A Postcard from Quarantine

The high school admin loaded me with classes for this year. I arrived late in September, having to suffer through multiple cancelled flights back to Shanghai and then a week-long quarantine in a room with my wife and toddler son in a run-down hotel in a middle-of-nowhere that goes by the name of Zhengzhou. I show up to work excepting some sympathy, but instead I find that half of my paycheck is being decked for returning late to the country. Moreover, me not being there to complain, the school admin decided to dump on me all the extra classes that came up to be redistributed after another expat teacher quit last minute. Expats quitting last minute has become a thing here, of course.

Whatever, I gotta pull through and I’m working hard every day. Every expat I know is planning an exit strategy, as a very eventual plan B if not plan A, but in the meantime, one has to make one’s rents. And save up money for the big move.

Last Thursday at lunchtime, I go for my routine in-school COVID swab test. The school requires 24-hour negative COVID tests to enter the campus, and they offer the tests in the school every day around lunchtime. A teacher volunteers to collect the swab samples in one of those hazmat suits, and a student volunteers to stand in front of the desk with the test tubes and scan in people’s health codes as they line up to take the test. I pull up my AliPay app to open my QR Health Code. To my shock and horror, the thing had turned red! RED, like blood! (It’s always been green). I swerve out of the test lineup last minute pretending I have connection problems.

I go pick up my lunch delivery and go back to my desk in the department office and sit down to eat it. What am I supposed to do? I look it up. The internet is more or less useless: conflicting information. Is it a mistake? Why did it turn red? I went to a local American bar the night before – that must be it! You gotta scan your code to get into these places, and if there is a “case,” everyone who scanned in that day gets tagged as a contact and has to quarantine. But do I quarantine at home, or a quarantine hotel? There’s been so many news about people storming out of shopping malls and bars when there’s a case. Guess they just go home and play stupid. Did their codes turn red? Should I also play dumb? I got one more class to teach this afternoon. I don’t want to cause a commotion, so I’ll just finish that class and then tell my head of department what happened.

I go back out into the hallway and on a whim decide to do the test anyway. I show my screaming-red code to the volunteer student who’s scanning me in for the test on her phone. She sees the code and, apparently not noticing the red, swipes to some other place in the app and opens another code, this one black, and scans me in. I do the test. Like nothing’s wrong.

My afternoon classes are over; I feel more normal. The world is not ending, it’s just a regular workday. I go back to my office, drop off my laptop, and go into the stairway to call my wife. I tell her what’s the deal. She’s not much more familiar with what’s to be done than me, except she tells me that someone should call me. I check my call log: two missed calls from the same number, right up there in red, right around 2:00 pm. I don’t speak Chinese, but my wife does. I forward her the phone number and ask her to call it for me and see what they want. She calls me back and tells me that the person on the other end of that phone number told her that I must report immediately to my school administration, and they will know what to do next.

I return to our department office and summon my head of department outside for a private talk. She comes out with the goofy playful smile that she always has. We find an empty classroom nearby, and I show her the red code. “Oooh!” I’m looking at my HOD’s face and she’s going through the same reaction that I went through. Surprise, confusion, not knowing what it means or what to do.

“I went to Cages last night,” I explain with a smile. “They got a small playground inside and I took my kid there. It was so empty! I remember thinking, ‘This is a bit eerie, such a big place, usually packed, now so hollowed out, but at least the chances of anyone with COVID being here are that much slimmer.’ And what would you know: my code turns red!”

I felt the need to point out that the only reason I went to the sports bar is to give some playtime to my boy. They can’t say it directly, but for weeks and even months, the school admin has been suggesting ever so insistently that we avoid “unnecessary” outings. Whenever pushed back on to define “unnecessary,” and whenever answered that one has to live one’s life, the school admin says nothing in return. Of course, one has to live one’s life. They’re not saying you can’t.

“When did it turn red?” the HOD asks.

“This afternoon. When I showed the code this morning to get into the school, it was green.”

