This article comes from the public number: GQ report (ID: GQREPORT) , author: Hu big cat, drawing from the title: vision China
On April 8th, the separation of the Han and Li channels was released, and WuHan “unblocked”. The number of new crown cases diagnosed in the United States is approaching 400,000. Chinese people still in the United States, from caring about the domestic anti-epidemic situation, to beginning to experience the isolation life that they were familiar with one or two months ago, like having experienced two disasters.
The author Hu Damao is a Ph.D. candidate at the Chinese Department of Peking University and currently participates in a joint training program at the University of California, Los Angeles. According to his observations, his segregated life in the United States also has other aspects: there are subtle concerns within the Chinese community and they dare not write their names with obvious ethnic characteristics on the courier; the cinema is closed, the utopia of the world disappears, and the government Consider building the studio into a square cabin hospital, the film industry began another kind of salvation.
The epidemic has unprecedentedly revealed the depth and breadth of globalization, and no one can really settle down. The author who is about to start his academic career lamented, “Those thoughts, theories, and methods that require daily study like a monk, in the face of a sudden global disaster, most of them lose the power of understanding and interpretation.” With this in mind, can writing take on the role of recording public experience? What do we mean by the globalized “normal life” we long to return to?
Last day
About March 17th, the situation suddenly became tense. The library sent an email early in the morning, informing that it would close indefinitely two days later. I hurriedly packed up the books at hand and listed a list and rushed to the school. When I returned home after borrowing a book, I suddenly discovered that the evening peak in Los Angeles had disappeared.
Last autumn, I came to the University of California, Los Angeles, and began a year of joint doctoral research in the East Asian Department. In my limited memory, it seems that I have never seen this city and this school so empty. There are some students scattered on the campus. The school has just issued a notice that all courses will be moved to the Internet next semester. They are still coping with the final exam and digesting this sudden change. The spring break that is coming soon may have opened a long farewell to campus life.
On the way home, I deliberately detoured the “Little Osaka” near the school. Most of the lights in the shops along the street are already dark, as if preparing for the long night. Walking on the street, I feel a little chilly. The bustling Asian restaurants on weekdays have posted notices handwritten in A4 paper at the door: “Take-out Only” Remarks “> (Takeaway only) , the paper is new.
From March 16th, all California business venues will be closed, and the restaurant will only provide take-out service
Only one Chinese restaurant was still open that night. I walked in and ordered a portion of noodles. After a while, the boss packed the noodles properly, turned around, and took another bag from the kitchen. He swiftly put a thick soup into the lunch box and handed it to me. “This is for you, take care! There is hand sanitizer at the door.” “Thank you! You take care too.” This was the last time I went to school.
Invisible wall
With the “Home Order” issued by California on March 19, in a house more than 20 miles away from the city center, my family and I started an epidemic life in isolation. First of all, the functional partition of the house has been re-divided: the restaurant on the first floor has become an office area, and Ray and Di are sitting side by side, holding their computers, and the keyboard continues to crackle like a cyber cafe; I ’m in In the bedroom on the second floor, I use the Zoom class every day, facing the unfinished papers; the other bedroom becomes a printing room, and the long-dusted printer is forced to be reactivated; all the remaining space belongs to 3 At the age of Eddie, his toys began to fill the room.
In the enclosed space, the passage of time becomes faster and slower. People become lethargic and get up late; three meals a day become two meals a day-or multiple meals a day. The parameter for measuring time has become a weekly supermarket shopping. In various disturbances, this has become a constant invariance, so every time I go to the supermarket, it is like an irritating and dangerous blast.
Looking at people coming and going with their shopping carts, they are secretly thinking, the current disaster is almost the same as people ’s logic. Only purchasing daily necessities is the only thing that can be grasped and grasped at this moment and in your own life. Things. The change of shelves is also full of meaning. In addition to toilet paper, water, hand sanitizer and alcohol, there are also some unreasonable and unexpected shortages. All Nintendo Switch consoles are sold out, and the dumbbells have been swept away, leaving only those two or three pounds, which are gently placed on the shelf.
Eddie cannot go out or go to the supermarket, he can only play in the backyard. In September last year, Ray dug a big pit in the backyard. It was originally planned to be transformed into a small terrace. Buy some tables and chairs. In the summer, you can sit outside and put your feet comfortably on the table. Have a drink with ice. .
However, the heavy daily work caused the construction period to be delayed again and again. In the blink of an eye, half a year later, the project has made little progress, and the edge of the pit is increasingly blurred. It seems that it will be filled in the wind and the sun. . After refurbishment, excavation and leveling, the pit appeared again. During this period, Eddie ran around with his shovel and was deeply involved in the whole process of construction and reverse construction. The excess energy of the 3-year-old child was also effectively consumed.
