Voice and intimacy in quarantined Rotterdam
Eighty years ago today, Rotterdam got the shit loudly blown out of it during the German invasion of the Netherlands. Most of the city was destroyed, with only a few buildings surviving the blitz, today making it aesthetically and historically distinct from other medieval Dutch cities. A city turned upside down, indeed.
Back in January, I was getting WeChat (China’s WhatsApp 2.0) messages from my friends back in Beijing. They were sharing information about the restrictions being put into place to stop the spread of this new Coronavirus. Daily life was shutting down, businesses I used to work for were closing; the bomb had detonated, it seemed. But here, thousands of miles away (8585 kilometers from Wuhan, itself quite far from Beijing), it seemed foreign and nonthreatening. At the new job I started in February, my colleagues and I talked about it with temporal distance as well; if we were going to get some sort of virus over here, surely it would not be soon?
By mid-March, though, we were all working from home. Servers for the first live stream for a press conference with the Dutch PM were overloaded, and King Willem-Alexander addressed the nation outside of his usual Christmas appearance. Weeks later, my parents were telling me about things starting to get serious back at home in Indiana (USA). My mom, nearing 70, was reluctant to stop her part-time job at a music store (she had just sold a $1000 guitar) until official quarantine measures were put in place. The explosion was imminent.
A wartime bombing and a pandemic are two entirely different events, and certainly there are dangers in comparing the two. But in both cases–a violent, sudden bombing and a slower, determined infection of a population by a life-seeking virus–one entity desires to take over or invade another, ensuring, it thinks, its own survival. Invasions of either sort can turn life upside-down, or just end it; voices can be silenced, intimacy restricted, and relationships torn apart in the destruction and isolation.
I am lucky to be a healthy person, and have family, friends, and colleagues who have been more affected by Corona than I have. I moved into my own place during the pandemic after months of living on the generosity of an old China friend here, but spending hours alone reinstated buried childhood loneliness and anxiety, somatized by a choking feeling and blushing with anxiety from attention and self-consciousness during WebEx work meetings. And, of course, I have been far from the people I know well and love, having barely gotten started creating my life here after arriving via plane/bus/ferry with a hiking pack and computer bag last fall.
But things heal, and life comes back even if on its head. Here, food delivery and the postal service became contactless, as did other professions. Going to the grocery store has meant going alone, using a basket or cart, and not paying in cash (not that anybody does that much anyway here). Respecting the 1.5 meter rule, we have been encouraged to be outside in the fresh spring air in order to stay healthy, and as of this week we can finally get our hair cut and teeth cleaned. For me, someone I had been seeing who was also living on her own became even closer to me and became my quarantine love. My work team and friends from my past became more connected and collaborative than ever, creating human intimacy through pixels on the screen and the sound waves through my headphones. I would not have even realized that today was the eightieth anniversary of the Rotterdam bombing if a colleague hadn’t mentioned it during a meeting.
After the 1940 bombing, Rotterdam went through its renaissance, with architectural symbols of subsequent decades creating the funky, historical spaces in the city today. The SS Rotterdam started sailing to New York on the Holland-Amerika Lijn in the late 1950s. Interestingly, it is now docked at the end of the peninsula where I just moved; like a close reminder of my link to my past and the rest of the world, and the intimacy and interconnected-ness of all of us, not excluding SARS-CoV-2.
At present, Corona is retreating a bit (at least here), people are coughing less, and Rotterdam is getting loud again after this other invasion. Businesses are opening slowly, and parks and streets are seeing more of their usual families, skaters, and stoners on these sunny spring days.
Our uninvited closeness, or intimacy, with Corona has required adjusting to a new way of living, and of living with — in this case, with a lethal respiratory virus. So for now, here’s to all of us getting our voices back.