After a bit more back and forth, the HOD sends some text messages and tells me I should go to the nurse’s office. I go back into our department office to close my laptop and take my employee card (I don’t know why – it’s not like I was going to use it downstairs to buy a coffee in that situation). The other teachers seem to be looking at me funny, but maybe I’m just imagining it. They’re certainly not looking at me directly. First a private talk with the HOD, now I’m heading out somewhere in a rush. There are a few comments in Chinese, which for the most part I don’t speak. Maybe the HOD has revealed that I’m going to the nurse’s office. Even if she hadn’t, some of the others must be wondering if the laowai caught a COVID case.

As I get up to leave, the HOD says; “Ummm, do you have a mask?”

“Yes, of course,” I answer. I have to wear a mask every day on the subway. As my body is rising out of the chair, my hand is reaching into my pocket to take out the mask.

“Wear a mask! Wear a mask!” the HOD’s irritatingly cheerful tone breaks down for once and touches on panicky.

“No worries,” I say as I exit and put on my mask.

I walk down the stairs from the fourth to the ground floor and into the nurse’s office. A bunch of my female students are chilling there, giggling and shooting the shit with the nurse. They turn silent when I come in. The nurse looks up from her phone and gives me a knowing smile. “I know why you’re here,” it says. She has that stupid kit that looks like a pregnancy test and asks me to do it. I have nowhere to sit, so I ask one of the girls on the couch by the coffee table to give me her seat. She jumps off respectfully.

I rip the long, narrow swab stick out of its plastic wrap. I peel off the silvery cover off the small plastic capsule with the liquid in it. I wriggle the stick into each of my nostrils and then swirl it emphatically in the capsule for a few seconds. I close the attached cap of the capsule, turn the capsule upside down, and I squeeze a couple of big drops of the liquid through the opening in the plastic cap and onto the dip at the bottom of the test cassette. I look up and the group of girls and the nurse are frozen in expectations, turned at forty-five degrees from me in an attempt to look disinterested.

“I think one line is good, two lines is bad, right?” says the nurse. Some girls confirm.

“You all better hope it’s a one-line, then,” I said, “otherwise we’re all going on a big trip today.” The silence is broken by a burst of laughter.

We all watch the test cassette. I contemplate making a pregnancy joke but think better of it (“let’s see: is it a boy or a girl”). One line appears, at first as a border between a dry and a wet area. Then it stays and turns reddish. No second line appears.

“Guess you’re all good then!” says the nurse. There’s a general sigh of relief. I’m relieved too, though I was pretty sure the test would come out negative, and that for the simple reason that I already had COVID – I got it on my first or second day back in Canada. Of course, no I haven’t reported that to anyone in China.

The nurse goes back on her phone, texting people to figure out the next things to do. Finally, she tells me that I should just go home. Pack my stuff, and go home. I take the elevator back into our department office and announce, as nonchalantly as I could, that my code is red and that I’ve been instructed by the nurse to go home. I tested negative in the office just now. There’s a sigh of relief to that, but everyone’s still wondering what’s going to happen to the whole school because of this. Online teaching for a week? Over seventy schools in Minhang district alone had that happen to them already. Quarantines for everyone? Who knows.

I pack my laptop and anything else I’d need for online teaching. We’ve done online teaching before, during the first lockdowns, and like all the other teachers I’m prepared for it to happen again, so I don’t need much time to think about what I’ll need. In fact, all I really need is the laptop – all my materials and apps are already on it. The rest, like the digital writing pad, is at home. I throw the laptop with the mouse and the charger into the backpack I keep under my desk, think once or twice about anything else I’d need and throw that in too, and say goodbye.

Again, I walk down the stairs to the ground floor, mask strictly on. Taking the subway back home is out of the question; they won’t let me in with the red code, and the last thing I need is to be detained by a squad of metro security on this issue. I’m calling in a cab; they don’t scan your health code these days, though the QR code printout invariably hangs on the back of the front seat in every one of them. Guess they don’t want to go into quarantine, either. Right as I’m about to grasp the exit door handles to get out, I decide I better use the washroom first. It’s going to be a long ride at this time of day, fifty minutes probably, and I don’t want to spend those fifty minutes with a full bladder. So I turn around: the washroom is on the other end of the hallway.

