My last post...ages ago now... was right in the middle of the dystopian lockdown in Shanghai which made mainstream news when reports were flooding out of people starving, others getting beaten, protests/riots and beyond.

Well, lockdown ended and Shanghai was Victorious! Everything is back to normal!!

...is what the news has since informed the world. Well, it's hardly true.

True, Shanghai is back to Normal. But Normal has changed completely. The new normal is something that any normal civilization would be up in arms against, or simply refusing to partake. Unfortunately, with generations of learned helplessness being the very foundation of this society, everybody is just kind of... going along with it. Because safety.

So allow me to introduce you to 'New Shanghai' - Now with extra Dystopium!, a way of life which is by no means unique to Shanghai anymore, but other major cities throughout China in general.

The New Normal

Back in Old Shanghai, working life was long and tiresome, but pretty routine in a way that I accepted. It was a very long commute - 3 hours per day there and back - but the job was enriching and it gave me a reason to be on my feet and get some social energy around me.

NOWADAYS, there's a few tiny little extra steps required for me - or anyone - to actually go to their office.

In my case, the first thing I have to do is get myself tested at an official station. They set these up every 15 minutes walk apart from each other across the entire city of 26 million people.

This means anyone at any time can conveniently get a test done and get results within a few hours.

In practice, however, what we now see across much of the city are huge, often hour-long queues down the streets at random intervals, as everybody gets off at work at the same time and rushes to the nearest testing facility or hospital. Many close before people get off work, say, 6pm, meaning the evening options are much more limited, and given that most people live in huge high-rise buildings, you tend to have many thousands of people all in the same vicinity with the same idea.

Just walking down the street I'll see these massive queues stretching hundreds of metres blocking half the walking space, and the pace of that queue is slow.

This seems a minor annoyance at first until you realise that everybody has to do this EVERY 1-2 DAYS FOREVER. If there is a delay in results, you can no longer go to work. You can no longer enter the subway station, the shops, malls, hospital or anything else.

Here's your permit QR code to function in daily life.

So it's generally accepted that everybody do this at least every other day. On the weekends, there is citywide mass testing where the sirens of loudspeakers, or banging on your door, or shouting from 7am in my case, 7pm for others, telling everybody when to come down.

In theory, this weekend part is only to last until the end of July, but I doubt it.

Furthermore, this testing will stop being free in the near future, so not only do we have to spend up to 4 hours per week queuing to get rammed down the throat, but we have to pay for the privilege, too.

Need I remind you that everybody has just kind of given up and accepted this as the new normal - myself included. It sounds like something from a dystopian sci-fi movie to me, but hey, let's just go along with it. But we are all literally powerless to change anything, so whatever.

Ok so that's step 1. Once my results are in and it informs everybody that Foreigner #2309 has had his DNA successfully analysed & logged, I can now enter the metro and taxis in order to get to work.

But before that, I also need to do a HOME test every 24 hours. This is your typical home kit, complete with unrecyclable plastic and all, which I then have to photograph, upload onto an app on my phone, and again await results. If approved, I can now go to work with confidence.

Proof of daily purity, sir

Upon arrival, however, there are a few more steps before I can actually enter the building.

First, I must show the guard my home test results, my main test results and green code, AND my travel permit code, each of which he will photograph and approve before I enter. Then, I must write my name, time of arrival, job, and temperature, which I acquire by getting my face scanned on a machine.

I promise I haven't traveled anywhere untoward, here's the evidence (Places I've travelled over 14 days noted at the bottom: Shanghai), now please let me in

NOW I can enter my workplace. When the next day comes, rinse and repeat. Forever.

Now, why do I say forever? Well, The Beijing secretary of the Chinese Communist Party publicly announced recently that they will 'unremittingly grasp the normalisation of epidemic prevention and control' over the next Five years.

That is to say, they have no intention of stopping this procedure any time soon. Indeed, in another city down south, Shenzhen, they had their own lockdown several months before Shanghai. And yet, despite starting off months earlier, they too continue this process across the city.

Work Life

As a high school music teacher, being told I was to work from home from now on was... a blessing and a curse. When it came to teaching my choir class, it was impossible. One cannot teach students to sing in harmony... in an online zoom call.

For my guitar class, well, half my students left their guitars at the school and were never allowed to get them back or obviously buy another. So, for most of this semester, I was teaching a guitar class in which students had no guitars. SOME of them did, though. Making it even worse. I had to somehow teach a guitar class to some students with guitars - from afar - while simultaneously educating those without guitars?? let's just say I'm glad that's over for the holidays.

My AP Music Theory course was for the most part ok. But for all AP students in Shanghai ONLY, their exams were tragically cancelled on all fronts without any appeal or chance for a makeup test. Most students in this school were doing AP classes, so most of their year has been considered a complete waste.

Compounding that, online classes are, for the most part, simply ineffective. These are teenagers. They're having classes in bed, creating screenshots of themselves awake for the camera and going back to sleep, they simply write 'give up' during online exams so they can go back to their computer games. Or, play computer games while sitting onscreen in the middle of classes.

Cheating was rife, and because the school has to be even more generous now, there's no consequence for doing badly, so students see no incentive to even try when they can just make up grades by writing a short essay at the end of the year.

There was no graduation ceremony or prom for the Grade 12's, no farewells, no celebrations. Simply end the zoom calls of your class and may you never see the students you taught for years ever again.

The psychological and educational damage for these students must surely be profound. This does seem to be the same globally, but while the rest of the world moved on with this deficit much earlier as a global collective, Shanghai continues to this day, and the rest of China will continue to get this severe brain drain as they insist on Zero Covid - an impossible endeavour - for years and years to come.

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After cutting out huge paragraphs of my rambling, I'm also going to cut out the final part here discussing plastic waste and a positive sense of community. I'll make a SHORT post... I promise (maybe) to finish things off for anybody still interested.

Going back to the start, though. Remember how I said Shanghai solved it all and we won the battle? Turns out that isn't true anyway. Y'know why? Cuz Zero Covid policy is about as realistic as 'zero death policy', So yeah, rather than a huge city-wide lockdown, they're now just locking down countless individual buildings. Take my new compound for example where I moved to recently. Within days of arriving, the building next to me got locked up. A week later, my building had me locked indoors for 2 days, too!

There was no positive case here. There was a woman who knew a person connected to a positive case somewhere. That connection can be as thinly joined as, say, walking through a mall that somebody several hours ago also walked through who was positive.

I was actually invited, by the president of my company to personally go with him to see the first opening concert by the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra. It was an online concert, but because he had connections, we and just those connected few, got to sit in an empty concert hall and watch the concert exclusively.

But, thanks to my building getting a 2-day warning lockdown, the Opera hall didn't want to risk it - You know, being shut down indefinitely because somebody who knows somebody was in the same area as somebody who knows somebody in a building who might have heard of somebody with a positive infection. So they cancelled on me. Yay.

So is the city really covid-free? Obviously not. It never will be. Is the city 'free'? I guess that's too obvious.

C'est la vie!