Quentin Quarantino redux
December 23, 2021
AFTER nearly two years in a state of suspended “zero-COVID” animation in authoritarian China, Britain’s more laissez-faire approach to the coronavirus took me a little by surprise.
During my month back home, there was a semblance of a tracking, tracing and testing regime, but nothing appeared to be joined up in any way, and all the pandemic infrastructure seemed to have been set up primarily as a profit-seeking enterprise.
No one seemed to be paying attention. There didn’t seem to be any resolve or manpower to check whether anyone was complying with the rules. The authorities just want to tick their boxes and cover their arses in case anything goes wrong and someone on their watch creates some kind of lethal superspreader event. Remarkably, even this minimally intrusive, mostly voluntary system was interpreted in some quarters as a kind of invasive Big Brother and the first step in the direction of totalitarian tyranny.
Even without COVID-19, my flights back to China increasingly felt like a return to captivity. This time was even more painful than usual. Landing in Shanghai after a long flight and a day-long stopover in Copenhagen, I got the usual sense that I was descending into a different kind of air.
At this point, the hypervigilance of the Chinese state requires my own commensurate hypervigilance, and all the focus on procedure seems to settle my mind. I file my way through the system and even allow myself a little joy as I breathe my first gasp of fresh air in two days while queuing up at the testing huts in a narrow outside alleyway.
I am scrupulously polite with the staff in their hazmat suits. I allow myself a few moments of elation as I pick up my luggage and head to the departure lounge, which is now divided according to Shanghai subdistrict in order to facilitate the quarantine arrangements. The whole area is patrolled by the now customary hazmateers spraying disinfectant.
There is an overabundance of caution. We are frogmarched through a sealed, sterilised passageway of the airport towards a designated part of the carpark. Absolutely nothing is left to chance. This all comes as something of a culture shock after a month in the recklessly libertarian England.
The familiar bus route takes us through the highrises of Pudong and over the murky Huangpu. We eventually reach our sealed and sequestered quarantine hotel - known in English as the Skybird and slung up on the edge of a Shanghai overpass.
We are ushered into the Skybird hotel’s repurposed back entrance, given a black plastic trash bag filled with medical provisions as well as another form to fill in, and are then led one by one into the elevator. In my assigned room, there is no natural light at all: just two windows that open out about two inches onto a brick wall. It is all very well that the Chinese authorities are strict: but here they are being needlessly punitive.
Tellingly, a sign on the door warns residents not to be taken in by online scams. I expect being cooped up for so long in such an unfriendly room can lead one into some strange mental directions. On any normal one- or two-day assignment in a small-scale Chinese city, this room would be perfectly acceptable: but for a fourteen-day stint in quarantine, it feels like a torture cell. Unhelpfully, I start to think of Buried, the most terrifying film I have ever seen.
On Day 2, I work out there are 312 hours of confinement left. I can’t work out if the lack of natural daylight is ameliorating or exacerbating the jetlag. How much of my unsettled, agitated state is down to quarantine, and how much to the usual psychological disruptions of returning to the Chinese timezone?
China’s propaganda organs have been declaiming the virtues of China’s own version of “democracy”, which is “systemic” and not simply a matter of staging elections every few years. I have no doubt that there is something “systemic” happening right now. COVID-19 perfectly encapsulates the brute reality of the Chinese state, whether you believe in the lab leak or not. A ruthless, uncontested power exploits even its most heinous of failures, and has now arrogated for itself the authority, means and moral justification to shut down parts of the country - from hotels and apartment blocks to entire cities - on health grounds.
Early in the morning, we must submit our temperatures to the authorities. Some time later, I field calls from some residential committee busybody from a previous address who has somehow got wind of the fact that I am in quarantine and thinks I will pose a risk when I finally emerge. I tell her I no longer live there and relish the fact that the state isn’t quite as omniscient as we think.
Mercifully, it is also unable to enforce its strict ban on alcohol in quarantine hotels. An accomplice fills up Sprite bottles with white wine and has them delivered to my room.
Some online advice suggests that it is the lack of control that makes quarantine especially unsettling. This feeling, I would suggest, is compounded by being in China, where the only chance of being truly in control is by getting oneself elected as General Secretary of the Communist Party.
Every day, the hotel dumps on our doorstep a meal of meat and rice, a “soup” that resembles stagnant dishwater with three meagre slices of cucumber thrown in, and a welcome piece of fruit. Every other day, volunteers come with their swabs and test tubes.
On the penultimate day, the weary, long-suffering girl in her hazmat costume listlessly stuffs one swab into each nostril but doesn’t even bother to let it linger: she is now merely going through the motions. Everyone’s a victim of this ridiculous charade.
The final hour drags. I pace around. I fret and brood over the possibility that I have made a mistake and that my quarantine will be reset.
We are finally released at 5.10 on Wednesday December 22, fourteen days to the minute since we arrived. On the way out, a notice warns us that if we take the wrong “polluted” elevator, we will have to do the 14 days again. I meet some of my fellow captives in the hotel’s glistening reception, which is bathed in warm orange light. The bill comes to around £300.
There’s a lavishly furnished Christmas tree in the corner. For whom? For the staff? For the hordes of post-quarantine undead, trudging painfully towards daylight?
Never has the sight and sound of Shanghai’s rush hour traffic been so welcome. Never have I enjoyed the smell of petrol fumes so much.