As I’m walking to the washroom I ran into our principal. She beams her concerned-modern gaze at me and it feels like a floodlight. “Badminton court is over there,” she points in the opposite direction.

“What?” I ask. “I’m going to the washroom, then I’m going home. The nurse told me to go home.”

“Oh!? No, no. You’re supposed to go to our quarantine, which is the badminton court.”

“Are you sure?” I ask.

“Of course,” she insists. “Come with me, I will check the rules.”

“Okay, but I have to use the washroom first,” I insist.

“Okay, I’ll meet you over there by the nurse’s office.”

I don’t know what I was thinking at this point. It couldn’t have been anything much, or anything too coherent at any rate. I wasn’t panicking, I wasn’t scared. I just had that sinking feeling of having no options. After taking a piss, I walk back to the nurse’s office area and find the principal flipping through her leather-bound notebook. She flips over some notes in blue pen and then makes a phone call. After the phone call, she tells me that the CDC (Center for Disease Control) van is coming to pick me up and drive me to a quarantine hotel.

“Really?” I ask. “How long do I have to be in quarantine?”

“I don’t know,” the principal shrugs. “Ten days.”

I feel like a cornered beast. The cursed bathroom trip! I could have been on my way home! Were they going to hunt me down and then take my whole family to the quarantine hotel? I wouldn’t want that, we already spent a week in a quarantine room together, when we returned to China from Canada, and I don’t have the heart to put my boy through that bullshit again. So I’m compliant.

“Let’s go,” says the principal. “I’ll take you to the badminton court.”

We stroll out of the building, wearing masks. Then we go by the volleyball field, then through the small soccer field, then through the basketball field, then by the track field, and finally we enter some new area of whose existence I was previously not aware. All along the long, winding trip, I’m feeling like they’re walking me to the gallows. My students stop their games and look at me, wondering what I’m doing there this late in the afternoon. I’m never on the sports fields. All along the walk, my principal is reassuring me. “Don’t worry! Everything is fine. Michael went to Disneyland and he’s in quarantine now. Everything’s fine. If you need anything, just let me know. We are here to help.” She keeps repeating those words, and it’s making it worse. I probably tell her about Cages and how I was only taking my boy there to play at their playground.

I get taken inside an indoor hall the size of two badminton fields. The principal shows me the washroom. She sits me down at a plain table with two folding chairs stuck by the wall and has me sit there. She tells me that the guards will come to pick me up once the van arrives and closes the door.

I try to make the best of the situation. I take out my laptop and headphones. But there’s no Wi-Fi. I message Michael, the IT guy who’s also somewhere in a quarantine hotel, and ask him what is the wifi for the badminton court. Poor IT people, they’re used to being badgered wherever they are. Michael responds promptly telling me that the badminton court doesn’t have the school’s Wi-Fi. So I’m stuck despondently updating my wife on what’s happening to me by text messaging over 4G.

The dreary silence of my cell is suddenly broken by a rush of middle school students bursting through the door. The sports facilities are shared between our high school and the adjacent middle school. I try to say something about how this is quarantine space but they ignore me and promptly begin warming up. A Chinese teacher follows behind them and she’s a bit surprised to see me there. She doesn’t quite understand my English. Angry, I send a text message to the principal to the effect that my quarantine has been breached and that I’m coming back to the school.

As I walk back to the school, I find that the tall wire gates between the various courts, beginning with the basketball court, have been locked. I have no way to go back to the high school building. I get a panicked message from an HR manager asking me where I am and telling me that the CDC van is on its way and will pick me up at the front gate. Angered further, I decide to walk to the middle school and exit to the street there. I always exit through the middle school’s gate at the end of the day, because that’s where my bus stop is.

I get out of the middle school gate and again I think, “Why the fuck don’t I just go home? I can go home and play stupid. What are they gonna do, drag me out?” I open up the app and order a cab. It’s two minutes away. A u-turn from the opposite side of the street and it’s right in front of me. But once again, I think of my kid and the one-week quarantine in Zhengzhou. I shudder at the thought of dragging him to quarantine with me. So I cancel the app and pay the cancellation fee. I walk around the big combined middle-school-high-school campus to the high school gate entrance. It takes almost ten minutes, and it’s a grey, shitty ten minutes.

