th, all of Shanghai was put into temporary quarantine, in phases, so they could mass test the entire city. Going one neighborhood to the next, neighborhoods were shut down and all of the residents tested — there wasn’t a lot of information coming out, but in group chats with friends from other parts of the city, it seemed like we all were locked in for 3-5 days or so. I was released on March 20th and biked over to Michael’s house to try to see him (this had probably been the longest we’d gone without seeing each other at that point…. sweet, sweet summer children…) but his compound was still locked up with guards at the front. The next day, on March 21st, he was released as well. A week later, on March 28th, it was announced that all of Shanghai would be going into a complete citywide lockdown from April 1st to April 5th. Not wanting to risk going out to a store, we sat down that night and ordered grocery delivery — the earliest date they could deliver was April 2nd, after the lockdown began. We assumed that would be okay – why else would it have been given as an option?

Even though we could technically still go out and about that final week of March, Michael and I both made the decision to stay at our (separate) homes. We’d heard too many rumors of people getting locked down while out at a store, or getting stuck over at a friend’s house, and didn’t want to risk it. We assumed that we would each have to carry out the lockdown from our own houses; we were registered with the police under the addresses and thought they might use that registration information to carry out all of the testing. It’s only a few extra days, we thought. We can handle it, we’ll be back together on the 5th.

The night of March 31st, Lockdown Eve, we both felt incredibly uneasy. The energy just felt… weird. Running low on groceries until my delivery would arrive, I went to order dinner on my usual delivery app. Shanghai RUNS on deliveries, you can always order absolutely anything, anytime, anywhere. When I opened the app, almost everything was gone – only a few restaurants were open, with limited meals available. I tried ordering something and, after being delayed for over an hour, the order was cancelled. Pictures were popping up in my WeChat Moments (sort of like a social media newsfeed) of people out and celebrating one final night out before the lockdown. Michael and I, who had both been through various forms of pandemic quarantines in Sudan, the US, and China, felt sick to our stomachs. If people were all out partying now, inevitably spreading the virus even more, that didn’t bode well for these next few days…

Starting on April 1st, all compounds in Shanghai were completely shut down. Depending on the layout of the compound, we were all locked in through various means, with volunteer 大白 Dabais guarding the gates. Dabais, or “Big Whites” as they were nicknamed due to the white hazmat suits they wore, were stationed at every compound, responsible both for conducting the NAT tests and ensuring that no one came in or out. Michael and I called them Astronauts, because that’s what my anxiety-exhausted brain thought they looked like when I first encountered the suits on my flight from the States to Shanghai. Every few days, the Astronauts would either knock on my front door or shout into a loudspeaker, and we would all go down into the alley for testing. Other than to come out for testing, we were not allowed to open our front doors.

When the lockdown began, all deliveries were cut off completely. We had all been under the assumption that we would still be able to order food, that had been the impression that the lockdown announcement had given, but that was not the case — no one was to be allowed out of their homes, and that included to make or deliver food or water. The groceries that I had tried ordering almost a week earlier never came.

On April 5th, it was announced that the lockdown was indefinite.

In a further announcement, it was released that absolutely no deliveries of any kind were to be carried out, and that the government would provide food to all locked down households. Thus, every so often, there would be a knock at the door and an Astronaut would hand me a package of food. Sometimes it would include a real treat — an onion! Tomatoes! GARLIC!! Most of the time, the package would be some combination of bok choy and cabbage. On a good day, the greens were still edible. Some days, they’d arrive with fruit flies already in the bag.

I am not someone who especially enjoys cooking. (I have a boyfriend who likes to do that for me, thank the old gods and the new.) I am also not someone who has an incredibly healthy relationship with food – years of body image issues brought on by being a woman who hit puberty in the era of “heroin chic” and “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.” So the idea of having no control over food – not knowing when it’s coming, not knowing what there will be, or if it will still be good, or how I can prepare it, or how long I need to make it last – was not great. My favorite go-to became throwing a bunch of vegetables together and making soup. (Michael, on the other hand, concocted homemade kimchi. So, you know. It takes all kinds.)

