Time’s Gone Inside Out
I knew this period of my life would end and at times I willed it into existence. I have been a constant surveyor of “normalcy.” I have seen it in this blog over and over; it is clear it is on my mind. At the same time that I feel a sense of normal. I feel time slipping past me in the way it always does in spring. I am reminded of my senior spring, when on the first warm day I sat outside on a bench with the boy I liked, drinking Jack’s Hard Cider. Those kinds of days passed very quickly. In some ways, I wanted them to (so I could enter the big, confusing rest-of-my-life I had been promised after college). But in retrospect, they ended and I missed them. I think I get this feeling every time it gets warm. Living is a very cyclical thing.
A few weeks ago, I biked to Fuxing Rd. and drank a beer outside, completely without cares. It is the epitome of springtime to get a little drunk in the sunshine. Before my friends showed up, a very little old lady approached me and asked me something about Russia in Chinese. I am often mistaken for Russian, so I told her that I am an American. She nodded knowingly and started singing a little song. I believe it to be a tiny Russian tune. Now there is covid all over Shanghai and these kinds of interactions feel less likely.
When I say there is covid “all over” Shanghai, I mean that there are like 100 cases or less and they are extremely contained by all the policies and infrastructure that China has built over the last two years. But yesterday afternoon our whole university was called to return to the building and get covid tested onsite. We were afraid we could be locked in the building for 48 hours or more if it was discovered someone was a close contact (or worse, a covid case), as many people have in the last weeks and months. But all 1800 tests came back negative. We scanned a QR code to view our own results, stamped in red by the Chinese government. It was the kind of beautiful bureaucratic situation I have come to expect from living here.
There has been a real panic in the building. Classes have voluntarily gone online and our office will be alternating in-person and remote days. The risk is still incredibly low, but the logic is that if only half of us are in the building when it is locked down, then only half of us will be trapped. Not sure if that is exactly the mode of thinking we should be going with, but it is also characteristic of my experience in this institution. It feels a bit like March 2020 again, and these are feelings that I had a) forgotten and b) hoped to never feel again. Yet this time it is not the virus that is unfamiliar to me, but the government that is tasked with containing it. This is a very interesting time to be here and in some ways, time is really all I am thinking about.