As I’m nearing the gate I get a voice call from the HR manager. “Where are you? The van is about to arrive! We can’t find you!”

I explain how the sports grounds gates were locked and I did everyone a favour by getting out on the other side and walking around to the high school gate. The HR doesn’t understand, but she caught the piece of information relating to my near arrival to the point of pick up, and she’s happy with that.

They let me inside the gate only for the security guard to usher me into his guard booth and give me a hazmat suit to put on. I oblige and once it’s on, I get out. The van is waiting for me. At this point the students have stopped playing volleyball or whatever, and they are watching their economics teacher being perp-walked into a rackety old work van. They are wondering how that’s going to affect them too. The COVID shit is contagious in many ways.

Once in the van, I got tunnel vision. I can’t believe this is happening to me. I can’t believe I yielded so easily. How could I be so soft? Why didn’t I protest? People rush out on these assholes all the time, and I submitted like a coward. My emotions turn to anger. I call my wife. I seethe and rail. I tell her we’re moving to Vancouver once I get out. I begin texting in my buddy group chat. I send them a photo of me in the van showing the finger. Friends, the wife, managers, colleagues. Anger, disbelief. Messages are flying back and forth. Ten fucking days. I don’t know which hotel I’m staying at. Someone told me that it’s not far from my school.

We drive through the grey streets of outer Shanghai as the day turns to dusk. I lose the sense of direction. I don’t have a recollection of what happened at the base of the hotel. They might have scanned my health code off my phone. Anyhow, the process was really quick. As I get out of the elevator on my floor, one of the hazmat assholes sprays me and the air around me with a Febreze-type bottle, obsessively. What a fucking moron. I get into the room. It’s not a piece of shit at all, but it’s still jail. I take off the hazmat suit and crash into bed. Ten fucking days!

So there I am, my dear reader. Crashed onto the bed in the quarantine hotel, facing ten days of isolation from family and the rest of the world. Of course, it’s Friday the next day, and the school will expect me to teach my three periods for that day online, as well as teach online throughout the next week from my room. But I’m in no mood to think about work. I’m absorbing the shock of it all and cursing that moment when I decided to go to the washroom. Second-guessing my decision not to flee in a cab at that last moment as I was walking back to get picked up by the van.

Text messages and calls are pouring in from all sides. People are asking how I’m doing; they are curious to hear the story. Some want to compare notes to their own quarantine experience. Someone, my wife probably, tells me that the quarantine is actually not ten days: it’s seven days, plus three days of self-quarantine at home (which no one respects nowadays). Okay, that’s some good news, I guess.

A friend in the buddy chat group shares a breaking piece of news, related to my plight. A local store belonging to the international supermarket chain Aldi, located in the expat-heavy Jingan Temple area, had a COVID-positive customer that day. I’m familiar with the store, I’ve been there often, and they are very strict with scanning every visitor on a machine hoisted upon a stand at the very entrance. My friend and many of his friends are getting text messages telling them that they “may have been to Aldi recently” and that they should go home and “self-quarantine” for four days. Guess he’s trying to make me feel better.

Except wait a minute! Fuck! I was at Aldi last night! Aldi is on the main floor in the same building as Cages! My boy and I left Cages and he saw the store and dragged me in. He loves to get in there and run between the aisles for a bit. I ended up indulging him for a few minutes. I didn’t even buy anything! I check my phone. I got the same tex message as my friend. Go home and quarantine for four days. I tell everyone that it wasn’t Cages that got me into trouble, but Aldi.

All this time I keep getting calls from Chinese-language speakers. All I can respond to whatever they are saying is that I’ll give their phone contact to my wife, or I give her phone to them, so they can talk to each other. Out of these phone calls arises a piece of news that gives this story a big twist of retarded. Turns out these calls are from government officials, health officials, etc., from my district of residence (which is not the same as the district in which I work) telling me to go home wherever I am and quarantine for four days. WTF? I’m already in the quarantine hotel! Can I like, get out??

