We’re going to be really happy.
Considering the hotel’s rickety elevator, cracked cement walls, worn-down carpeting sprouting mould, our room could have been much worse. We had a double bed, comically firm. There was a TV with a range of State-sponsored cable channels. “We’re going to be really happy here,” I said to Angela. We just might get something out of it. Maybe some romantic couple time, or a chance to get some work done. This might be the perfect place to write after all.
ROOM FOR ERROR BY PATRICK CONNOLLY 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 113
I worked as a foreign teacher in Beijing for six years before the Covid-19 epidemic, and when China opened up again I applied for a new work visa, with my teacher wife, Angela. I had to give the Chinese education authorities my sponsoring employer’s application, my extended family’s entire employment history, a vial of blood, and a signed declaration of allegiance to the Communist Party.
All this took months to process. My application was held up because I didn’t disclose my great-grandmother’s brief employment as a scullery maid.
When I finally got the paperwork I had to wait for my number to be called, so to speak. China was allowing in only 20 foreign teachers a week. At this rate, I calculated, China would get all of its foreign teachers back in 846 years.
Angela and I were in New Zealand. Our teacher life was on pause. No students, no classes, no papers to grade. Eventually our number was called and we booked our flight back. But after our enforced holiday in the fresh air of Christchurch, smoggy old Beijing didn’t really feel like a good idea any more. The life we’d left behind in China seemed like something to run from, not fly back to. I thought of the tiny apartment in Beijing. Was this what I wanted to get back to? And I thought of the authoritarian State that China is.
There are plus-sides to authoritarianism. The thing is, freedom invites choice. The choice to not listen to authority, the choice to keep pushing forward when all signs tell you to turn back. Choice is the primordial ooze of human error. Authoritarianism takes all that away, a vicious robbery to be sure, but the results speak for themselves: a neat, tidy, uniformly error-free society. Just don’t ask too many questions about human rights or fair elections, and it’s just great.
China’s ferocity in its virus laws and policies left little room for choice, and thus little room for error. The Chinese followed isolation and social-distancing procedures with a zest and precision that can only come from fear of death or worse, time in a Chinese prison. No measure was too extreme to eliminate the virus, and no length of mandatory quarantine was worthy of complaint. Seven days? Sure! 14 days? Let’s go! 21 days? Lock me up and throw away the key!
Angela and I got on the plane back. The flight attendants wore cheap knock-offs of hazmat gear, baggy white body suits, on top of their uniforms. They didn’t have to do much. They kept their distance from the passengers and they didn’t even serve food. On my seat was a plastic bag stuffed with 14 individually wrapped custard cakes and two tiny cartons of some milk-adjacent drink. I did the math: I could eat one of these cakes each hour of the 14-hour flight. The cake was a gelatinous substance that tasted like black-market penicillin. I ate six of them, and drifted off into a custard-induced coma.
I slept until we touched down in Guangzhou where we were to spend our mandatory two-week hotel quarantine before proceeding to Beijing. Guangzhou is a city I had somehow never heard of before living in China and yet it had a population greater than all of Canada. It must have decent hotels for quarantine, I thought.
Armed guards led us into the dark bowels of the airport for a covid test. We had to walk single-file, at least three meters from each other.
The covid testing area was behind a dirty plastic tarpaulin under flickering fluorescent lights. Children were crying and medical staff were shrieking orders. “Ready?!” a nurse shouted in broken English, as if the patient was on the opposite side of a football stadium.
Then it was my turn behind the curtain. The nurse looked exhausted. Penetrating hundreds of terrified foreign arrivals might have been fun at the beginning but obviously it had got boring. She grabbed a tuft of my hair with a blue-gloved hand and pulled my head back. “Getting right to it!” I said. The swab went in. This isn’t so bad! I thought. And then the nurse shoved it about an inch and half further up my nose hole. My vision blurred as she rotated the swab. I smiled in relief when it was all over. The nurse smiled too, and in a thick accent said, “Other nostril.”
We joined a long line of international arrivals next to signs in Chinese characters and English which said: “Welcome to wait for kindness transport.” A Chinese woman in line seemed asleep standing up, her faced pressed against the duffle-bags on the trolley she was pushing. A toddler peed into a plastic mixing bowl that her mother had brought along.
Our quarantine hotel was to be determined by which bus we happened to be herded onto. One bus might be headed for the Westin in downtown Guangzhou, with personal swimming pools and a Michelin-star chef in each suite, but the next bus might be destined for a former army latrine with a sleeping bag on the floor. It was the luck of the draw.
Our hotel was surrounded by massive cement blocks like those you might see in a zombie apocalypse film. The neighbourhood was deserted, the buildings and street signs were layered thick with brown dust (likely nuclear ash) and shrouded in a grey haze of pollution.
We were met by officials sweating under layers of hazmat gear in the tropical heat who took our passports and our temperatures and hosed-down our luggage with disinfectant. The guards sprayed us head-to-toe in a cooling mist from a container labeled Highly Flammable. It left me smelling for days like I’d just downed a quart of mouthwash.
At the front desk Angela shouted “Husband!” and pointed at me in an accusatory manner. “Married!” I said and pointed back at her. We’d heard that foreign arrivals were sometimes separated from their spouses or even their children.
“We’re MARR-IED!” I repeated, breaking down the syllables. “We can stay TO-GETH-ER!” I was hoping my English would somehow transmute into Mandarin.
“Yes, you can stay together,” the concierge responded in a British accent, smiling.
Considering the hotel’s rickety elevator, cracked cement walls, worn-down carpeting sprouting mould, our room could have been much worse. The floor was white linoleum. We had a double bed, comically firm. There was a TV with a range of State-sponsored cable channels. The bathroom, partitioned off from the rest of the space by frosted-glass, contained the shower, the toilet, and the sink all in one.
“We’re going to be really happy here,” I said to Angela. We just might get something out of it. Maybe some romantic couple time, or a chance to get some work done. This might be the perfect place to write after all.