The Shanghai lock-down of 2022(I)
April 8, 2022, the 8th day — starting to get used to this…
Here in the western of half of Shanghai, we’ve been in lock-down for about 8 days now. I’m starting to get used to it, apparently, and I have now the motivation to write.
It all began a morning sometime in mid-March, when an elderly man knocked on my door with the words “today, we’ll all go for nucleic acid tests together. 12pm in front of the gate” — great…
I live in a small residential compound in the Xuhui district of Shanghai — on the western bank of town known in Chinese as “Puxi” — where the historical heart of the city can be found.
My compound consists of only two buildings. One with three floors and another with four — remember in China the ground-floor is the “first floor”. Next to my compound is a larger one, consisting of many high-rise towers. As I walked out around 12pm and followed the crowd, I found out what “in front of the gate” meant — in front of the main entrance to the bigger compound next door.
This is what it looked like, and if it looks like a confused crowd of people it’s because it is one. And so we were promptly told to come back in a few hours, when there would be less people.
Around 3pm, I went back to the gate. The crowd was gone and a volunteer gave me the directions to the testing site. Since there was another resident just about to leave as well, the volunteer assigned me that person as my escort.
After a short walk —about 5 min during which my escort asked me some questions such as which country I was from — we reached the testing site. It had been raised on the playground of a high-school just around the block.
A short queue was followed by a quick wave of our “green” QR code, and we were allowed to enter the site. Once inside I was promptly directed to the dedicated “foreigner using passport as identification” counter.
A quick registration of personal details, a swab, a hand-out of a blue card of unknown use — duly stamped — and out we went.
Since I had a phone call scheduled at 4pm, I went straight back to my apartment. After the call, I headed out — for some groceries and perhaps some evening recreations — only to be told at the door that I “couldn’t leave”.
Oh really? What about groceries? “Tomorrow, after the second test, you can go to the store quickly before coming back”. Back at my apartment, I felt a bit trapped, and annoyed. I guess the first day of a lock-down must always feel like that.
The next day, another trip to the testing site in the afternoon. As it rained, it had been moved to a different spot with a roof within the same school ground. On the way back I made a detour to some shops to buy groceries.
And so the early days — now remembered as “lockdown-lite” — went by at the rhythm of a trip to the testing site once every two days. And on the sixth day — after the first two rounds of testing had turned into four — they let us out.
Lock-down means lock-down
In the following week, Shanghai went a bit crazy — after having been under various forms of lock-down for a week, lots of people rushed out to socialize. Our compounds and lanes would remain under guard, where one would need a pass — the usefulness of the blue one previously handed out finally revealed —to get in or out.
There was a sense that another lock-down was imminent, and few days later — when one was announced — a kind of panic swept across town. People started panic buying, to the point of actually forgetting their groceries. While enjoying a beer with a friend in front of our friendly neighborhood store, we noticed a bag of vegetables left behind on a table next to the entrance of the shop.
The preparations reached a kind of crescendo on Thursday, when government workers started hanging “do not cross” lines next to every sidewalk. With the lock-down starting the next morning at 3am, we went to sleep that night expecting a short week of staying at home and living off the limited supplies we had gathered in preparation.
Little did we know what would follow.