Water was even more a source of concern than food. You cannot drink the tap water in China – it’s filled with all sorts of contaminants, bacteria, metals, etc. Most people here in Shanghai order big jugs of bottled water and replace them every few weeks. But the government wasn’t sending water along with the cabbage, so pretty early on we all started to panic. I had a few big bottles that I was trying to make last, at times drinking only 1-2 glasses of water per day. Each day, I would have to decide if I wanted to drink the water or use a little of it to wash off the vegetables I was getting before I ate them. Deciding to splurge enough water to make a soup (which would at least get me eating) was a risky choice. People were all sharing tips and tricks how to boil water, collect the steam on a lid, and let that drip back into a second bowl, which you could then cool and bottle for drinking. I filled a few empty bottles with this home-brew drinking water and hoped for the best. Rumors spread of someone who “knew a guy” that was somehow not locked down and could get you water, but even then, you have to buy in bulk and it wasn’t a sure thing. Eventually, a colleague shared a contact from a company that sold water filtration devices who were miraculously able to deliver during the lockdown. It cost me nearly $500, but removing the anxiety of not having enough water to drink for an indefinite lockdown with no end in sight was worth it.

A little over a week after lockdown began, on April 9th, I had my 30th birthday. Because my birthday falls over spring break, we had originally planned on going to Tibet so I could hike up to Everest Base Camp to welcome my next decade. Instead, I spent my day completely alone locked up in my house. Thanks to modern technology, I was able to Zoom or FaceTime with my family and friends back home, who each called me for a birthday hang-in-there chat, and Michael and I pulled a classic “3-2-1, press play NOW” viewing of a travel documentary and Newsies. Not quite the birthday I had envisioned, but certainly a memorable one.

As time went on, the days all started to feel the same. I’d log on to teach my classes for a few hours a day, but then there was just endless nothingness. I am lucky enough to live in a pretty big apartment, so I could try to create some kind of normalcy: I would “commute” up the stairs to my craft loft where I kept my laptop for work. I would cook and eat in the hall, though after a few weeks of not being able to take the trash out, it wasn’t always the greatest place to hang out. My living room has lots of sunlight and my pole, so I’d head in there to read or work out. I tried to keep active, to do something with my time, but many days I couldn’t manage much more than moving from my bed to the couch.

The days came and went. I remember hitting Day 15 and thinking it had been so long, now officially one day longer than the initial 14-day quarantine I’d gone through when I first entered the country. Around Day 40, our school PTA arranged for an amazing food drop for all of the teachers – not only did it include some beautiful fruits and veggies, but some truly amazing treats like CHEESE and CHOCOLATE and DISH SOAP and TOILET PAPER! Some grocery delivery companies had started to open up, sort of, but most of them only in Chinese — all of the apps targeted towards expats were still shut down. Each morning at 6:00 am, I would attempt to log on to the apps and translate enough to figure out how to order some basics. When one of the English language grocery apps did open up again, they had limited food boxes that they would release every so often — friends would all text each other as soon as the boxes were released in the hopes that you could beat out the other thousands of people trying and maybe get something other than bok choy for dinner that week.

Michael and I would typically spend anywhere from 3-8 hours on the phone each day. Sometimes just having the phone call on while both sitting and doing our own things. I think once I accidentally made him sit through an hour and a half of me singing the entire score of Jesus Christ Superstar to myself while I was cooking and doing dishes. One night we fell asleep with the phone call still open – he woke up and hung up the phone somewhere around 4:00 am.

Meanwhile, we were all receiving no information from the outside world. As you may know, internet censorship in China is more intense than possibly anywhere else in the world. If the government doesn’t want something to be up on the internet, it will be removed. Even with a VPN, sometimes either the VPN or the WiFi itself will just mysteriously not work. This meant that for all of us locked in our homes, we had no way of knowing what was really going on in the rest of the city. Pictures and stories would be posted on WeChat only to be removed. Videos of riots and arguments, people begging for more food, people in need of medical attention but not being allowed through their gates, people standing up against the Astronauts… they would briefly appear and then be wiped from the internet. Over the course of a few days sometime in May, my newsfeed was filled with videos of “Do You Hear The People Sing” from the musical Les Miserables. This song, which has been used as a protest song in Hong Kong for the past few years, has been banned in China – it is mysteriously missing from all of the cast albums on Chinese music sites. And yet here it was, being posted and removed, all across Chinese social media. “Do you hear the people sing? Singing the song of angry men. It is the music of a people who will not be slaves again. When the beating of your heart echoes the beating of the drum, there is a life about to start when tomorrow comes.“

