I keep thinking that I should document what the big Shanghai lockdown was like. It was an incredibly strange and surreal event which I hope to never experience again. I’m home sick this weekend with a little sore throat, so here we go! Lockdowns continue all around China. This weekend the biggest news in China was about a tragic fire in an apartment building in Urumqi, Xinjiang where lockdown had been going on for over 100 days. There were at least 10 deaths and it’s believed that people had difficulty escaping the building because of locked doors. Huge protests have been happening in response to the fire and WeChat is full of videos which are all eventually censored and deleted. Some more clever critiques of the zero-covid policy have remained uncensored, like a WeChat post that just says “太好了太好了太好了太好了….” (wonderful, wonderful, wonderful) over and over. There have also been huge protests against zero-covid measures at the Foxconn plant that produces many the world’s iPhones.
Let me return to the big Shanghai lockdown which came just when we thought everything in China was finally getting better. The ENTIRE city was locked down beginning on April 1, 2022. For context, here’s a graph of the Covid numbers which caused this lockdown from state-run news source Shine. The population of Shanghai is somewhere around 25 or 30 million. (It’s hard to count because there are so many migrant workers from other provinces who aren’t included in the official number.)
There was a lot of food uncertainty at the start of lockdown. It took awhile for deliveries to resume because so many delivery drivers were on lockdown. Eventually drivers were given passes to return to work, but many of them were no longer allowed in their apartments after they started working again since they were considered high-risk; so they had to choose between making money or staying home with their families. It was heartbreaking that the delivery drivers who were so crucial to everyones’ survival had to spend the lockdown living on the streets.
During most of lockdown the most reliable way to get food was through group buys. In the group chat with all our neighbors someone would announce what item they had sourced and then everyone would sign up. Sometimes group orders didn’t go through because the product had run out, but if they did then the food usually came a day or two later. We used this method to get milk, dumplings, eggs, fruits, and veggies at the start of lockdown and later used group buys to get more frivolous items like Peony flowers and Basque cheesecake.
There was no shortage of inhumanities that played out around the city during lockdown, but I was lucky in my building. I was safe throughout, but the threat of being taken away to quarantine, the need to constantly translate Chinese WeChat messages for lockdown updates, and the challenge of obtaining food were a lot to deal with. The “silver lining” of this whole experience is that I formed new bonds with my neighbors and learned how to cook a lot of new recipes.
March 8 – Our school had our first session of mandatory Covid testing for all students and faculty because of a few cases that popped up around the city.
March 12 – My friends and I decided to stop hanging out at each others’ houses since there was a risk of being locked in to each others’ houses without warning if a Covid case was discovered in the building.
March 15 – My school started online learning. This was also the first day of our “48-hour lockdown” during which they started doing mass testing. I had to stay in my apartment and wasn’t supposed to even enter the hallway. I did get to go on a few walks to Shanghai Library for Covid testing and even snuck over to a coffee shop one day after testing.
March 22 – After 7 days this first mini-lockdown finally ended. It was official when a man came through the neighborhood with a megaphone playing a message in Chinese that announced the end of lockdown!
March 25 – I first read on social media about asymptomatic Covid cases being sent to beds in the corridor of a hospital because there was nowhere else to put them. Soon after the city started building very shoddy “hospitals” for Covid patients which were just giant warehouses full of hundreds of beds, no showers, and disgusting toilets.
March 30 – I went for a walk on Wulumuqi Lu and sidewalk veggie vendors had sprung up everywhere in response to the notice that we would be entering a four-day lockdown on April 1. I really believed it would just be a four-day lockdown so I didn’t do too much stocking up. (Whoops!)
April 1 – The big lockdown of the entire city began. I got to leave the building once a day for Covid testing in an alley around the block. Everything was shut down. All businesses. All shops. All public transportation. Even many hospitals.
April 2 – I sat on my balcony and marveled at all the bird sounds I could hear from my balcony. I did not get to go outside for today’s Covid test because it was a self-done antigen test. I had stocked up on fava beans on March 30 because so many people were selling them on the streets and I cooked them today with a recipe I got from my neighbors in our building group chat. Also today, Caixin reported on the Covid deaths at Shanghai’s largest elderly-care hospital and the article was quickly deleted from the internet.
April 4 – I received my first free government food box with cabbage, carrots, zucchini, potatoes, and daikon. Lockdown still felt novel and not too bad! I was excited about all my free veggies. I also met my nextdoor neighbor, Erynn, for the first time because she had to help me generate a QR code for Covid testing. She’s a photographer from Ningbo. I had never spoken to her before, but we became close friends during lockdown and she helped me immensely to navigate all sorts of issues that came up during lockdown. I made her lots of tasty food in an effort to repay her for all her translation help. Today we were told that lockdown would not end the following day, as promised, but would continue “until further notice”. I started getting stressed, but was happy to end my day with an online puppet drag show put on by the Shanghai drag scene.
