justinaforever

I have a cold. When I lie down facing up, it’s like my head fills up with mud while some other substance drips into the back of my throat to tickle it. I hate being tickled. The only way to get rid of the muddy ticklish feeling is to sit up, blow my nose, and cough, which makes it hard to fall asleep.

In another life, I would writhe around in bed making pathetic whiney noises knowing that someone – my mom, a boyfriend – would take pity upon seeing me so incapacitated, so depleted of whatever vitality I normally have, and revive me with a bowl of chicken soup made from scratch, the layer of oil lovingly scraped from the surface, and maybe stroke my hair and tell me, “There, there, get some rest.” 

But this is not my reality anymore. I live alone in a city where I don’t feel close enough to anyone to let them take pity on me and make me soup from scratch. Besides, there’s no more hair on my head to stroke.

What’s a person to do when they just don’t have the energy to make chicken soup and pull themselves from the deep dark depths of a cold? Here’s what I did. I went on Meituan’s medicine-buying platform, which operates 24/7 and delivers medicine to your door within half an hour, and bought myself some 999 感冒灵颗粒. Because of the country’s zero Covid measures, if you’re buying cold and flu medication, the app asks you to enter your identity card details and fill out a health declaration, including whether or not you’ve recently been to a medium- or high-risk Covid area in the last while. 

You know when someone phones you and you pick up and it turns out they’re right at your door and you can hear your voice over the speaker on their end, which gets fed back into your receiver in a weird loopy effect, and as you approach the door, alien noises begin to interfere with your phone call until you just HAVE to hang up? Well, A Meituan delivery man called me half an hour after I placed the order. I opened the door, and he handed me a yellow paper bag, but before I could say thanks, he went charging down the stairs to make his next delivery.

999 感冒灵颗粒 is a box of little satchels of brown granules that you mix with hot water. Gulp it down and it will chase away cold and flu symptoms. The taste is neither too sweet nor too bitter. You will neither get addicted to it nor find its flavor so offputting that it sits on your shelf for years, only for you to find it two years past its expiry date when you have a cold again and you’re making a final desperate attempt to find cold medicine in your house.

Anyway, I chugged a cup and would have been knocked out were it not for the intermittent drilling sounds from next door’s renovation work and the megaphone downstairs calling residents down to get a Covid test. But after 6 p.m. both noises ceased. I can try to sleep in peace now.

I have to say, though, these internet platforms are handy for people who live alone and don’t know anybody in a city. If you don’t have friends who can help you move house, you can hire a van on Taobao, and two guys from Jiangsu will come and help you. They’ll clear out the empty Coke cans and cigarette cartons from the front seat so you can ride in the cab of the truck with them, and they’ll tell you all about the ridiculous bride prices in their home village and ask you what the bride price is in Hong Kong (I have no idea). They will arrange your belongings in small piles, bundle the piles with a thick strap, wear the bundle like a backpack, and haul your possessions up seven flights of stairs because your building has no elevator. They will reject the popsicles you offer them even though it’s 40 degrees outside. They will do all this without complaining. The only thing they will complain about is the bride price in their home village.

At the beginning of the year, I go to the barbershop down the street from my rental apartment and ask for a haircut. Spring Festival is a few days out, so there is a small queue outside because it’s bad luck to cut your hair during the new year. As that saying goes, “正月剃头死舅舅”: if you shave your head in the first month of the year, then your uncle will die. 

One of the Tonys (as barbers are called here in mainland China) points out a stool for me to sit on. I watch an old man teasing a white poodle. The poodle wears a burgundy sweater and white sneakers. It seems like any dog in Shanghai smaller than a Shiba Inu will find itself squeezed into a tiny outfit, complete with matching canine Converse All Stars.

I walk past this barbershop every day. Bright LED barber’s poles flank the entrance. It’s a couple of stores down from my favorite fruit and vegetable market. After Tony stows my coat in a locker, I plunk down in the chair and ask him to cut off all my hair.

Tony: Are you sure you want to cut it? I think long hair suits you better.

Me: Yes, I’m sure.

Tony: Why do you want to cut it off?

Me: Bad breakup. Need change.

Tony: It’s too drastic.

I make the assumption that he’s had many clients in the past instantly regret when the blades go snip, so I say: I promise I won’t cry.

Tony: How about just this much shorter?