In another corner, the trash cans dedicated to recycling weeds and fallen leaves are filled. After the lawn is trimmed, it becomes particularly neat, and the unknown flowers gradually open up on the wall heads and become vibrant. Outside the wall, there is a world raged by viruses; inside the wall, people and their family spaces are living together day and night, in a somewhat sullen atmosphere, but instead regained various forms of communication.
Eddie playing in the backyard
For adults, the closure of a city or a family order is one thing in China, but another in the United States. Several of us Chinese honestly followed the former standard, and it did take Americans a long time to realize the seriousness of the matter. Before that, we still went out in various names , Grocery shopping, sports, parties. As the epidemic escalated, the tone of politicians became harsher, and people did not seem to realize it until the parks, beaches, and hiking trails were all turned off.
So the community streets became places for them to exercise. In the neighbor’s house not far away, the idle basketball hoop became lively. At 11 o’clock every day, a boy in his early twenties started shooting practice on time;The only park lawn in the town that was still open, quickly became a place where people carried out a peak-to-peak movement in some kind of tacit understanding. There, even sports that are not common on weekdays are starting to appear.
One day, I returned from the supermarket and glanced out of the car window. I saw that in the sunset, a huge colored fan spread out on the lawn. A man stood at the end of the morning and evening staggered rays of light, and he collected and recovered his paraglider … The most obvious change happened on the road-there were obviously more people running. Every evening, there were always several similar faces, “Dong Dang Dang” all the way, passing the road across the door. They see each other from a distance, stagger the distance, nod and smile from a distance. When he ran to the intersection, he suddenly slowed down, turned back in small steps, turned around and turned back, as if hitting an invisible wall.
Order a takeaway and write down the Irish name
My major is in mass culture and film studies. The epidemic first dispelled the public and then closed the cinema. What is more disappointing than the physical disappearance of the research field is that those thoughts, theories and methods that need to be studied daily as monks, faced with the sudden global disaster, most of them have lost their understanding and explanation Effectiveness .
The only certainty is that everyone is experiencing an unprecedented moment, and with it comes all kinds of confusion and uncertainty.
This few consensuses are in itself a medium effect. In isolation, the only way to stay connected to the world every day is the news on the Internet. And when news around the world is almost the same thing, reading them becomes a real mental loss. Especially the daily bipartisan struggle, the rising number of diagnoses, and the government ’s sluggish response have been blamed for bad news, pouring tons of people down. The content of Di’s work happens to include the daily collection and data analysis of cases in various countries. Obviously, she has more troubles than we do.
When Trump first called the virus the “Chinese virus” (Chinese Virus) , this loss arrived accurately. Soon, various stories of the Chinese community began to spread on WeChat. Shops were smashed, humiliated on the street, spontaneously armed … All kinds of true and false news spread back to the country at a more exaggerated speed and form, the panic of the family members was multiplied, and from time to time forwarded various unknown in the family ‘S WeChat article.
At first, I will also comfort my parents: The United States is very sparsely populated and medically developed, so that it will not end to the point where it is impossible to end. Now, the popular articles that are circulating are mostly eye-catching and traffic things. Do n’t take it easy. Be fooled. “Look at it, I can’t wait for 20 exclamation points in a natural section of this article, but there is no data, no interviewee, no provenance, can you believe it?” I have read this text carefully for several times, but the epidemic The rapid development made these detailed readings quickly lose meaning. Once the reality seems too absurd, the rumors even become some kind of corroboration.
So all I can say is: “Do n’t worry! I ’m not going out!”
Add the name of the ethnic group before the virus, and make the internal crisis others, so as to blame yourself for the “blame trick” (Blame Game) is a common tactic used by politicians, but in the atmosphere of global panic brought by the epidemic, its consequences are incalculable. The bad thing is that in the end, specific individuals always go through these unexpectedly.
Thinking back over the past few days, the effects of this kind of words did indeed seem to have been copied from the Four Breads in some imperceptible ways-they do not necessarily come from the outside, but more from actions. Minorities’ daily subdued, subtle identity recognition. When the online grocery shopping website became popular, and friends were eager to try, Di showed a hint of worry: our names are all too obvious.
The unspoken sentence is, what if our address happens to be seen by someone who has the ability to judge ethnicity based on the name but is not well-intentioned? In the next few days, we have tacitly stopped online shopping, pushed open the front door, and no more packages arrived at this address.
Two weeks later, Trump announced that he no longer called the “Chinese virus”, these tiny emotions dissipated in a greater sense of crisis. I picked up my phone and ordered the first takeaway during quarantine. Before placing the order, I hesitated for a few seconds, and finally changed the recipient to a non-existent Irish name: Jacob McEwan.
this world, and utopia
The most busy person in the family of four is Ray. The company he belongs to belongs to the manufacturing industry in terms of division of labor, and contacts with domestic companies are very frequent. When the plague hit, the nation’s first hand soap was out of stock. The reason behind it was the mismatch between the sudden increase in demand and the limited production capacity: