Last of the Laowai Part II: The Final Resort

This second installment of Last of the Laowai covers the early days of COVID, beginning with my flight back to China in March of 2020 as the pandemic is popping off. A fellow passenger is suspected of having COVID, and all of us are quarantined in a remote seaside resort in Fujian Province. As is frequently the case, I am on drugs.

(For Part I, "I Was Simon Song," which contains an overview of my time in Shenzhen and Beijing, click here); Part III, "Holes in the Wall, Holes in the Brain," which details events related to the pro-democracy riots / protests in Hong Kong, is available here)

Customs page from my passport; 入 means entry and 出 is exit. You can see my flight to the U.S. on 1/14/2020 as the COVID outbreak was burgeoning into an epidemic in China and the first cases were appearing in the U.S., mostly in major cities and on college campuses. As the stamps show, I returned to China on 3/12/2020, about three months after the first COVID cases, which were linked to the Wuhan seafood market, were reported. By this point, the pandemic was on and poppin'. However, the Chinese government's draconian "Zero COVID" lockdown hadn't yet been instituted, and international travel was still largely unrestricted.

My flight from New York City to Fuzhou begins in a blur and ends with a moment of awful clarity.

Most of my friends and family believe that it's too risky for me to head back to China.

By coincidence (unless my boss was trying to kill me), I had been in Wuhan, the city where COVID originated, at the end of December of 2019 - just as the initial case cluster from the seafood market was being reported.

Before I left Shenzhen for that business trip, my coworkers had offered confused advice against eating sushi or getting too close to the hundreds of parents and students who would attend the talks that I was giving.

Remarkably, I had returned to Shenzhen physically well and not any sicker in the head than I usually was.

My family and friends pointed out that this was an epic, lucky W. And, when I returned to New York in mid-January for my yearly holiday visit, it appeared that I had escaped China just as fortuitously as I had dodged COVID in Wuhan.

It's now mid-March, and the Chinese healthcare system has been overrun by the virus, whose biology and clinical properties are still largely unknown, and the lockdowns have begun.

The discrepancy between what ordinary Chinese people are sharing on social media and the sanitized, state-sanctioned narrative from official news outlets is chilling: "The novel coronavirus outbreak is being contained, and infection numbers are stabilizing," we are reminded each day as Chinese citizens share videos of hospital corridors crammed with sick human beings - some covered in their own waste, others dead.

Still, I don't know what other call I could make. My fiancé, my dog, my career, my apartment - my whole, hard-won new life - they're all in China.

Really, that life is beginning to crumble as I stumble back into opioid and benzo addiction, but I'm not ready to admit that to myself just yet.

As is often the case with me, my emotions swirl below the surface, where they form contradictory eddies, currents, riptides.

I'm not conscious of feeling worried about returning to China, but this doesn't prevent my underlying unease from manifesting in my behavior.

I've been maintaining myself on buprenorphine (Suboxone) while I visit my family upstate, which allows me to avoid withdrawal without being f*cked up, but during the 12 hours that I have in NYC, I pay one of my old dealers to meet me near JFK airport with something stronger.

I've already taken a handful of benzos - everyone pops Xanax before a flight, right? - but I know that it might be an entire year before I can use a needle again, and suddenly it seems very important to me that I not let this opportunity go to waste.

I pay D far too much to drive the dope out to me. He agrees to stop at a pharmacy and pick up fresh needles on the way.

"I wouldn't do this s*it for anyone else," D chides me.

"I know, D, and I really appreciate it," I wheedle.

I've missed this liar's dance, which is ritualized, frictionless, soothing.

After paying that much for someone to meet me, I'm not going to buy less than a couple bundles, right?

And, since I obviously can't carry dope and rigs onto the plane with me, I've got to do it all before I head back to the airport, right?

Finding a public bathroom to shoot up in in New York City is like playing an absurdist videogame on difficult mode; it's preposterously inconvenient, and it's meant to be so.

As I complete my quest, I conclude that, pandemic or no, I'm glad to be returning to a country whose public restrooms are designed to make it as convenient as possible to void bodily wastes - as opposed to the U.S., where the design premise is that these facilities should be as inaccessible as possible to drug users who want to shoot up in relative comfort, safety, and cleanliness.

Eventually, I order an entire breakfast at a run-down diner to purchase the privilege of shooting up in its squalid, single-occupant bathroom.

Gotta get through two buns in four hours, I remind myself as I load the first syringe.

It's the kind of challenge that brings out my heroism, that makes my spirit sing.

Even before the dope hits me and I deliquesce into the warm-molasses demimonde of the poppy, I feel a surge of that unshakeable optimism that is only possible for a junkie who has a full bag of fresh rigs.

I return to my table. The food is slop. I have a heavenly breakfast.

I'm chatty with the waitress. She's visibly annoyed with me. I enjoy the conversation for both of us.

I return to the bathroom, inject an amount of dope that is just as likely to OD me as it is to get me high, and then head directly to the register by the door.

I tack on a make-your-day tip.

I have no idea how I get to JFK, check myself in, find my gate, and board my flight.

The only memory that I have of this process is of two girls in their late teens approaching me as I walk down one of the airport hallways.

They wear concerned expressions, which are so similar that I question whether they're sisters.

"Are you okay?"

"Are you sure you're okay? Do you need some... help with something?"

I mumble something back.

Somehow, I board my flight.

I have no memory of the safety demonstrations or of any of the other preflight fanfare. I'm sure that there are extra announcements related to the pandemic, but they don't register with me.

Shortly after we take off, a handsome flight attendant with an inscrutable expression taps my shoulder and gestures to an open row of seats in the very back of the section that I'm in. I stretch my lanky frame out there, and I am instantly unconscious.

At some point during the 16-hour flight, a bemused Chinese grandmother rouses me, her expression as natural and as confident as if I were her grandson.

She hands me a plastic cup filled with water, which I gulp down greedily. She refills it from a bottle that she's holding, then gestures toward the seatback in front of me, pulling the storage compartment open to show me that she has stashed my in-flight meal there.

Xiè xiè, I remember to thank her before I lay back down.

She slips a pillow - not a cheap airline cushion, but a real, from-home pillow with a cover - under my head before I pass out again.

There is something profoundly, almost spiritually comforting about the old woman.

All that pain that you think is uniquely yours, I have seen and borne and more, her smile seems to say.

Her face floats up through a warm sea of memory at several points in the monthslong ordeal that follows.

***

Please remain seated.

We have landed in Fuzhou, the capital of Fujian Province, which is the closest Mainland territory to Taiwan. Adjacent to the west is Guangdong Province, where my Chinese home city of Shenzhen is located.

My drug-deluged fog is dissipating: I've reached the point where my memory track will resume.

The first thing that I notice is the absence of pre-disembarking bustle.

There are no announcements about local time, temperature, precipitation.

No one stands up to stretch as we wait to receive the all-clear to retrieve our carry-ons from the overhead compartments.

There are no phone calls to let relatives know that we have landed.

In the seats directly in front of me, a mother shushes two young girls, one on either side of her. She keeps her arms around them in that archetypal maternal posture for when danger is near.

Minutes tick by.

Of course it's taking longer than usual, I reassure myself. We're in the middle of a pandemic.

I know that it's a lie. I have the same feeling as I had earlier, when I was talking to D.

Rail and air travel in China usually proceed with a fluent, choreographed precision.

Something is wrong.

Just as I'm starting to feel half-human, a thought slaps me across the face: Oh my God, what if they saw how f*cked up you were and assumed you had COVID?

My eyes dart around the cabin as blood rushes to my cheeks, bringing a pins-and-needles sensation.

It doesn't seem like anyone is paying particular attention to me, though.

Most of my fellow passengers - at least 95 percent, I'd bet - are Chinese. At present, they're maintaining the impassive, eyes-ahead expression required by Chinese social etiquette under distressing conditions.

Still, I begin running through my rudimentary Mandarin, struggling to summon the proper words for, "Do not fear; I am not sick of body. I am merely the drug-debauched foreigner who you were warned about in middle school."

***

My whole life, I have loved B sci-fi flicks, and the scene that unfolds next is right out of a low-budget biothriller.

Please remain seated, we hear again as workers in white, Level A Hazmat suits - the "moon suits" that have a one-piece jumper for the body, a plastic window where the face is, and a self-contained breathing apparatus - walk briskly down both aisles.

Almost as soon as I register their presence, one of the workers taps my shoulder and hands me a small, glass rod.

My thinking track is still a few seconds behind the motion track for this scene, so it's a moment before I identify it as an armpit thermometer.

