As a rule, I do my best to avoid caffeine in the evenings. I’ve had a long history of sleeping problems, including a bad spell of sleep paralysis during my first year of college. However, this evening I’m having a small cup of black coffee while I stare at my computer screen, wistfully hoping for inspiration to strike.
It’s April 30th, 2022, and the final evening of a month I have spent almost entirely within the confines of my own apartment. At the time of writing, the majority of Shanghai residents are more or less in a similar situation as the government continues to implement its zero-COVID policy, no matter what the cost.
With the final hours of April passing away, there is no clear indication of when the lockdown will end. Certainly things can’t go on like this indefinitely, but here we are in the fifth week of what was initially announced as a nine-day lockdown. Most attempts to find accurate information about the duration of lockdowns in specific areas of the city end in frustration, and any optimistic news that one happens to find becomes instantly void as soon as another positive case is reported in the vicinity.
The events of the past several months in my own life have only added to the surreality this experience. Since leaving my job in a professional orchestra last year, I have been working as a freelance musician in Shanghai. Issues related to retaining a valid visa without a permanent employer have led me to reconsider my trajectory as a musician in China. With the city-wide lockdown still going strong a month and counting, the idea of this being a hospitable environment for a freelancer seems like a distant reality.
Although this all may seem like an isolated event that suddenly appeared in global headlines a few weeks ago, the situation shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone who has spent the past two years living in post-pandemic China. Regional lockdowns have been a common occurrence since the initial outbreak in the city of Wuhan, though none have seen the rate of infection and severity of restrictions as we are now experiencing in Shanghai.
As COVID fades from the headlines of many local news organizations worldwide, the reality of an ongoing pandemic in Shanghai and throughout China is more palpable than ever. The situation stands in stark contrast to the first year of the pandemic. China had all but eradicated COVID while the rest of the world struggled to find enough hospital beds to keep up with infection rates. There was undoubtably a sacrifice of personal rights in order to keep positive cases at or near zero in China, but this seemed like a reasonable trade-off for anyone who was allowed to continue working full-time as a musician while most of the world’s orchestras were shut down indefinitely.
The question that now remains in most Shanghai residents’ minds is a matter of how long it will take for things to return to “normal”. In reality, the months preceding the Shanghai lockdown were anything but normal. Returning to pre-COVID policy after the most recent restrictions are lifted is not an outcome anyone should be betting on. A more sober inquiry into the coming months would then be:
“What will this new normal look like?”
One needs to consider what the implications of this most recent lockdown means for his or her individual circumstances, whether or not it challenges the sustainability of one’s professional and personal pursuits, and how might one mitigate such challenges. For myself, the lockdown has made glaringly apparent what eight months of freelancing had already begun to reveal. This is not the time nor the place for me to continue my business.
This realization comes at a time where relocating internationally is a serious challenge, especially when it involves traveling to or from China. However, reaching an impasse requires one to set aside preconceived notions about the way that things should be and instead take action in order to pave the way toward a more sustainable future.
Instead of viewing the current crisis as a threat to the status quo, I believe it can be adapted as a catalyst for progress beyond the stagnation I have experienced living in post-pandemic China. Sooner or later, Shanghai will reopen and its residents will go back to work. For many, it will be business as usual. For others, the lockdown will have inspired, or perhaps necessitated, a change of course to better weather this new world we find ourselves in.