I’m writing this blog from “Vienna 3 Best Hotel” in Shanghai where I’ll be staying for seven days before being transferred to my next quarantine hotel in Changshu for another week. Surprising nobody, the Chinese take quarantining much more seriously than Americans. The process of returning to China during this pandemic has been similar to most aspects of my time in Asia: organized yet chaotic and extremely serious yet silly. I’ll share more details and pictures about our process to get into the country below, but first here are some insights into my isolated life.
Vienna 3 Best Hotel appears to be very impressed by the English language but couldn’t be bothered to actually learn it or find a translator. Upon entering the hotel we were met by their slogan “Lady-like Kind Gentlemanly Taste” and a TV screen that assured us we would be getting “five star quality at two star consumption” (whatever that means). Each room has some friendly traveler warnings such as “be careful for foreign currency exchange with private dealers” and “follow no strangers to the fun places”. Don’t worry, Vienna 3 Best Hotel, I won’t. The pièce de résistance though is the artwork in Alex’s room, a landscape scroll with an elegant cursive that reads: “your text sample text here your text” over and over. Incredible.
My quarantine so far has essentially been a comfortable-yet-maddening solitary confinement experience. I lucked out in having the biggest room on the floor equipped with a giant TV that doesn’t work, a dirty Mahjong table that looks like it was retired from a smoky backroom in Macau, and a bathroom door that says “push” when it is most certainly a pull. Three times a day a hotel employee in a full hazmat suit leaves a meal outside the door. The food is below-average versions of Chinese cafeteria foods (see pics below) served in plastic containers that I have to throw away in a trash bag outside my room. Every now and then there is a fun surprise though, like dumplings that look like a brunette boy and a blond girl! Just one of the many times in China I’ve eaten something that had eyes to look back at me. The meals are nothing to write home about, yet I find myself grateful to the hotel staff for showing up like clockwork and breaking up the monotony of my boredom. I liken this to a very mild Stockholm Syndrome.
In addition to mealtime, the other part of our daily routine is to take our own temperatures in the morning and afternoon and enter them into a website. Initially we could just make up any numbers we wanted, but the hotel probably realized this flaw in their system and changed the rules to require we also take a picture of the thermometer reading. We are using mercury thermometers by the way, which I’m pretty sure have been outlawed in the US for twenty years. I found out they were filled with mercury because mine broke and spilled on the ground, leading to a brief panic attack when I realized I was trapped in a room for a week being potentially exposed to mercury poisoning. I think I’m ok though because I cleaned up the metallic liquid balls without touching them and I have left the windows open ever since.
Quick sidenote: one of the worst parts of China is the Great Firewall blocking access to Google, which means I have to use *shudder* Bing. It’s the worst search engine and only shows you three results per search before saying you’ve reached the end of the internet!
Even though we are married, Alex and I were put in separate rooms. I have a hard time imagining one of us having COVID and the other not, but again, the Chinese are not fucking around with quarantine. Being isolated, jet-lagged, and extremely bored has been really hard on us. There is only so much time I can spend reading and watching TV before I start literally pacing back and forth to get some steps in. Our doors are unlocked so technically we could probably visit each other’s rooms, but it’s not worth the risk of jail time or being kicked out of the country if we were caught. Instead we spend a lot of time together on video calls eating meals, solving crossword puzzles, and even playing some card games. As much as I would love to be with Alex, I will abide by the words of Vienna 3 Best Hotel and not “follow to the fun places.”
Some of you might be wondering how we even got back into China, so let me recap that saga in this second part of the blog:
Seven months ago Alex and I were on a beach vacation in Thailand when we realized the COVID-19 crisis in China was serious enough that we needed to return to the US. With practically nothing but t-shirts and bathing suits we flew to a New England winter thinking that we would return to China in a few months when things calmed down. As we all know, things turned out a bit differently than that; the border to China closed, our wedding plans were disrupted, and the entire world has since been ravaged by a pandemic.
The first few weeks we were home we marveled at how folks in China were sheltering in place so diligently (on government orders). Friends from China mailed us a box of face masks and I thought they were overly cautious since the CDC was still assuring people that PPE masks were only needed by medical professionals. I remember conversations with people where I said things like: “Americans would never quarantine at home for months and wear masks like that.” I was pleased to be proven wrong about that at first. And then I was saddened to be proven right.
Throughout the pandemic, Alex and I had been dreaming of the day we would get an email from the school saying the Chinese border was reopening and we could return to our lives. Don’t get us wrong; we loved spending time with our families, and we are incredibly privileged to have had a place to stay rent-free, but living with our parents for half a year was not how we imagined our lives as newly weds!
So you can understand how excited we were when we finally got the email in August stating that the school had successfully lobbied the provincial government to classify us as “foreign experts” who could apply for a special entry visa. We went on a roller coaster of emotions as Alex literally wept with joy at the prospect of returning before we realized that all visa applications had to go through a local Chinese consulate. Of course all the US consulates were shut down due to COVID. We had finally been given permission, but now there was nowhere to issue the necessary documents. It felt like running a race where the finish line kept moving.