I consider injecting some levity into the situation by pretending to pull down my pants, but when I raise my eyes to meet the worker's, that impulse dies immediately: She has that brittle, doll-like perfection that some Oriental women are graced with, an ethereal quality that suggests a deathless djinn encased in modern technology. I find none of the softness of the healer about her; in fact, she has the mien and carriage of a cop.

How could they know that someone on board has COVID? I wonder as I wait for the thermometer.

It's still early days as far as the pandemic is concerned, and it's not yet required to document a negative COVID test before flying. Still, it's not clear to me how things could have gone from green to red during the 16 hours of the flight. My best guess is that another patient vomited or spiked a fever.

My thermometer registers a healthy 37 Celsius, but this doesn't change what happens next. I'm hustled off the plane and into the airport, where a phalanx of airport security and local police leads our group through double doors that don't look like they're ordinarily used by passengers.

No one asks where we are going.

***

As I wrote this, I had to pull out my passport to verify not just the month, but also the year of my flight to Fuzhou.

The pandemic was one long blackout.

As the days, weeks, months, years wore on, the absurd and the formerly unthinkable became routine.

My brain's scornful response, it seems, was to refuse to remember - as though this period of my life wasn't worth the synapses that would've been required to memorialize it.

However, as with any blackout, the most vital, emotional, and menacing moments have their way of punching through into the light of recollection.

But they come to me in strange hues, out of sequence; I wouldn't believe some of them without independent corroboration.

At one point as I wait in yet another pop-up hospital after registering hot at a fever checkpoint, a middle-aged, male doctor slips his hand down the back of my hospital gown, caressing my spine and shoulder. He removes it after a moment, then slides it into the back pocket of the jeans that I left on underneath the gown.

I don't react, and he withdraws his hand a moment later, giving my butt a paternal pat.

I don't resent this extra, who is playing the part of Handsy Uncle 1 in the 2020 Pandemic Pageant. He's middle-aged, true, but this might be his first role out of acting school, or perhaps he's a dilettante. I'm... what? Amused, flattered, grateful?

The memories come in inexplicable pairs; they bear no relation to each other.

I remember a phone call with one of my dearest Chinese friends almost 18 months into total lockdown, by which point hundreds of millions of people are experiencing the mental unraveling caused by solitary confinement, which is considered a form of torture for a reason.

At 9 a.m., I empty the vending machine at my hotel of the five beers left in it. Then, Peng and I spend two and a half hours belting out our favorite Western hits. We alternate who gets to choose the song. U2, Britney Spears, the Cranberries, Cher, Tupac, various Disney theme songs that shall remain unnamed are all represented.

"Ready, set, go," we count down together before simultaneously pressing the play button on whatever YouTube video we are using for music and lyrics.

Ordinarily, I never, ever sing. I have an awful voice, and my tonal control leaves everything to be desired.

But this morning, I am outrageously, deliriously happy to sing along with Peng.

***

It's not just the facts and the timeline that are muddled. My emotional memory, too, is distorted.

I am unafraid as our plane is boarded by the public health workers (or whoever they are).

I certainly don't fear for my health. By this point, I've been daring God to let me destroy myself for years - calling the universe's bluff as a matter of both style and principle, again and again.

I do recall a pang of worry at the thought that I might not be able to get to the oxy that I have waiting for me in a mailbox in Shenzhen.

I have some Suboxone with me - simple to travel with because the sublingual strips don't look like medicine, more like little orange Listerine strips. As soon as I realize that I will not be flying on to Shenzhen on schedule, I begin calculating how many days my Suboxone supply will last, devising a taper schedule in my mind.

I am overcome by a primal exhilaration, an awakening of a part of me that modern society prefers us to forget that we possess.

My whole life, I have read books about natural disasters, wars, plagues.

Something's finally happening, I realize with a strange thrill as I board the bus that is waiting for us outside the airport.

This is my time; these will be my stories.

***

As I write them now, the face of the kindly grandmother from the plane returns to me. I close my eyes so that I can picture her more perfectly.

I never found out if she caught COVID from another passenger on the plane, and if so, if she made it.

Perhaps she survived and returned home only to perish later on in the pandemic.

Maybe she was one of the millions who died because they couldn't access essential medications and medical procedures during three years of lockdown.

As I write this, I realize for the first time that I never returned her pillow.

