Beijing in January was an exciting time. I was starting full time at a new office job, finally closer to a permanent position after more than a year of freelancing. Spring Festival was coming up, and I was determined to spend it seeing the city, going ice skating, hitting up temple fairs and seeing friends. My cover band had loads of shows that were almost too much fun. With a group of friends, we also put on a charity concert where we sang classic girl group songs — we raised thousands of RMB and some of my new colleagues came by. It was a great month.
Bubbling in the background was the news of a new sort of pneumonia that was making the rounds in Wuhan. It seemed so far away, so unlikely that it was anything serious. People in Beijing started to get a little more apprehensive about it – no more outdoor markets, worries about getting restaurant food, increasing paranoia about this strange new virus (but come on, it was probably nothing serious).
And then suddenly it was serious. All of the public spring festival activities in Beijing were canceled – no temple fairs, no ice skating. A lot of restaurants were closed anyway, but whatever was still open seemed to introduce temperature checkpoints overnight. Some areas required you to write down your name and passport number before going in. The government extended the weeklong holiday by three days, which meant that I wouldn’t go back to the office until February 3.
As the holiday drew to an official close, Beijing stayed weirdly empty (the city is a ghost town during the holiday, when everyone returns to their hometowns to celebrate the new year with family). My flatmate and I, starting to go a little stir-crazy, went on hour-long walks most days, in the cold and snow. We wore masks the entire time, every time, like everyone was. My residential compound stopped pedestrian usage of one of the two entrance gates so that they could take everyone’s temperature as they entered the compound. People just returning to Beijing had to fill out forms to say where they had been. I wrote in my journal on Feb 1 that pretty much everywhere had implemented temperature checks and everyone was wearing masks.
Before the end of the (extended) holiday, probably on a Sunday (Feb 2), we were told to work from home for the next week. My line manager told my team that we could work remotely for the next month. Then US airlines announced that they were stopping flights between the US and China by February 9. The UK and US governments advised citizens to get out of China. The travel ban that barred non-US citizens coming from China had already dampened flight demand, and flights were being canceled left and right. My flight was canceled three times and I was anxiously refreshing google searching for new travel bans, which new countries were seeming to implement by the hour. It would be bad news for my international flight – direct flights from Beijing to Newark, New Jersey had simply ceased to exist. Finally, I managed to get on a flight from Beijing to London Heathrow. After a 14-hour layover sleeping on the seats at Terminal 3, I finally made it back to New Jersey on Friday, February 7.
I’ll stay for about a month, I told myself. This will all blow over soon. How wrong I was. We all were. Five months later I packed the few things I had and moved to London, with no hope of returning to China in 2020 – if ever.
Olivia M Ryan 