Xirui Blogger Post

 

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    After we got off the plane and took all the painful nostril COVID-tests which I could feel the nasal swap reaching the back of my brain, we lined ourselves up in the Shanghai airport terminal waiting for the relevant government agency to bring us to a specified hotel where we were going to quarantine ourselves for 14 days, we could not go outside of our own rooms whatsoever, even though we took 2 COVID-tests and self-quarantined in San Francisco before boarding on airplane to go back to China from the United States, the flight was 14 hours and we had to keep our masks on the whole time except when eating and drinking. By the way, they took our passports away and claimed they would give them back to us when we arrived at our destination just in case we won’t sneak ourselves out, really mindful of them. Everything I described above was mandatory, and we had no rights not to follow it as well as complaining. Everyone next to me just had one goal, to go back home, to see our friends, and to see our families that we had been facetiming for 9 months. Ironically, they had us fill out a form that I remembered so detailed that we had to check on a box claiming that we were willingly and voluntarily to follow the requests.

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    The bus was filled with the smell of hand sanitizer or whatever the disinfectant liquid or fluid they were using to spray the bus inside out. It was 2 am in the morning, but, because we came from the United States, the 12-hour jet lag made us both awake and unanimated at the same time. I never expected myself visiting Shanghai for the first time ever in this way. All I was hearing was the bus engine in a city that never sleeps in China. The ride was roughly about 40 to 50 minutes, and the whole time I was imagining the past and the future of this peaceful and silent city, which helped lead to a question: does freedom exist here? Speaking of the past, earlier in the year, the government locked the whole city up, and nobody was allowed to leave their houses. Many people were literally starved to death. I mean I could definitely choose not to come back, which could save me and my family thousands of dollars, but is the policy really what the people want?

    “The total would be 7020 Chinese Yuan for 14 nights.” 7020 Chinese yuan roughly equals 990 dollars as of today’s exchange rate. I had seen international students go back to China before me living in a place where, let me put it this way, just about enough to live, and paid the same price I did, so I was extremely nervous and panicked to see what my room for the next 14 days looks like. But for the international students who were Shanghai residents, their quarantine was shortened to 3 days due to many reasons that I still cannot possibly interpret. I am “patriotic” enough that I cannot write such an article in China, but I am lucky to share this article.