April 5 – Daikon day! I cooked as many recipes as I could with the daikon in my government box. Butter on daikon, pickled daikon, daikon fries, curried daikon, and daikon on top of chili. I tried to order food online from the one grocery store that was open, but it immediately sold out after it opened at 6am. I started becoming worried about running out of food. I had lots of veggies, but not enough food that was really filling. A neighbor gave me ten eggs, which he wasn’t sure he was allowed to do. I appreciated his generosity. Many of my friends were becoming worried because they couldn’t find any drinking water to order. I was so grateful I’d had a water filter installed in my apartment.
April 6 – Throughout lockdown I was very lucky because my neighborhood contains many important government buildings which ensured we would be well looked after. Further out from the city center people were not being taken care of. Videos on Wiebo showed folks yelling on their balconies about a lack of supplies. A drone told them to control their soul’s desire for freedom.
April 7 – News about pets of Covid patients being killed. Felt really hopeless about lockdown. Started running out of fruits and veggies.
April 9 – I woke up to 30 eggs outside my door! Our building did a group buy together. We weren’t allowed to get deliveries from the front of the building at this point. They had to be delivered to our door by a volunteer in a hazmat suit.
April 10 – Found out our building’s septic tank had been overflowing into the street for two days and couldn’t be fixed because of lockdown. Those poor ground-floor residents. It finally got fixed. I got a bag of fruit from a group buy. Another neighbor helped organize a mass dumpling order. I discovered the delicious flavor combination of sauerkraut with scrambled eggs.
April 11 – I finally got my first order through on the Ding Dong grocery app. I saw it arrive out the window and had to wait for a volunteer to bring it to me. Happy to get some fresh milk and more fruits and veggies.
April 12 – We were declared a “preventative zone” since we never had any Covid cases and were allowed to leave the building! We were only supposed to walk as far as the end of the block, but there wasn’t anyone keeping track. It felt surreal to be outside under the trees. Most buildings were still locked down so the streets were completely empty except for delivery drivers and Covid volunteers.
April 13 – My school sent me a large box of food. I gave the meat to a neighbor who is cooking for the elderly in our building and she gave me homemade plum juice in return.
April 14 – One of many instances of creative protest online about the lockdown. News comes out about Qian Wenxiong, director of Hongkou’s health commission information center taking his own life due to the stress of zero Covid. This is just one example of the tragic, unnecessary deaths that occurred during lockdown. Here is a memorial to over 200 other people who died.
April 18 – We received the best government package yet. This brown spiced tofu pictured in the center is amazing. Sadly I couldn’t get through all the lettuce before it went bad. It was difficult to not be in control of what food we were eating during lockdown.
I managed to buy some luxury food items today. I was out on a bike ride and heard about an imported food store where the owner was living and discretely selling food. I knocked on the window and the owner flashed her WeChat QR code for me to add her as a contact. She texted me and told me to walk down the block because she wasn’t allowed to be open and she didn’t want the police to come. She sent me blurry pictures of what she had on the shelves and I told her what I wanted – chocolate chips, vinegar for pickling, and ginger soda. I paid her and she left the items on the sidewalk for me to pick up.
I really must reiterate that while I was very comfy with food, many other people in the city still hadn’t received any government deliveries at this point. At this point some people had still never been released from their initial lockdown in March.
April 19 – People started protesting PCR testing because they realized this is one way that Covid continued to spread. A neighbor made me bamboo shoots for lunch.
April 20 – My school finally got through a care package of food and I got my first loaf of bread in three weeks!
April 22 – Everyone, like EVERYONE, was sharing a video on WeChat moments called “Voices of April” which compiled audio from calls to the CDC during lockdown. Every single version got taken down. People edited the video in all sorts of ways to try to slip past the censors, but every post got removed within a few hours.
April 23 – On a foggy night I rode my bike to the Bund – the most popular viewpoint in the city. I rode right down Huaihai – a major road in town. There wasn’t a single car on the road! It was spooky and I felt super on edge the whole time since I knew I wasn’t supposed to go that far from my building.
April 24 – A neighbor gave me fresh nutmeg so I could make carrot cake.
April 28 – I organized a group buy of Italian food products. I learned how time-consuming it is to do this work and had so much more respect for the people in my building who have been organizing food deliveries. Luckily our Italian foods arrived quickly the next day and I was rewarded with a 2kg chunk of Gouda cheese. A great comfort during the lockdown. Meanwhile, people in other parts of they city organized banging of pots and pans to demand supplies from the government.
April 29 – The government sent moon pies and salted eggs. I really became tired of cooking on this day.
April 30 – I rode my bike out to the West Bund – a pretty spot next to the river that’s usually full of people. During lockdown there was a pack of street dogs roaming the streets, overgrown weeds, and tattered sleeping bags on the sidewalk. At one point I encountered a drone saying something to me from the sky, but I couldn’t tell what the message was. In the late afternoon I finally found peanut butter to order!