Phone lines were busy or off the hook at every consulate and the website looked like it had barely been updated since 2015. I finally managed to get through to a human being on the phone who told me to send an email to the definitely-not-sketchy address of cnnyconsulate@gmail.com. The irony of the Chinese Government using Gmail, a platform banned in China, was astounding, and yet it was through corresponding with that gmail that we got instructions to mail in our application materials for our new visa. We had to jump through a dozen more hoops of paperwork and authorizations, but in the end we got our visas mailed to us and didn’t have our identities stolen (that we know of).
With visas in hand we set our sites on the next two obstacles: flights and COVID tests. There were no direct flights from the US to China and the routes we saw took a minimum of 40 hours, had multiple days of layovers, and cost thousands of dollars. So we thought we had hit the jackpot when we found a flight path that took “only” 35 hours and went Boston – Tokyo – Taipei – Shanghai for about $750 per person. We bought the tickets and announced to our school’s HR office that we were on our way back. They asked us if we had confirmed that Taipei would let us transfer planes there, and we realized we had gotten too cocky. Of course it wouldn’t be that easy. You see, the airline sold us a ticket from the US through Taiwan, while neglecting to indicate that US citizens aren’t allowed to even transit through the Taipei airport. We confirmed this frustrating news through some late night long-distance calls where we were laughed at for even asking if someone from the US could travel through Taiwan during this pandemic. In the end we got most of our money refunded back to us (we are still grumbling about an airline selling a ticket for a flight they know we couldn’t take), and promptly threw up our hands in defeat and asked our school’s HR office to help book our flight for us. At 10pm on a Wednesday in Vermont they asked us if we could leave the next afternoon out of Boston. For a hot second we thought about pulling a crazy all nighter of packing and driving to the airport, but in the end we told them it was impossible and they booked us on a flight for the following week that went NYC-Detroit-Seoul (where we couldn’t get off the plane)-Shanghai. I won’t tell you how much it cost but I will say it felt like highway robbery that an airline could charge thousands of dollars for “basic economy” seats like that.
Before flying to China they make you complete a health form verifying a negative COVID test. While that seems reasonable enough the reality is they have created a logic puzzle with no solution. You see, the test results can be no older than 5 days before your flight into china, you need to send the results to the Chinese embassy 24 hours before you depart the US, the COVID test centers in our area take about 2-4 days to get back, and our flight landed two days after departure due to time zones. If reading that made your head spin imagine trying to figure out the solution. In the end we just took two COVID tests in the days before we were scheduled to leave and thankfully got the results back in time to complete the form. Of course after all that nobody ever asked to see these test results, but it still felt good to have them.
We got to JFK airport and were treated like minor celebrities by the check-in counter employees who probably hadn’t processed a ticket to China in months. A baggage claim worker wandered over just to make sure he had heard correctly that we were going to China and not Cancun. We had gotten to the airport three hours early thinking that there might be lots of check ins and screenings, but air travel in the time of COVID was honestly the smoothest airport experience I’ve ever had. JFK was practically empty, and we got to our gate in about twenty minutes. After sitting at the gate and killing time for two and a half hours, as we were boarding the plane we were informed we needed to show them an additional health authorization form on our phones giving us permission to return (a form that our school had assured us we didn’t need until we landed). We frantically located it and filled it in just in time to board the plane five minutes before takeoff. I suppose like every other part of this experience, one thing had to be hard.
After that it was relatively smooth flying. We saw all sorts of PPE including a woman who covered her whole body in plastic, another who traveled in a hazmat suit, and a baby wearing a face shield.
Approximately 18 hours and one Seoul stopover later, we made it to Shanghai around midnight. Airport employees boarded the plane in hazmat suits, checked we had the health authorization form, and dismissed us one section at a time. We spent the next two hours weaving our way through the airport where we underwent a very uncomfortable nasal COVID test, temperature screenings, health form checks, and the usual immigration inspections. The longest part was waiting for the bus to bring us to our quarantine hotel, and it wasn’t until about 5am that we checked into the oh-so elegant Vienna 3 Best Hotel.
UPDATE: We have been moved to a new hotel in our local town of Changshu for our final week of quarantine. We transited through a holding pen where each worker was completely decked out in PPE from head to toe. One of the workers was my hazmat hero because he was streaming the Celtics vs. Heat game on his phone and let me watch over his shoulder. Watching playoff basketball at 9am in a Chinese holding paddock has to be one of the more surreal moments of my life…
That’s it for this long-story-not-short blog! Thanks for reading. It would be such a delight to hear updates from friends and family to help me pass the time in my second quarantine week. You can email ramiejacobson@gmail.com or rjacobson@uwcchina.org.
The Wild Wild East 