The birth of the mask wearing and vax gang war-fare era originated in Wuhan, China. It feels like a decade ago when the catalyst for the new world order erupted from the epicentre of a chemical weapons lab, a pangolin or a bat depending on what you read. The ripples started early, they didn’t spill over into the rest of the world for a few months. China bought the West time, the West squandered it was the headline of an article I read just as COVID’s tentacles were reaching into the rest of the world.
Covid seemed to have started around December 2019. It wasn’t taken seriously until the approach of Chinese New Year, the biggest annual mass migration of people on the planet. Millions of people packing onto planes, trains and automobiles; hurtling to their hometowns to bring in the new year with their families. There were whispers of caution early on, plans for the holiday scaled down to the bare essentials of returning to families. I arrived in Yinchuan with my girlfriend, planning to stay a week, initially planning a few family restaurant laps which quickly dissolved as the unknown virus began to demand caution.
Two days into the festival, cases begin to spike, the country elevated its precaution immediately. Roadblocks were set up. Cars were stopped, passengers required to provide ID and travel plans. Temperature checks were taken by the roadside.
It was a quiet festival, mostly spent at the home. Chinese New Year is not at all like its Western equivalent. The festival is more akin to an Asian Christmas, family get-togethers, home cooking and gift giving all occur so a festival tucked behind closed doors was nothing too dramatic.
Drama would instead come in the form of increasingly urgent emails from my employer, monitoring the situation without providing a solid conclusion until the day before we were due to return to Chongqing. The inevitable news that the government would extend the public holiday came. Selfishly I was over the moon. I couldn’t comprehend the scale of what this emergent situation could mean. I remembered the swine flu and bird flu stories in the 2000s and arrogantly assumed that this too was nothing more than media storms with projected, worst case scenario figures that dwarfed the actual reality. Clearly, I was wrong.
We managed to return to Chongqing as planned without major disruption other than the sight of blue cotton masks on every face and temperature check guns (which rarely worked) and enjoyed lazing about for a few more days. The pandemic was still in its infancy, but the company responded swiftly, informing us that we could not return to our offices. The holiday kept rolling.
Unbelievably quickly our company responded by drawing up plans to move all of our schools’ classes online, a service we did not offer and did not have any systems set up to deliver. It was amidst this phase that concern was growing and measures were beginning to alter our daily lives. Face masks were already in short supply and yet were compulsory to enter any public area or building. Temperature checks also mandatory. It wouldn’t be long before the maiden lockdown arrived, though I wouldn’t be in the country when it began.
I had planned a trip home six months earlier and after some flight alterations I had the green light to fly back to the UK for two weeks. My commute started in Chongqing before a long break in Hong Kong airport where I stood in an apocalyptic queue to have my temperature checked and my details recorded. I spent the following eight hours drinking and playing Mario Kart with a Dutch fencing instructor before my flight to the UK. Masks had to be fixed to our faces for every minute of the nine-hour flight and the atmosphere had a touch of chill to it. I was stepping out of a country on the verge of a storm and into another that was lying in ignorant bliss.
Manchester airport felt like a short trip back in time. Nobody else was mearing masks. Nobody checked my temperature. Nobody cared where I’d flown from. It was business as usual, the scenes you would normally expect from any airport on any given day.
I was in a mild state of disbelief before the grip of jetlag and sleep deprivation threw my cares far away and I concentrated on getting home. China bought the West time, the West squandered it. My conversations with people confirmed the perceptions of the general British public; coronavirus was this thing that was going on a long way away, it was not a relevant concern. It was monitored but clearly no precautionary efforts were being made. I was swept up in this atmosphere of ambivalence and sense of ease, going about my home trip without a care for the spiralling situation that was occurring in my new foreign home in Chongqing.
Flights across the East were being cancelled and reworked constantly, making a return to China challenging. Eventually I crafted a journey that involved overnight stops in Paris and Hong Kong. Along with a short trip to Amsterdam, I’d visited 4 four countries before arriving back in China, the distinction between the West and East and the manner in which they were reacting to the situation were distinct.
Some poking and prodding about where I’d been aside, my re-entry into a country in the lockdown swing was complete. Shortly after, the rest of the planet would sample its first tastes of COVID. China was out of lockdown and functioning in semi-normality within a couple of months, but it didn’t stay that way for too long.