I was texting a friend who told me that the convenience store in their compound has remained open this whole time because the shop owner has been living in the store for 35 days now. She was sleeping on boxes until the neighbors realized what was happening and got her a mattress. So many people around the city had to spend a lot of days sleeping in their workplace.
I made my first pizza! I made a lot of pizzas during lockdown and this is one of the cooking accomplishments I was most proud of.
May 2 – One of my best friends thought her building was freed, but then another case popped up and they were back in lockdown for 14 days. This happened all over the city. My neighbors texted me to see if I had found peanut butter because they remembered me asking a few days earlier. I really felt cared for by my neighbors.
May 7 – I rode my bike to the International hospital to get my booster vaccine. The efficacy of the Chinese vaccine is questionable, but I knew that having it would make my summer trip home go more smoothly. China has easier requirements for re-entering the country if you’ve had the Chinese vaccine. There was only one location in my part of town I was allowed to get the vaccine at since I’m a foreigner while Chinese citizens could go to any number of locations. Despite all the zero-Covid protocols, China never made vaccines mandatory.
There was a notice going around WeChat about a new lockdown (the “silent period”) where no one can go outside or get deliveries. I asked my older Shanghainese neighbor about it and he says “You can ignore bc it is not legal. If you become strong, they will be soft. If you soft, they will be strong.” Unfortunately he’s not quite right, because “legal” can be defined by the government however they like, but I liked his attitude.
May 10 – I discovered the best game online! It’s called Calico and you try to strategically build a quilt that will get the most kitties to lay on it. I played on http://tabletopia.com with a friend in Australia and it was one of the highlights of lockdown.
May 11 – I started to see nearby neighborhoods get completely sealed off with wooden fences.
May 13 – I started seriously thinking of fleeing China because it seemed like lockdown would never end. I took my cat to the vet to get her a Rabies shot and a microchip in case I needed to take her with me to the US. In order to do this I had to drop her in her carrier in front of the vet’s office. A police car was stationed out in front to make sure I didn’t enter the vet’s office. The vet tech who was living at the vet’s office took my cat inside and the vet directed her through the procedure on a video call and texted me updates. An hour later I walked over and picked up my cat who would now be allowed to enter the US if I needed to take her. I looked around my apartment and debated which items I would squeeze into my two suitcases if I left. It was very stressful.
May 16 – I finally got to see my Shanghai bestie who lives half a block away from me! She was only just now let out of her compound.
May 18 – I heard about people being let into grocery stores again. There was very limited capacity and people have to line up for blocks to be let in. My friend shared this picture of folks in lockdown getting pedicures. Stuff this like was happening all over the city.
May 21 – My first big social event of lockdown! Several friends and I were reunited at a park picnic! We felt a little uneasy being part of such a large gathering and made sure our masks were on since we didn’t want to end up in the news as a bunch of irresponsible foreigners who were spreading Covid. Later in the evening the cops blocked off the park we had been hanging out in.
May 23 – I was again having trouble finding veggies for sale online so my kind neighbor let me come down and pick what I wanted since he had just bought a lot. This neighbor is a middle-aged Shanghainese man who my friends and I call Viagra because my phone always translates his wechat user name “Wei’ge” to Viagra instead of “Brother Wei” which was his intended meaning. In the afternoon the neighborhood volunteers gave me stamped passes that we were supposed to use for leaving the building once a day only between 1pm and 3pm. I was confused why we were being given these passes after weeks of relative freedom, so I asked Viagra about it. He said something along the lines of, “I don’t know why we have these passes and I do not care about them.” I love his energy.
May 28 – I got to go to the visa office! This process usually would have been taken care of in April. Visa renewals are super difficult in the best of times, let alone during a citywide lockdown. I was only going be able to go home for the summer if I was able to get my residence permit renewed and things were looking a bit hopeless through most of May. I hadn’t been home in over 2 years and was dying to get this visa sorted out! After a huge amount of research, document gathering, and some phone calls I was able to secure an appointment at the visa office and found a driver to take me. The visa office was only open because the employees had been living in their office for several weeks now. I was so grateful for the sacrifice that these employees and so many others were making to live away from their families in an office so that essential services could still run. (Not that they had much of a choice…) It was super quick to get my visa application turned in and then I finally felt assured that I would make it home for the summer! What a relief!
June 1 – The last of my friends was let out of lockdown. The whole thing actually ended! We had been hearing in the news that the lockdown would end up June 1, but most of us didn’t believe it. However, June 1 came and the lockdown really did end and the streets were once again full of cars and scooters like the lockdown had never happened. So strange.
October – I experienced two more 48-hour lockdowns during October since there was a “secondary contact” in my building. These lockdowns came without any warning and although they were short it was stressful being confined to my apartment once again and not knowing for sure when it would end.
Scan or Be Scanned 