I mentioned having feels and wanting to share them when I wrote this. Now I’m going waaaaay back to before we ever went to Belize or Turkey… does any of this sound familiar? Probably not! Again, that’s my bad. Read below to find out why we left China for Europe as soon as we were done being locked up.
“We’re going into lockdown, you know.”
One Thursday we were in a meeting at our kindergarten in Shanghai and the next we were locked into our building. It happened so fast and we didn’t see it coming. A few of the other foreign teachers said they’d heard the city was shutting down isolated buildings within communities if a resident tested positive for Covid. Wouldn’t you know, that very day we got home to find our own building in the process of being locked up. Once we were inside, we couldn’t leave. This lasted about a week, then we could go outside but we needed to stay in the community. We could still receive contactless deliveries at this time. Anything we ordered online would be placed on a table just outside the building’s front doors. We could retrieve it once the courier had left. It wasn’t always like this though.
Fresh groceries aren’t always easy to find
With our diets consisting mostly of fresh fruits and vegetables, we regularly grocery shopped a couple times each week in person or on mobile apps. Kim was the app shopper and would try her best to replenish anything I would remember to tell her we needed. In this first lockdown, with mostly reliable deliveries, food was not a problem.
After this lockdown ended and cases exploded all over the city, we constantly lived in fear of being locked in again, never knowing if we had enough food stocked up in the fridge or toilet paper in the cupboard. Once we were locked in our community for 63 days straight. We could leave the building but couldn’t go outside the main gate. Grocery deliveries became more difficult to schedule as the entire city – except for the essential workers – was also locked down. This meant fewer couriers and a much greater demand on mobile app shopping, oftentimes resulting in zero availability of fresh fruit or vegetables. We spent too many mornings waking up to a 6 AM alarm just so we could frantically click the shopping apps on our phones, trying to score some spinach or sweet potatoes. It was frustrating, exhausting and terrifying.
Get it where you can!
We managed our pantry and refrigerator the best we could with the occasional attempt at home gardening. We tried to grow fresh lettuce and celery from stems but it usually molded more than it grew. Our school generously sent us huge boxes of groceries and we are forever grateful for them. They saved us. I should mention we were never in danger of starving, but the inconsistency of being able to get fresh produce had us scrambling often.
We have some dietary restrictions that prevent us from just eating anything and everything, so when the government did send random food boxes (see left,) we often would put those things aside in case a neighbor needed or wanted them. We gave away a lot of Chinese SPAM and noodles. Sometimes we were even able to trade things we could not or did not want to eat for things we preferred.
It always works out in the end
We live an exciting and charmed life but this lockdown had its share of ups and downs. On the left you can see a fair trade with a neighbor: some cheese wafers for spinach. We came out on top with that one, and we made a friend who would later lend us her yogurt maker. And we took the tomato on the right as a sign that things would be fine eventually. We just needed to cling to each other and keep eating salad…
and drinking coffee. We met CK, a barista locked in our building. We took our mugs and almond milk down to him a few times and he blessed us with his coffee art. We’d made another friend.
Have you updated your code today?
This is the part of the story where you learn another reason we eventually decided we needed to leave for good: QR codes and constant testing. Once lockdowns were lifted, part of the control measures included consistent monitoring of the population. Often we had to test at home and send a picture of our results to our building leader. She sent them along up the chain of command.
Here you can see our tests with one of our sanity-savers, a little houseplant that didn’t survive long, maybe a week. We bought it during on a rare grocery run we were able to do between lockdowns. Two negative tests meant we could keep shopping!
I don’t know what you mean, “it’s not green.”
To successfully complete a grocery run, we needed to show green QR codes to enter any public place. To get a green QR code, we needed a negative test result. And it had to be entered no longer than 48-72 hours prior to showing the code. (The timelines fluctuated but it all boiled down to establishing a routine of stopping at a neighborhood testing station every other day. They scanned our personal QR codes and tested us. Then we waited for our codes to be updated within 24 hours. If we didn’t have green codes within the correct turnaround time, we couldn’t go anywhere public. No stores, no subway, no train.)
We managed for as long as we could. Remembering to test consistently combined with inconsistent test centers and store inventories was a good indicator we needed to get out of the country. We didn’t just didn’t know how long we’d be gone.