Life in the Time of Quarantine

by Emily He (United States of America)

I didn't expect to find China

Streets are empty, shops are closed, and I haven’t seen anyone besides my mother in weeks. I have been self-quarantined in the city of Kunming because of the coronavirus for forty-seven days. As the temperature rises into Spring, I wonder how much longer I can endure this. I flew to China to celebrate Spring Festival with my family. For most Chinese people, this is the only time parents in big cities return to their rural hometowns to spend time with their children and working adults go home to their aging parents. It’s the most important family reunion of the year and central to our traditions. It’s our Christmas, our Hanukkah, our Ramadan. When I first heard the news that a SARS-like virus was spreading rapidly in Wuhan, I didn’t panic. China is so large that the chance of it reaching me is minuscule. A week after Spring Festival, however, I learned that a neighbor three floors below my grandmother had come back from Wuhan to celebrate the holiday with his family in Chongqing, and he carried the virus. Of the 24 confirmed cases of infection in an urban district of 880,000 people, in a municipality of over 30 million, one of the infected persons just happens to live in my grandmother's building. Since then, the entire country of 1.39 billion people has locked themselves up at home. My mom and I have built a routine around the quarantine. Mornings start lazily with coffee, and before it even ends, my mom begins to prepare lunch. I read or write as these early meals digest, and then turn to exercise to regain energy for the rest of the day. When the sun shines onto our balcony in the afternoons, we pull up our little seats to soak in the Vitamin D that quarantine has taken away from us. Sunbathing lures us into naps, and by the time we wake, it’s dinnertime. We enjoy this nightly meal catching up on Chinese television series that I never enjoyed until now. As the coronavirus crosses over the Chinese border, I cancel my trip to Cuba. I stop myself from daydreaming about beaches and hikes and hostel beds and turn myself to books and phone-calls with a cousin I had lost touch with, quarantined alone on the other side of town. For several days I have a headache. I am afraid it is a symptom of the coronavirus, but we do not have a thermometer at home, and all four pharmacies in our neighborhood are sold out. I could go to the community center but if I have a temperature, they will send me to be quarantined in a hospital where the exposure to Covid-19 is much more likely. I am terrified, but I go. I see the fear in the eyes of the woman taking my temperature, but to our resounding relief, the thermometer reads 36.6 degrees-Celsius. Normal. February passes swiftly into March. With only two confirmed cases remaining in Kunming, my mom and I feel safe enough to go for a three-hour walk. We are not the only ones. Everyone still wears face-masks and many businesses are still shut, but buses are running and markets are busy with people again. I have the option to leave China. I could go back home to the States or continue my travels in South America, where I was only a month before the coronavirus swept the world up into arms. But I don’t want to. Not yet. I want to stay in Kunming with my mom at least until life resumes normalcy. A fiercely independent woman, my mom works three jobs, rarely cooks, and lives alone. I take after her independence and am always on the road. Quarantine has given us time—time that my mom and I never have, or never make—to be together. From her bedroom, I overhear my mother think aloud, “I now understand how to live.”