Photo from All Trails of a section of southern Chinese coastline; it's reminiscent of the beach outside the coastal resort in Fujian where our entire flight was quarantined after a passenger showed symptoms of COVID. During our two-week stay, we weren't allowed to leave our rooms to explore the hotel, to interact with each other, or to venture outside. However, we were permitted to keep our phones, and we had Internet access, which was a saving grace.

I've never seen this section of Mainland China's southern coast before.

This stretch of beach reminds me of Cape Cod. It's craggy, argumentative shoreline, prone to the same misty melancholies.

I can't see the sun itself, but the fog outside the sliding-glass doors has gone from charcoal to slate to a milky, wispy white.

I pull up a chair from the kitchen of the luxurious suite that they've put me up in. I watch the final tendrils of fog part to reveal timid waves lapping at the rocks scattered along the shoreline.

I place a four-milligram strip of buprenorphine under my tongue, where it dissolves with an acrid, citrusy tang.

I've taken too much already, and my supply is dwindling. If we're kept here for longer than three or four more days, I know that withdrawal is in my near future.

Out of all of the events transpiring in a world gone mad, it's the only prospect that truly terrifies me.

As I scry my fate in the revealed shoreline, I allow myself a morbid flight of fancy, imagining the last two humans, the inverse Adam and Eve, drifting along this stretch of coast in a cozy, retro little vessel, their skeletal remains curled toward each other like two halves of a broken-heart emoji.

***

"Morning, fellow traveler :)" The ping from Weston's greeting jolts me from my reverie.

Things are tense between Chinese and foreigners right now. The Chinese are humiliated that the virus is being blamed on them, and that Chinese are being mistreated in the U.S. and other countries; there is a worrying, retaliatory trend of Chinese insisting that foreigners are more likely to carry the virus and to be diseased in general.

Accordingly, most of the Chinese passengers in our group had given the handful of foreigners present a wide berth during the 90-minute ride from the airport to this coastal resort, which hasn't officially opened yet, where the local government has evidently decided to let us die in luxury.

Weston, though, had plopped himself down in the seat next to me without a moment's hesitation.

"A chance to improve my English!" He'd noted cheerily after it became clear that my Mandarin wasn't up to advanced conversation. I didn't need to ask where he was from; Weston's speech was full of the bravado and the distinctive extra "er" syllables of the Beijinger.

Really, Weston shouldn't have needed a chance to practice his English, given that he had attended Western Michigan University for the past three years.

However, this doesn't mean as much as you might expect: WMU caters to slacker Chinese princelings whose parents are happy to pay upwards of 50K USD a year to ensure that their sons graduate from an American university; they hope that Chinese hiring managers who are reviewing resumes will mistake WMU for the highly prestigious University of Michigan or the not-too-shabby Michigan State University (sorry, guys, the jig is up).

Upon discovering that I'm a teacher, Weston sheepishly confessed to paying an ABC - American-Born Chinese - peer to take his humanities and language requirements for him; he studied mechanical engineering.

Weston did have blind spots in his vocabulary and spoke with a lilt that could be a little hard to decipher, but I recognized right away that his real motivation for sitting next to me had nothing to do with improving his English; he was there to help me by translating the instructions of the medical workers who had boarded the bus with us.

In between his translations, which Weston delivered with an almost cartoonishly intense look of concentration on his face, the two of us had a lively conversation about fate, family, real estate valuation in Tier 1 cities, and our impending doom.

So many of my Chinese students saddled themselves with ill-fitting names from pop stars or TV series - or, sometimes, unfortunate attempts at phonetic translations of their Chinese names - but Weston's name fit his chill personality to a T. He had a rich kid's confidence, and I found his swagger comforting under the circumstances.

In situations involving a finite supply of male talent, I tend to gravitate toward two guys: One who could become a good friend, the other a low-key crush.

Desperate times called for desperate measures, though, and in Weston, I had found a bit of both.

Although passengers had been discouraged from sharing nonessential information in the WeChat group for our flight, which we had all been force-added to during the bus ride to the resort, Weston had scanned my QR code so that we could chat privately.

We had been quarantine buddies ever since, and we made a point of saying good morning and goodnight.

***

The two of us have resolved to put our quarantine to good use.

For the third morning in a row, we run through our improvised exercise routine, video chatting as we complete push-ups, crunches, lunges, burpees.