He gestures out the length with his hands. It’s a short bob, not the close crop I am looking for. At this point, I’m not good at telling people what I want, so I say: Okay, fine.

While he’s cutting my hair, he tells me about the first time he gave a woman a short haircut. She had just gone through a bad breakup. As soon as he started chopping her hair, she began to sob. When I ask how short he had cut her hair, I expect him to point to the old man next to me getting his head shaved, but instead, he tells me: up to her shoulders. I imagine her hair was down to the floor before, otherwise why would anybody cry about something like that?

A few days later, I decide this short bob is not short enough for me. I want my hair to be even shorter! I go back to the barbershop, and Tony obliges. It seems he has a handful of very short haircuts in his arsenal, all for men: the full-on buzzcut for the no-fuss grandpas and the little boys with snot dribbling out of their noses, the crewcut for the millennial office worker, and the hairstyle sported by all his fellow Tonys, which he also gives me: buzzed above the ears, but left long and messy at the back and top. The old lady in the chair next to me gushes in admiration and asks Tony what this haircut is called. 短碎, he says. I am now a member of Tony’s 短碎 gang.

When I leave the barbershop, I can’t stop smiling. I feel lighter. I feel free! What a relief it is not to have my eyebrows yanked back by my ponytail! Not to wait for my hair to dry in a cold cold room because I haven’t got a hair dryer!

But soon it strikes me that the decision to cut my hair so short in the depth of winter is not well thought-out. Especially if you forget to wear a hat. Because winter in Shanghai is very, very cold, the kind you feel inside your bones.

I’m starting a thing where I try to write 500 words daily (ambitious, I know) about what I see and who I meet while I’m living here in mainland China.

Normally I like to just snap photos and post them on Instagram, but the exercise of writing from memory is much more challenging, like I have to observe things much harder and keep a notebook so I don’t get details wrong. Case in point: in this post below, I initially wrote about a white tent and white PPE, when actually both were blue.

Rules:

1. Write 500 words.
2. Write every day.
3. Write freely. (Don’t go back and edit.)

Well, here goes nothing!

Every few days, the building compound I live in holds a mass Covid-testing event. A megaphone broadcasts a recording of a woman’s voice. Sometimes the megaphone is perched on the handlebars of someone’s bicycle. Other times it’s worn on a sash across a worker’s body. The voice summons residents from Buildings 20 and 22 to come down and do their Covid test. After ten minutes, she moves to another corner of the compound and starts calling 24 and 26, and so on and so forth. Really it doesn’t matter what order we go down to do our tests. I don’t even know how or if they track which residents have gone to get their tests and which haven’t.

There is a blue tent-covering in the middle of the quad outside. Beneath it is a table and two stools. In normal times, this setup is vacant, but when the staff from the neighborhood committee come to run these tests, dressed in baby blue PPE, two of them sit at the table with an array of test tubes, swabs, and hazardous waste disposal bins laid out on the table, while another two staff members stand nearby with cellphones ready to scan.

To save money (I think), each resident doesn’t get their own test tube for their own test; samples from ten people go into one test tube. The staff with the scanners scan a test tube, give it to the first person in the group of ten, then scan each person’s QR code in the Health Code app so they can get tested. 

The test is a long swab inside the cheek. Some of the testers go further back into the throat, but most kind of do a light, perfunctory swipe on both sides of the tongue. They wear gloves. Between each test, they pump some hand sanitizer onto their gloves, do a perfunctory hand-washing motion, then peel open the individually wrapped swab for the next person to test.

Sometimes the tests are at 6pm, or they’re at 9am on the weekends. The megaphone is pretty annoying. My windows aren’t soundproof, so closing them makes no difference. But it’s nice to see the neighbors come out. Some get their tests before they go off to run errands, like I am about to do. Others come downstairs briefly, as though this might be the only time they get out of their apartments. In Shanghai, I rarely see people with obvious physical disabilities, but my building compound seems to have several amputees (missing legs) and some people with their backs hunched over. 

Outside of this scheduled mass-testing event, you can get tests anywhere else in the city, at any hour. All of China’s map apps show these Covid-testing stations, along with their operating hours (each one has different times). There are 10 within 500 meters of me. The closest one is at the entrance of my building compound. Proof of a negative test from within the last 48 or 72 hours is required on public transit, in public venues and buildings, and also in restaurants and other places. There appears to be no vaccine requirement to enter buildings here, unlike in Hong Kong.