Day 15 of Shanghai Lockdown

The rain in the last couple of days helped. Its not as inviting as the sunny bright blue skies that’s taunting me right now.

The water and supplies I ordered should have arrived yesterday. As it stands, I’ve gotta wait at least 10 more days. But luckily, my friend ordered me an “emergency box” from Epermarket that arrived yesterday. What a haul.

And it wasn’t until I was packing away the groceries (immediately challenged by my small cat lady fridge that used to only hold forgotten leftover takeout boxes dying slow, undignified deaths…) that I realized a weight was lifted off me.

I’m fine. I’m not starving.

If anything I’m stress snacking quite a bit and whipping up little things here and there just for something to do.

For most of us, this lockdown is annoying, stressful, but fine. I’ll eat my own crappy cooking and drink boiled tap water for a few more weeks and survive. But on my phone, outside my gates, people are suffering. Articles outlining the injustice and helplessness get deleted. People try to repost it in image format, share it in PDF’s, start online trackers for those who passed during the lockdown while waiting for a covid test result that’ll grant them access to emergency care.

I often feel like people outside of China don’t give Chinese people enough credit for the quiet, persistent, and cunning acts of rebellion. The word “brainwashed” gets thrown around, usually to squash an attempt to explain a different perspective. But you can disagree with how the West largely views you and still be lucid and critical. And you can have a “free” internet and freedom of speech and still be fooled into narratives that tells you there’s an “us” and then there’s ”them.”

There are more cases every day during lockdown, where most of us have not been allowed out of our own apartment doors. Best guess is that people are getting infected during testing. As I’ve mentioned before, social distancing was never widely practiced in Shanghai. We shut down the city (not to the current extent, mind you), had several hundred cases, and moved on with our lives, masked. And when you live in apartment buildings and all 190 people from your building is going downstairs in the same elevators and back up, crowding happens.

My other suspicion is that volunteers not trained in proper PPE usage are cross-contaminating. But that’s not really the fault of the individual. When my father started home dialysis, I offered to sterilize the working surface for my mom once, and was immediately corrected for overlapping my alcohol wipes. We all know not to touch our faces, but can you fault a volunteer or a healthcare worker for wiping the sweat off their brows hours into an endless shift?

Last night, the big viral story was that they’re evicting people from an apartment complex to convert the neighborhood into a quarantine camp. The residents pleaded, protested, and the police pushed back.

And here I sit waiting for my slow wifi to download a video game so I can kill time during this lockdown with no end in sight.

#COVIDCatLady Day… 790-something, Day 15 of #ShanghaiLockdown