(…is so boring!)

It’s not that I don’t appreciate the need for it, or that I have nothing to do, it’s just that being forced to sit in one room for an extended period of time is soundly annoying. It makes sense that this is what we do to criminals. Break a law, deal with being annoyed for the term of your sentence. That way, we can deter people from breaking the law, because getting caught is really annoying. I get it. But I didn’t break the law. I’m just local.

Realistically, I’m allowed out, and back into my complex, but the burden of the unknown is a bit fearsome. We have animated maps that tell where people in the city have been found with the disease, and those places are basically hot-zones. Why would I want to go to a place that someone had the new virus? Oh, well, perhaps it’s my local market, or perhaps it’s the warm and brightly lit mall in the city. It’s a total shut-down for me. I’m trying to get work done on a few projects.

(Note: The photos are from Vietnam, but I’m referring to China when I speak of a nation in lock-down. It’s that I was just in Vietnam when it all went down, and I felt that these images conveyed feelings that fit. VN is doing great~ If you haven’t been there, you should consider it. :)’ )

Cities in Lock-down

What does that mean~ Well, for different areas, different things. Here in Guangzhou, the freeze of activity is limited to the schools, restaurants, and many more settings that congregate people, movie theaters, for example. All of these are closed. For schools, a great burst of online teaching is awash over the country. Restaurants only do delivery and take-out, and movie theaters are screwed. I saw a post that was where the local movie industry put all its films online for streaming.

On the other hand, I hear that certain parts of Hangzhou have rules where only one person can leave the house, and at that, only once every two days. Shanghai is like here. Limited. The city I used to live in, Wenzhou, is on the same kind of full-scale quarantine that Wuhan is on. Travel is heavily restricted. I can’t even imagine. Beijing is requiring people who are returning from other places in the country to stay at home for 7-14 days, depending on what part of the country or world they are returning from. These rules are enforced by citizen policing. If people notice people breaking the rules, they are encouraged to call a hotline formed for the purpose.

Across the board, wearing face masks is the rule, and people aren’t allowed into any business at all if they don’t submit to a thermal test. If you do not pass, you do not pass. So, I’m trying really hard to not get a normal cold this season. If I get a normal cold, and with it, the requisite side-effects such as a runny nose and a fever, I’ll be spotted, gathered and hospitalized for a minimum of 14 days. So, that’s annoying. I take an ibuprofen as I walk out the door, just as a preventative thing. Shoot, it’s winter, man~ It was down to 13 degrees today.

How am I doing?

Could be doing better. Arrived home from a four-week vacation (note the accompanying pictures in this blog-post) with a plan to sit still and work, so this isn’t too far from the plan, but the anxiety is a bit of a struggle.

From my friends, family, and embassy encouraging me to come home, to the pragmatic take on things where, I’d spend a ton of money to have a not-so-good time somewhere else since I’d have to sit in a room for 14 days and not visit with anyone where I landed, or I could just hold tight and ride it out. I’d not only still need to have two weeks sequestered if I were to arrive anywhere, but also visa complications.

              If I leave, do I stay in the course that I’m studying? If so, then I’ve got 4 hours a day at a specific point in time that are needed online. So, I need online access and space to talk, at what would amount to the middle of the night on the American side of the world.

Do I drop the course? If so, what does that do to my visa? Can I get the working visa earlier than not from the school that’s given me a job for the Autumn? Are they still into bringing in more people? Will the visa process be complicated by the new situation? If so, how? What about my apartment? Do I eat the money lost? Landlord’s a nice guy. I don’t really want to stick him for too much.

What about my girlfriend? She can’t leave her village. I can’t visit. This doesn’t get easier.

              If I stay, staying in the course that I’m studying becomes easier. I can focus on the schedule and continue with it through the term. I won’t need to get outdoors but to buy groceries and make sure my legs still work, so I can keep possible contact with others to a minimum, reducing my chances of contracting the virus. Even if I do, I’m healthy as they come, it won’t likely affect me too much. Is that apathetic or realistic?

I’m packing boxes as if to leave and thinking of buying an oven to make my stay that much more pleasant. The boxes can stay packed for the 4 months if I stay. The oven, it won’t matter.

Positives that are coming from this:

China, the single-most notorious nation for animal smuggling has, swiftly and uniformly, ended the trade in illicit animals. Have we seen the permanent end? Time will tell. But for now, it does not exist. We have seen the rare-animals trade stopped, under severe penalty. Can I get a “Hallelujah”? (…and a permanent extension, please?)

China, one of the many nations of the world with long-standing issues regarding sanitation, has burst into a full-on national campaign to educate people how to interact without sharing germs. This is an epic aspect. I am happy about this. I’m seeing cartoons teaching kids how to wash their hands and daily text messages reminding people the same. It’s shifted how restaurants and public spaces will be looked at in the long-term.

China has a unique holiday that all of this conveniently happened just at the beginning of. The content of this holiday is basically that people go home to visit their families, wherever they may be. It is often called the world’s largest human migration, because it is. And now, people were forced to spend an extra week with their families. That’s great. People who haven’t been able to visit with their relatives for a whole solid year were given an extra week. Only now are they returning en masse.

Negatives that are coming from this:

Besides the obvious viral outbreak that may or may not ravage the countryside and the world…

There is a lot of circling the wagons, suspicion of outsiders, racism, and other such non-welcoming behaviors going on outside China. To be fair, it is a natural thing to fear the unknown. But it is an enlightened thing to use available knowledge and scientific basis for overcoming said fears. I worry that our (American) culture is moving away from scientific norms into a realm that values despotic, religious faith higher than science. Allowing our society to go in that direction will stunt the world’s progress, beginning with, certainly, our own.

I saw a news article about a group of kids who beat up another kid because he was Asian, in which the kids said they’d done it because he might have the virus… Where is the logic? If he had the virus, the logical move would be to avoid contact, not beat him bloody, creating a situation where his bodily fluids were outside of his body. That wasn’t a fear of a virus. That was raw, racist hatred, using the virus as a veneer of excuse for completely unreasonable behavior. (http://www.nbclosangeles.com) That’s powerfully ignorant, we need to lead kids in the right direction. That ain’t it.

As for China, I hope the medical teams are able to work quickly, cleanly, and efficiently enough to get this terrible epidemic under control. Many lives have been lost. Hopefully, that number can stop going up. These are mothers and fathers, husbands and wives, children of neighbors.

Add oil, doctor~