The only thing we would hear were stories through word of mouth, or videos that someone had managed to post on Instagram. A video of a corgi who had been beaten to death because it had tried to follow its owner as they were taken away into central quarantine. Astronauts breaking into people’s houses to take them away to a quarantine camp if they refused to go on their own. Children being separated from their parents in quarantine, without being told where the rest of their family was. Even more gates and locks going up, even though all of the announcements were telling us that things were getting better. No, that man wasn’t begging because he was starving and had no food, he was just drunk, it was a rumor. No, that door hadn’t been broken into to take someone away, it was actually the fire department because they locked themselves out without keys while going down for the NAT tests. No no, everything is fine, everything is working, we will achieve zero COVID, this is the way, just trust us. [Photos taken from @shanghaiobserved and @wulumeme.lu on Instagram.]

None of us had any idea if and when this would ever end. We weren’t afraid of the virus itself – there were hardly any deaths and a majority of the cases were asymptomatic – but of being dragged away to a camp. If someone tested positive, they could not simply wait it out in their homes as has been the case for my friends in the States. Testing positive (which would be public knowledge because of the mass testing every few days) would mean being taken to one of the massive quarantine facilities they had erected. Sometimes in schools, in gyms, in giant warehouses, they set up thousands of beds where those who had tested positive would be sent to keep them away from the rest of the population. For a while, we heard that even if you hadn’t tested positive but someone on your floor or in your building had, you too would be sent away, just in case. By this point, even the US Consulate had left us – they had evacuated and basically told us we were on our own, there was nothing they could do. [Photos of quarantine camps taken from Western media sources.]

With the weight of all of this going on, on TOP of everything it took just to go about daily life, AND trying to keep a brave face for my students, my mental health took a pretty rapid decline. As did everyone’s. Friends were having panic attacks, not eating, pacing their apartments for hours on end, unable to sleep…

What kept me going was the little contact I had with the outside world. FaceTimes with friends back home, family Quizzo nights on Zoom, endless hours on the phone with Michael, Netflix releasing an assortment of awful reality shows… Day by day, my Lockdown tally grew.

Towards the end of May, some complexes started opening up slightly within the compound area. Though we weren’t allowed out of the compound, it was still gated up, I could at least leave my front door and pace back and forth on the little street in front of my house. This was a HUGE help for my mental health. As soon as I would finish teaching, I would put on my tennis shoes, slather on some sunscreen, put on an audiobook and pace outside.

Until then, I had only been able to leave my house in 5 minute intervals for testing. One day for testing, it was raining slightly and I just started crying as I walked back into my apartment – the rain felt so good on my skin, and I just missed being outside. On my newly allowed compound walks, one of the first things that overwhelmed me was the smell of the trees. Small flowers blossoming and growing — I had forgotten that nature had a smell. Though my body would be completely exhausted after only walking 3,000 steps, I began to go out every day, thankful for this small blessing.

As we reached the end of May, it seemed like we might maybe possibly hopefully be on the road to release. Some of my friends’ compounds were letting them out for one hour, one person per day, only within their neighborhood. Though I wasn’t having any such luck yet, there was a rumor that we would all be released on June 1st. We knew better than to get our hopes up (after all, this started as a five day lockdown that would end on April 5th, remember?) but at least it was something to hold on to hope for.

On May 30th, Michael was given a 2-hour freedom pass. He called me and immediately began to walk over to my house; luckily, he only lived a 15-minute walk away so even though we had been dating “long distance” for the past 2 and a half months, he was now within walking distance again. I made my way out to the locked gate in my compound that wasn’t guarded by Astronauts, and we saw each other for the first time in person since March. Unsurprisingly, I immediately started weeping. I’m sure we were putting on quite a show for my neighbors as we reached through the gate, trying to touch each other’s faces and hold each other’s hands. I don’t even care.

The next day, May 31st, you could once again feel the energy in the air. Unlike Lockdown Eve, when the energy was eery, this time everything felt like the moment before you jump off of a diving board — ready to go, anxious and excited and hopeful. That afternoon, I went to take some trash out and go for a street walk in front of my house, as I had been doing daily for the past week. But this time, as I reached one edge of my street, the Astronaut at the gate gestured me over, and pointed to the street. I frantically typed into my translator app: 我们有空出去吗? Are we free to go out? He nodded. Without even going back in to my apartment to grab my keys, my backpack, anything, I left.

Michael and I both left our apartments at the same time to just meet up wherever we bumped into each other on the way. After a very long and tearful (on my end) hug, we went on a long walk though our city, refusing to let go of each other’s hands. It was eery walking around the streets, seeing all of the new testing booths that had been put up, buildings that had been abandoned and locked up for months. There was trash on the streets (which NEVER happens) and everyone was walking around looking slightly shell-shocked, like none of us could really believe this was happening.

We snuck Michael back in to my apartment that night; he was probably allowed, we were never told otherwise, but we avoided the Astronauts anyways, just in case. The next day, June 1st, the lockdown officially ended. After 65 days, we were free. Though no restaurants or businesses were allowed to open back up yet, we were free. It wasn’t quite the same energy as what I experienced in Philly the day after the Eagles won the Super Bowl, but it was pretty damn close. There were parties in the streets, bars that had been closed for months selling drinks out of their windows, happy reunions and drunken dancing everywhere you looked. Michael and I made our way to one of our favorite Mexican restaurants and ordered tequila shots, margaritas, and tacos through the window to enjoy on the sidewalk with all of the others who’d had the same idea. (After this day, the rules very quickly changed and no one was allowed to congregate on sidewalks outside of bars anymore. But it was fun while it lasted.)

Since June, as I write this in October, the rules have relaxed but we are not yet completely out of the blue. There are NAT testing sites every few blocks; we must get tested at least once every 72 hours, and present our green health code (proof of negative test results) in order to enter any public space. We scan in to any building we enter for contact tracing. Though we are back on campus for school this year (so far… knock on wood…) we are required to do a campus-wide NAT test every single day before we go home. It’s become a part of our class schedule – 30 minutes to take your homeroom to get tested. Restaurants and shops have opened back up, but there are still restrictions and limitations – live music in restaurants is still a no go, KTV places have been shut down, only every other table in some restaurants can have guests, etc.

It’s odd, going about life now, because sometimes it feels like the lockdown never happened. And then you hear about someone’s compound being locked down for a few days for another round of mass testing, and a deep shiver will go down your spine. At brunch yesterday, my friends and I all panic-ordered some more toilet paper, water, and food essentials because the number of cases has started going up again. Sometimes it feels like you’re being gaslit by your own brain: look how amazing the food at this restaurant is, how could you possibly have been eating sad cabbage and mystery meat in your apartment for 2 months? What do you MEAN you didn’t leave your front door for over 60 days, your legs are so tired from walking all across downtown Shanghai!

Of course, through all of the anxiety and fear and depression and crying and, well, everything, humor makes for great distraction, so I thought I would share some of my favorites of the Shanghai lockdown memes that popped up throughout the spring. They served as a nice reminder that we weren’t alone in the madness of it all. [Photos taken from @wulumeme.lu on Instagram!]

It seems like some kind of strange fate or destiny that, of ALL of the places in the world I could have moved for my first international living adventure, I ended up in Shanghai during this lockdown. It’s hard to really explain or talk about except with other people who experienced it; why we always make sure to have a few jugs of water on hand, just in case. Why we have a crash bag ready to go, in case our compound is shutting down and we can escape to a friend’s house. Why we may never willingly eat cabbage ever again. (Okay, maybe that’s just me.) We made it out. Now, here’s hoping we never have to go back in again…