![]() Without the need to commute, people set alarm clocks to place grocery orders. “It’s like a liquidating sale, but wildly expensive,” he said. One local fried-chicken restaurant, he discovered, started to sell packages of potluck vegetables and meat. During the lockdown, he spent his days hunting for produce on various delivery apps. Qin is an amateur gourmet chef who works in supply-chain logistics he has always been something of a professional at sourcing food. Six hours later, the couple brought home hundreds of dollars’ worth of groceries, including “veggies, fruits, instant noodles,” and yellow croaker and a belt fish for the freezer. Instead, we dawdled in the toy and milk-formula section.” By the time they got to the produce section, most vegetables were sold out, leaving only potatoes, bunching onions, and some carrots. He still regrets a key strategic error: “What we should have done was to go straight to the produce aisles. “Everyone in Pudong seemed to have got the memo,” Qin recalled. ![]() The night before Qin’s area went into full-blown lockdown, a member of his local neighborhood committee, the most grassroots level of party oversight, had told Qin to “stock up on diapers.” The young parents drove to a nearby Metro store. “One day, we were notified it was happening, and that very night, downstairs, yellow tapes blocked off the building and tents were set up for the Big Whites”-a nickname for the ubiquitous hazmat-suit-donning volunteers and others. ![]() Looking back to how everything started, Qin still had an air of disbelief. Occasionally, the couple sneaked out to play poker or mah-jongg with their neighbors. Qin kept a video diary of his son’s curiosity and mischief-examining a couple of cucumbers, attempting to feed a pancake to their cat, and tossing his baby bottle during a tantrum. Since March, he and his family had followed the local guidelines to stay relatively static in place, which meant that Qin, his wife, their one-year-old, and a nanny hadn’t left their three-bedroom apartment for most of two months. On our WeChat video call, he sat in a swivel chair in his home office, sporting a khaki tank top and a pair of metal-frame glasses. “It’s like an advanced Chinese test,” Leo Qin, a Canadian permanent resident who lives in Shanghai’s Pudong district, told me the other day. There are no such plans.” Two days later, people were told not to leave the city unless “absolutely necessary.” Then, just to clear the air, a municipal secretary told reporters, “We are not going into lockdown, and it is unnecessary to do a lockdown.” In the following days, Shanghai entered what is known to the rest of the world as a “lockdown.” But the accurate term, according to officials, translates as “whole-area static management.” In Shanghai, the city’s official WeChat account posted a denial, saying, “Internet rumors are not true. Even though the rest of the world has moved toward living with the virus, China doubled down on its strict Zero COVID policy, which includes long quarantine requirements for travellers and lockdown measures when a small number of cases emerge. In mid-March, as Omicron started to spread locally, rumors of a looming lockdown circulated. Residents of Shanghai have long known that, when it comes to the news, sometimes you must read between the lines.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |