My life has gotten a lot more exciting over the past couple of months so I haven’t gotten to writing the Phables recently. But now things are clearly getting very exciting over here, so I’m back at it again.
First, mandatory pictures of ordinary life in Shanghai:
But probably the biggest question on everyone’s mind is how it is being in China during the coronavirus.
It’s clear that people’s attitudes changed drastically after the government announced that there was people-to-people transmission of the virus, because then it seemed more like SARS, which a lot of people still remember. Then the masks started coming out more in public and at the office, where previously few people were wearing them. As readers of the blog will remember, I was just in Wuhan as recently as last November, so this current crisis comes as quite a surprise.
I remember SARS, as I was attending local junior high school in Taiwan at the time. There were accounts of the virus spreading until finally someone in our school (or their family member) was infected, so they shut school down. I do remember distinctly one vignette, that is when we were put in a different classroom to wait for the school day to end and everyone to be sent home (we had to wait because some people’s parents were still at work I imagine), everyone was wearing masks in a classroom with a projector.
Our teacher or some admin person thought it would be a good idea to play a movie for us while we waited to go home, so they picked the enlightened choice of Resident Evil. Good times.
Anyway, in lighter news, I recently went on a business trip to Shenzhen, which is a very advanced city in southern China, less than 2 hours away from Hong Kong by road. I could do some research into how Shenzhen is one of the special economic zones (SEZ) of China that was first opened up to world investment and trade, but I’ll let you figure out the details. I’m just going to show what I saw, since that’s the sort of day-to-day details that seem to interest my readers. Tune in next time for the Shenzhen photo essay…