We make sure not to begin our drills until after the medical workers pay their morning visits to each room, where they stand in the doorways and observe us taking our temperatures. We can't elevate our body temperature before the morning and evening measurements because anyone spiking a fever will be sent off-site for medical treatment, we have been advised; Weston and I joke that "taken off-site for medical treatment" is a euphemism for being marched out to the water's edge and shot in the head.

After we finish a set of 100 jumping jacks, Weston calls for a break.

"Watch this," he calls as he takes a prodigious rip from his vape, exhaling a cloud that swallows him up like an over-the-top special effect for the disappearance of a wizard in a high school play.

"I'm thinking about working for the company that makes these vapes after I graduate," he tells me. "So cool. The HQ is in Shenzhen, and they give you a free vape and let you vape at your desk, I heard. No limit."

"No limit!" He repeats incredulously, shaking his head.

I'm laughing so hard that I can't finish my next round of crunches.

"What? I'm serious -"

I hear my phone ding and then, half a second later, the echo of Weston's notification.

Our breakfasts, packaged in disposable plastic containers, have been left on the stools set up outside each of our doorways. We're not allowed to retrieve them until the workers have left the hallway and the all-clear message appears in our WeChat group.

We end the morning's exercise session so that we can eat.

So far, the food is the most unfortunate element of the quarantine. This morning, it's greasy rice that has no business being greasy and a hard-boiled egg whose yolk is freckled with spots of a blue-green that I associate with Dr. Suess (him, and bread mold).

Between the lousy food and our morning workouts, I'm looking forward to getting cut up before I see Jay, my fiancé, whenever this quarantine ends and we're together again.

Imagining hugging Jay and Ti Qi the Wonder Poodle germinates a tense, dense feeling in the space between my lungs.

We should've been reunited already, I realize an unaccountable three days late.

For the first time, I allow myself to consider what is really at stake.

***

My stints in rehab and recovery have taught me discipline in organizing my time.

I've already implemented a rigid, prison-like schedule for each day. Next up is an hour and a half of Italian and Chinese study.

But not before I shower. And I won't shower until I've had my "me time."

One nice thing is that, aside from the small children who have been allowed to stay with their parents, we've all been given our own suites.

It's not a nice thing, really, to be so isolated.

But one actually nice thing is that we have Internet access.

This is particularly important because masturbation has an almost cosmic significance for me during times of stress; you know - final exams, legal proceedings, pandemics. Particularly pandemics, as it turns out.

It is the best anxiety alleviator that I have at my disposal - my rod and my staff, so to speak.

The problem is that my VPN isn't working, meaning that my browsing sessions are being recorded and potentially reviewed.

I've run into this situation once or twice before, and I've developed a psychological strategy for overcoming the weirdness.

First, I imagine a wizened Chinese censor, a closeted gay from a village with a male to female ratio of 12:1. Decades ago, the venerable Mr. Zhao had sex with his wife exactly one time to produce the couple's allotted one child, then fell into a catatonic stupor until modern psychiatry revived him three years later.

Of course, Mr. Zhao has always been far too frightened to browse porn, which is technically illegal in China, let alone gay porn. The most that he's permitted himself are a couple of "men in speedos" and "athletic underwear for men" searches, the kind of stuff that Western boys graduate from by the time we're in 4th, 5th grade.

Today, as I navigate the web with one hand, Mr. Zhao reviews my Internet feed in real-time to make sure that I'm not spamming Chinese social media with pick-me complaints about mistreatment of foreigners during quarantine.

Mr. Zhao's face, heart, and crotch light up as he discovers Russian gay spanking porn for the first time courtesy of yours truly.

I don't do it for me, you see; it's mostly for Mr. Zhao.

And it's Mr. Zhao's avid grin that I imagine as my relief arrives.

***

After I'm done entertaining Mr. Zhao, I remain sprawled out on a bed that is far plusher than any disaster-time sleeping accommodations have any right to be.

Suddenly, a moment of post-petite mort clarity arrives with that startling sting of absolute truth:

For the first time in your life, the entire world is as f*cked up as you are.

A moment later, the sequela:

It has taken the world shutting down completely for you to stop and reflect.

Before I begin reading my Italian newspaper, I sit down at the escritoire in the corner of the room.

I begin to write.

***

Thank you for reading! Part III, the second-to-last-installment of Last of the Laowai, is available here.