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.