Interim Stage 4 of 4
There is a certain horrible joy in not knowing what the hell is happening. For me, anyway. For my entire life I have been consumed with fear of “doing the wrong thing.” Not morally wrong, although the time I mistakenly stole a Lindor truffle at Borders in like 1999 and thought I’d be arrested would make one think otherwise. I am always afraid of not knowing where to go, where to stand, what to say. I don’t like not knowing what the procedure is. In choir, I hated being at the end of a row because the thought of having to figure out when to walk in and out gave me anxiety. I feel panicked about this most often in bureaucratic situations, like the post office. I have never once entered a post office with any idea how to act in there or any idea what kind of package I need to buy or how. These kinds of tasks used to seem daunting to me. Thanks to nearly a decade of antidepressants, I can now function with at least a reasonable level of procedural uncertainty.
One benefit to being in China and being dreadfully linguistically ill-equipped is that I never know anything about what is happening and generally people do not expect me to. It has taken some of the anxiety out of existing in a society. I am accustomed to monitoring myself and my behavior, careful never to let it seem like I don’t understand where to go or what to do. Now I have no choice but to look, act, and be confused. It is the default ailment of an international move, particularly one taking place in the midst of a pandemic that has created severe restrictions for travelers. It is just a little bit freeing.
I am not advocating for learned helplessness here. Mine is not a situation without its problems: I feel extremely guilty for needing help and asking for it. It is a burden to people around me, I am certain. Additionally, I think I have an ethical obligation to try to understand what is going on around me and to be a respectful traveler. The main obstacle is the language barrier, which is not something I can change in any haste, but which I am working on. Yet, for the first time in my life, I am too preoccupied with actually doing something to worry about looking like an idiot during. I absolutely do look like an idiot. And that is fine.
I’m reminded of all of this because today I transitioned from the first quarantine hotel to the second. We have more leeway here: we order our own food and can leave for essential items. Today I set up my Chinese phone plan, officially trading out my Verizon SIM card for a China Mobile one. I assigned a little too much meaning to it, feeling like it was the first real step to living here. There are four interim periods between leaving my house in Philly and moving into my apartment in Shanghai. I left on July 3rd and went to Pittsburgh, then Dallas, then Hotel Gulag, and now I am here. There are six days between me and settling into this program, but I long ago deserted my familiar setup in Philadelphia. As my new friend put it, I have “already pressed the new life button.” Despite the liminality, I am here.
I have opined about it already in sentimental and self-indulgent ways, but I didn’t think that I would get to do this in my lifetime. Somehow I had already written it out of my future when I didn’t immediately go live abroad after college. But I made it. I guess I live in this city now.
Welcome to Shanghai and a Tiny Riot at Hotel Gulag
Upon arriving at Shanghai Pudong International Airport last Tuesday, I was immediately greeted by a unit of hazmat suit-wearing airport staffers. Encountering a person in a white paper hazmat suit is certainly jarring, but I admit that when the words coming out of the suit are not words you can understand, the situation becomes all the more peculiar. I felt as though I had been surrounded by Stormtroopers, directing me into line after line, where I visited a number of booths for various customs purposes. Finally, after being repeatedly swabbed for covid up the nose and down the throat, I was shuffled onto a bus and taken away into greater Shanghai and checked into Baolong Hotel in Hongkou.
I am not sure if a 14-day mandatory quarantine (followed by another 7 days, elsewhere) is the best or worst way to ease into life into a new country. This was certainly the easiest jet lag experience I have ever had--nowhere I need to be, no real responsibilities, but very regular mealtimes. I have had a chance to fantasize about living here in a way I couldn't in America. Sequestered in this hotel room, I often stare out the window, looking directly onto a busy highway flanked by a parking structure and some nondescript high-rises. Far away, above the top of the garage, I can see distant skyscrapers. One lights up every night in a wave of colors, always catching my eye. In this way, I imagine a city just beyond and I feel comforted that it is out there, that it will be there when I am ready. It is strange how calm I feel. I am not antsy. I do not feel I am missing out on anything (except coffee...and cheese). I simply feel that I am here, in this room, looking to the outside world that I will soon join. It is a gradual adjustment into this time in my life.
My main access to human connection, aside from the kind stream of texts that my friends send me as though I am still in the states, is the hotel group chat. Immediately upon arriving into the lobby, which was less of a lobby and more of a storage room, every new guest was added to a WeChat group for their floor. I am on floor 6, room 638. The group chat has been an endless source of both amusement and stress. After a few days, once everyone had slept off their travel, guests woke up and instigated a never-ending barrage of complaints against the hotel. The hotel manager and the community health organization that is monitoring us act as moderators of this chat, fielding questions and comments. The lack of fruit we have received has been a hot topic. There were endless jokes about the individually wrapped, whole cucumbers we received at the beginning of quarantine. There has been frustration about lack of clarity on our release dates, confusion about how work the air conditioning (Grandma Yu had to be instructed in pictures how to change the temperature in her room, only for her to give up out of fear that she would change the temperature for the entire building). Admittedly, the hotel has seemed comically disorganized, often sending people the wrong items or seeming not to know the answer to questions. As Cheng Mun put it, the guests seem to have instigated a tiny riot, the best that people in medical quarantine can. As a result of the confusion, there has been camaraderie in a way I couldn't have anticipated. Someone down the hall has sent all her lunch and dinner deliveries to the room next to mine, where Max, a 28-year-old from Ningxia, has been very hungry without any additional snacks.