I’m emotionally and physically exhausted and it’s getting late. No one’s going to get me out of a quarantine hotel past 11 pm. Some time before I try to sleep I facetime with my wife and son. I go to bed with high hopes for the day after.

At around midnight I’m awakened by a phone call on my iPhone. Another official-sounding Chinese voice. I begin my rehearsed reply about calling my wife. “You have Wechat?” the voice asks in English. Of course I do. It’s easy to talk on WeChat in different languages because the app has excellent translation functions. The lady turns out to be a doctor with the CDC. She explains to me that in fact I’m a secondary contact and that as such, the rules say that I should not be in a quarantine hotel but at home. Great, when can I get out, I ask. The doctor can’t help me, but she can point me to the right people tomorrow. Let’s have some rest now. Okay, I say, and go to sleep feeling even better.

I’m awakened by savage banging on my door around 6:30 am. It’s the staff making the rounds and testing everyone. Bleary, I stumble to the door and open up my Health Code for them to scan. To my surprise, my health code has turned green again. Another good sign; I should definitely be getting out of here soon.

The hotel provides a mediocre breakfast box and as I select food items from it to eat, I prepare mentally for my early morning class. I’m in no mood to teach. Luckily, an email informs me that the morning classes in the school are cancelled. There will be an online staff meeting at 10 am. I learned the night before that the school has been ordered to go online through Tuesday. This news was announced as a good one – it could have been much longer. I’ll still have to teach the noon class, though.

Lunch, actually

Before the meeting I send a voice message to the principal. I explain that it turns out that I’m a secondary contact and that I’m not even supposed to be in the hotel. I want her to feel guilty about handing me over to the van people. She returns a voice message, in the chat, explaining in a matter-of-fact tone that she was also given a call last night and informed that I was a secondary contact and not supposed to be in the quarantine hotel. She offers no apology. Okay, I ask in the next voice message, can you call the same people you called yesterday and get me out of here, please? She promises she will call people and do her best.

The meeting and the class after drag out painfully and meaninglessly. No one at the meeting refers to my situation or to me directly. Whatever, as I expected. I get to work trying to contact people. I call the public service hotline, which has service in English. They never pick up. My wife does the same, they never pick up. My wife talks to the “hotel medical manager.” The man admits that I’m not supposed to be in the hotel, but explains that he cannot let me out unless he gets a documented order to do so. Where do we get the order from? He points us to the medical authorities.

I talk to the good doctor who called me last night on WeChat. She suggests I call the public service. They’re not picking up, I say. She offers to talk to my hotel’s medical manager. The man tells her the same thing he told us: he’s not letting me out unless he gets an order to do so. Clearly, the doctor does not have such authority. Someone at some point explains to me the now forever-etched line in my head: “Once you’re in, it’s really hard to get out.” Once you’re in, it’s really hard to get out.

The Aldi story develops, it’s the main news in the city. Tons of people got red codes, everyone who was in the store in the last several days (so half the expats in Jingan). Like mine, everyone’s code turned back green. It’s as though the authorities changed their mind. I’m itching to get the fuck out of this hotel.

My colleague Jenny, a British girl, starts sending me messages. She asks me if I’m at the Mercure Hotel because she was in that same quarantine in July. I vaguely recall her telling the story, something about not wearing her mask properly. She comforts me and tells me how I can order delivery and everything. Advises I watch some movies or read a book.

That’s pretty much what I do. I spend that whole afternoon binging on Youtube and doing some crossword puzzles. Anything to get my mind off the present. No updates from anyone. I can’t lie, I’m getting a pretty good rest. When was the last time I got this much alone time? A father of an eighteen-month-old? It’s been about eighteen months. As the sun sets right down the middle of the window, I reconcile myself to not getting out of the room that day either. Tomorrow is Saturday, the weekend, but the authorities should still be working. The principal sends an update: she has contacted the education bureau and tomorrow they will go and talk to the medical authorities about my case. Her voice is not excited. Also my wife says that she finally got hold of the public service hotline, they took her complaint and said they’d call her back.

I Facetime with my son again. I’ve played with him in person every single night since he was born, with perhaps one or two two-to-three-day breaks. This time tears come to my eyes and I’m filled with anger. After that, I waste some more time on the internet and fall asleep.

The next morning, I sleep in till late. Not counting the one time I have to get up to answer the maniacal banging on the door by the hazmat henchwomen. I got a ton of busy work to catch up on, and though I hate the idea of doing it, I do it anyway because it gives me a purpose and gets my mind off the present, in which there’s nothing to be done. It’s too early to follow up on anything. I consider writing this content. I make a couple of Tweets. I check my book sales. Whatever. I kill time.

My buddy in the group chat who had already left Shanghai and went back to LA advises me to sneak out of the hotel. “What are they going to do? You think some volunteer who hasn’t got a clue to begin with and who hates his gig is going to chase you?” I throw in an LOL and say I’ll think about it. He can’t believe I’m planning to work the next week from the room, either.

Jenny gets back to talking to me. The ex-inmate. She’s especially interested, and I guess it makes sense, her having stayed in the same place. I ask her about her story again. Here is, basically what happened to her:

Jenny was taken to quarantine after the authorities showed up at the door of her apartment. They have tracked her down using street cameras. Not with any sort of AI; a bunch of government wonks used their eyeballs to track down her walking path all the way to her home. They tracked it from a spot on the street where she passed by a person who happened to be COVID-positive. The specific reason she has to quarantine was that she was not wearing her mask. She claimed she did, but they took her to quarantine anyways. Like me, she was angry and she demanded answers. She contacted the authorities herself and with the help of her boyfriend and her Chinese friends. She learned that it was deemed that she was not wearing the mask because her nose was showing too much. She somehow got hold of the screenshots: yes, the bridge of her nose was showing, because she is of European descent and she has a high nose bridge. She cried racism. She got her contacts at the UK consulate to pull some strings. She pushed the principal to help her out. People tried this way and that way, but ultimately, nothing happened. She stayed in the hotel for the full seven days.

After telling me this story she talked about how her mental health has suffered and how she’s leaving the country soon. I commiserated with her. “It doesn’t hit you until it’s your ass on the line,” I said. We talked about how a lot of people’s asses have already been on the line, and how everyone wants to get out of here. Her parting advice was to avoid the stress of trying and hoping to get out and just buckle up for the full seven days. And don’t try to leave on your own! She explored the same option, but her diplomatic contacts told her that if she does it, she would definitely end up in jail. “They will make an example of you.”

In the afternoon, I followed up with the principal. She had not heard anything from the education bureau yet. How am I doing? Do I need anything? Anything she can help with. I was fine, I said. The hotel is fine, it really is. It’s clean and modern. It’s just that I can’t get out of here.

Later in the day, my code turns back to red. I learn from the group chat that many people who’ve been to Aldi, whose code turned red then turned green again, had their code turn red again. But for some people it stayed green. The sense of arbitrary enforcement of rules deepens.

That evening my wife sends me some fresh clothes and toiletries by express delivery. The hotel manager says I will receive them at the door in the morning. I have another facetime with my wife and kid and another emotional moment. Motherfuckers.

On Sunday, the principal informs me that there’s still no update from the education bureau. Guess they might not be working on Sunday; she doesn’t say. I kill the time writing this newsletter series, I think. I reconnect with old acquaintances and tell them what happened to me. I look for jobs in Vancouver.

It’s Monday evening now. I’ve done the two double periods of classes online. Can’t explain much through the computer. I gave the students some review assignments. I pretend I teach, they pretend they do work, for the most part.

This afternoon, I sent some more voice messages to colleagues I trust. I tell the story of the fateful trip to the washroom and depict the principal as an idiot. The principal updates me saying that the education bureau is trying its best, but there’s not much they can do. “Once you are in, it’s really hard to get out.” Translation: “You can go fuck yourself.” She asks me how I’m doing. I tell her the worst part is facetiming with my kid. No reply.