The WeChat group is rife with ethnographic material, but it's not an ethnography I have any authority writing. It is made all the more complicated by the fact that I have to use WeChat's automatic translation feature to understand any of what is going on. The translations are often hilarious. Sometimes I try to chime in, like when folks said they had to set their A/C to 5 degrees celsius to cool the room down enough. I had to set mine to 18 degrees. After I sent a message saying as much, Max from next door sent me a message trying to explain the context of the conversation. Unfortunately, I was fully aware of the context, but clearly not hitting the social mark. It is hard to join in on jokes when a) your translation means you might not get the nuance of the joke and b) your response is the only one in English.
Truthfully, the companionship and kindness of Max and a few other guests is the only reason I think I have been surviving this as well as I have. I met Max in the lobby on the way in and made him help carry my bags. He exclaimed, "What the hell do you have in here?" upon picking up my army duffel. "All of my belongings," I replied, "I have moved here!" I added him on WeChat to thank him for helping me and he has continued to be supportive of me in the week since. It is comforting to me to know he is just one room away from me, that someone knows I am here, in a strange hotel in a city I've never been to, in a country that I love but that isn't my home. Sometimes Max and I give our shared wall a resounding tap, just to remind each other that we are there.
I have also made a friend named Baoshen, who befriended me on the bus to the hotel. Several girls approached me and asked me where I was from and what I was doing in China. I learned that they were mainly graduate students returning from programs in the US. Baoshen went to school in AZ, giving us an instant connection. Since arriving at the hotel, she has helped me order snack deliveries and explained what she understood about the hotel's correspondence. She even told me, out of the blue, that she had arranged vegetarian meals for herself. Having heard that vegetarian meals would not be possible in quarantine, I was shocked and asked her to help me achieve the same. She did and ever since I have been enjoying my bland mushrooms in peace. As many jokes as have been made about the food (one man demanded that the hotel figure out how to incorporate spices into the meals), I am very grateful for the arrangement of non-meat food.
Food is also the main fixation of this situation for me. As someone who has spent the last 11 months in eating disorder recovery and practicing an intuitive eating approach, it is somewhat unpleasant to have so little agency over my food choices. While the food is fine, it is not familiar to me. That is normal and expected, but it means that even though I am hungry, it is hard to make myself eat another dinner of rice and cabbage. I have supplemented with a strong supply of Pocky, which has given me some sense of normalcy given that it is a food I know. I have begun to dream of coffee, even having a dream that I tried to go to Starbucks, but they never let me get my caffeine fix because they were trying to hire me instead. Throughout the whole dream, as I was inexplicably interviewing for a barista position, I was only thinking of getting to order. This dream was likely born out of equal subconscious undercurrents of desire for coffee and uncertainty about my new position. I did, after all, leave a very established job to uproot my entire life and move to Shanghai. But as I said then and say now, this is just something I have to do.
I include below a collection of photos from quarantine: the nighttime view outside my solitary window, the fully-laminated hallway of this hotel from which I grab my food every day, the food itself.
I only have a week left in this hotel before NYU sends me to another one to finish the last 7-days of self-health monitoring before I move into my apartment. It feels like the longest and shortest period of my life. I am strangely happy, I must say. It isn't too bad to sit around and play the Sims 24/7, especially when there are such nice people around to chat with. I am excited to begin my new life here. People have told me how they think this will be a fantastic year, that it will be a great time. I think so too, but here is the truth: it doesn't matter to me if it is a great experience or not. It will be an experience and I am open to the ups and downs as they may come.
On loneliness and automation
A fancy coffeemaker is a good replacement for companionship. At night, when you are getting ready for another workday, you can gently place coffee grounds into the filter using the specially-made tablespoon (that clicks into the side of the machine, of course) and you can hit that "delay" button like this is not a gift from current you to future you, a gift for tomorrow you to thank past you for. You can erase that memory for eight hours.
If you time it just right, coffee will be ready before you yourself are ready to get up and you will smell it from upstairs and it will almost feel like someone else made it for you. You can imagine that maybe someone crawled out of your bed before you and before the alarm and made you a cup of coffee. It will be a communal coffee experience! Even if you must go to your job, someone made you coffee!
You can venture downstairs with a self-deluded optimism about what you will find. Sadly, what you find will just be your coffeemaker. This will not actually be a surprise. You know you slept alone and that you only have Last Night You to thank. But you also have your fancy, automated coffeemaker. And that's as good companionship as most people ever get.
Pandemic Revelations of Young Queerness
This was the tweet:
