Hotel Quarantine by Yun Peng
In August 2020, I traveled to China because my father was gravely ill. The flight from Honolulu to Beijing normally took eleven hours and cost under $900. But in summer 2020, pandemic travel restrictions made it nearly impossible for someone in the U. S. to find a ticket to China. In June I booked a United flight scheduled to depart in early July. Its continent-hopping itinerary, Honolulu-San Francisco-Frankfurt-Beijing, seemed perversely designed for a great coronavirus mixer. In late June, the crucial Frankfurt-Beijing leg evaporated. I found out about this not through United, but on one of those Chinese websites run by “ticket gurus” dedicated to geeking out the problem. A civilian like me needed people like that--deep in the weeds about rules--to navigate the baroque and ever changing minefield. At the center was the Chinese government's Five One policy (one carrier allowed to fly into one airport via one route on one day of the week). All flights in violation of this policy were invalid, even though on various travel sites you'd still see plenty of these doomed-to-be-cancelled flights being sold. (You'd really wonder how much money was lost, and gained, through these false transactions.) Then airports in various countries had their own rules about who, from where, bearing what kinds of document, could pass through and stay in the airport for how long (a 24-hour layover limit was more manageable than one that required you to depart on the same day, for example). On these websites featuring elaborate charts and beautifully made spreadsheets, reality looked very different from the naive abundance advertised on civilian travel sites: Is the Minsk route still viable? How about Ethiopia? Has anyone tried Cambodia as a workaround for the rule that forbade mainland Chinese citizens to transfer via Hong Kong? By this point of my rapid education I knew key airports by codes. It's also weird to watch your expectation adjust: in June a $2500 round-trip ticket was begrudgingly acceptable; by July, you'd be thankful if you could find a $4000 one-way ticket for just one leg out of three or four. At some point, the fear of being infected receded into the background, and the usual travel worries never had a chance to rise above notice. No international flights were allowed to use Beijing as the port of entry. With the 14-day quarantine rule, any city in China was as good as any other. I made a list of airlines and called them one by one. It's always the same answer: all China-bound flights were sold out till the end of October. Xiamen Airlines was near the bottom of my list. I was surprised when the agent offered a one-way ticket from Amsterdam to Xiamen. It's in August, later than what I’d like. But the only other remotely possible flight departed from Auckland, New Zealand. So this was my itinerary: Honolulu-Seattle-Amsterdam-Xiamen-Beijing.
I had another problem besides the ticket. My passport had expired and my plan to renew it was derailed by the closing of the Consulate due to the pandemic. After two weeks of intense back and force with the Consulate, I was issued a Travel Document. But no airline agents I called could say for sure if they'd accept it as a valid ID.
Because so many things could go wrong, the quarantine hotel appeared in my mind as a shiny goalpost: if I could reach there I'd be home free. Even the anticipated boredom felt welcome. I needed a limbo to compose myself for the next part of the journey.
At the same time: what if I got home too late?
I was also curious. I knew I was an anonymous body passing through a dense web of intertwined technological and bureaucratic power. Each body passing through was like a particle shot into a cloud chamber, revealing invisible forces in the field. I wanted to catch a glimpse of how things worked while being the object of the work.
On Day 6 of the quarantine, my sister called in the evening and told me that my father was rushed to the emergency room. For the next eight hours I waited for her to call back to give me an update. I was so close, yet so far.
Also in this hotel, near the end of the quarantine, one early morning I had a vivid dream about my father. That dream had given me what I needed, what I feared I didn't have, to go on to the journey home.
I left Honolulu on August 3 and arrived at home on August 21. On October 6, exactly two months after I landed in Xiamen, my father died. I am grateful that I got to be there for the last two months of his life. I am also grateful for everyone who watched me along the journey. I felt the gentle propelling wind behind me all the way.
Yun Peng
Yun Peng lives and works in Honolulu, HI, where she teaches Chinese literature and film at University of Hawaii at Manoa
To view more of Yun’s work follow @featherladder.
Xiamen, 5:50 pm August 6 and 1:28 pm August 7. The plane landed at 2 pm. By the time I touched the door card to the lock of my assigned hotel room and heard the happy beep, it’s close to 7 pm. I had been on the road for 53 hours. From landing to the hotel, it took five hours for us to be processed. The list of checkpoints was long. We were shunted from one to the next by gaggles of hazmat-suited workers. According to a young man I met on a bus, our hotel was considered desirable because it allowed takeout orders. Once inside the hotel we were given a number and told to find the table with the corresponding number. On each table were two documents. One laminated information sheet (rules about takeouts) and another (more rules) to read and sign. Despite its grandeur and high ceiling, this lobby was hot and stuffy. Soon the laminated sheet found its new life as a fan. I was #15. #13 and #14 were a couple from Houston with two daughters. The older one was the designated family APP/QR code minder. The younger one was sulking, her head on the table, buried in her arms. Her mother said, We are all uncomfortable. You are not the only one. Don’t be impatient. It just makes you feel more uncomfortable. Calm yourself and you’ll feel better. See, we are all fanning for you! I watched the young man on the bus, who was #12, disappear into the passage to the elevator. It occurred to me that even though we’ll be living under the same condition for the next 14 days, I will never see these people again. But we did not say goodbye. When it’s my turn to go to the elevator I was greeted by a painted Chinese opera mask filling an entire wall. Out of a corner to its right a man in hazmat suit emerged, floatingly. I didn’t know that I needed to use the door card to operate the elevator. The door opened on the wrong floor to another man in hazmat suit. He touched his card and pressed the button for my floor. Maybe there was a hazmat-suited man waiting at the elevator on each floor? But when I got to mine there was nobody. And my room—it was just a hotel room. ** I want to thank everyone for keeping me in your thoughts. You are the spell that got me through. ❤️
Day 1 (August 7). Spent the whole day pretty much in this exact position. Too tired to do anything, too wired to sleep. Trying to figure out the next steps. Learned the sad news that I’ll have to spend 7 more days in at-home quarantine when I get to Beijing. There are so many rules issued by different agencies and they are constantly changing. Had my temperature checked twice by either the same hazmat-suited man or two of them. He moved too fast for me to tell. And each time he came he’d knock on several doors and go to the one that opened the first. So each time I caught a glimpse of the woman in the room across the hall.
Day 5. This is the point when days start to blend into one another. I remember the days by the variations in the free breakfast menu. The first was the morning of coconut milk and a sweet bun; the second of soy milk and a meat bun. The third morning was the most different and the least preferred. Instead of the usual rice porridge there was watery oatmeal and three slices of white bread. And the drink? It was either coconut milk or soy milk—I couldn’t remember anymore. That was a Sunday. So Sundays=Western-style breakfast? The fourth day cycled back to the first, except that the meat bun streak continued and the fruit was an apple rather than an orange. Both changes were favorable.Today must be the fifth day. The fruit is neither an orange nor an apple but two small green plums (they are good and sweet). I am no longer interested in the difference between coconut milk and soy milk. They come in similar bottles and are of the same brand: Joylaugh. And since Monday the bitesized purple sweet rice ball for dessert has been replaced by a bitesized steamed sweet rice cake. That marks the beginning of a new week. But a hard-boiled egg is always there. Like a primate in the lab, I’m demonstrating an innate desire to find patterns and adjust expectations. So far no two breakfasts are entirely the same. I don’t know how I would feel waking up one morning to find a repeat breakfast. Perhaps I would be satisfied for having seen through a complete breakfast cycle; perhaps I would be disappointed that there are no more variations. Or perhaps on the morning after the repeat, I’d realize that there is no cycle at all. But as long as I remember the breakfast variations, I can always say, On that day when I had two plums for breakfast, we had a typhoon warning, but nothing happened (at least not on that day).
Day 8. So close yet still so far. Most of this day was spent trying to get online and watching web pages load (or not). So much of this is about trouble shooting: bureaucracy, technology. Yesterday the halfway point was marked by another PCR test and a blood test. I regret not having asked the two nurses whether anyone from my flight had tested positive. Not that I expect them to answer. Similarly I know my test results by not being told.
Day 9. Hazy. A view of lunchtime delivery activity from my window.
Day 10. Quarantine sunsets. Yesterday I looked at the map for the first time (seems pointless knowing that I am not allowed free range movement at any point) and realized that I was on an island. The hotel is about four kilometers from the ocean. From there if you draw a straight line southeast, there is the city of Tainan across Taiwan Strait. Also I am not that far from Xiamen University, which I visited many years ago working as an interpreter. But the whole point of the quarantine is to make sure that even though I am in Xiamen I am not really here. I am merely passing through a tunnel made of hazmat-suited agents. It’s about maintaining the chain of custody. Tomorrow I will inform the “front desk” (I have no idea which agency they represent) of my plan to leave on the 21st. They will have me delivered to the airport. Tomorrow I will also call the neighborhood committee in my parents’ neighborhood to inform them of my impending arrival. I will need to register with them as soon as I arrive in Beijing. (There is an app for that!) I will find out if I need to undergo another seven days of at-home quarantine. I hope not, because I have other bureaucratic errands to run. Then school will start. Internet might crash. Google docs might be inaccessible, etc etc.
Day 11. Bedscape & other things. A man called in the morning on the room phone to arrange my ride to the airport. Called the community office in my parents’ neighborhood and was told that I needed to undergo seven more days of at-home quarantine. But the woman’s voice sounded relaxed. Things weren’t as strict as they had been. And because I was flying from a domestic location carrying a government affidavit, my risk level was downgraded. For example, they would no longer collect me at the airport. I only needed to fill out an app. Maybe two apps. She even suggested a solution for my dilemma. My sister and I discussed it and we couldn’t figure out if it would work. It all depends on the condition of my health app. Essentially, if I get this color my life would be easier; that color, not so much. But either way I’ll be home. That’s the important thing. The temperature check came way late this afternoon. After a while I realized I was waiting for it. It has become a part of my routine. (“After the temperature check I will drink another cup of coffee.”) The occupants of the room at the end of the hall must be special in some way because twice I noticed the temperature checkers talking to them. The most they’ll say to us regular people is “normal” or “36.1.” Sometimes they say nothing. Just a beep. But today I had to suppress a laugh when the man put the gun to my forehead. I imagine they feel a growing sense of ennui, knowing that we are normal people, indeed, parasites, doing nothing but spending money and eating takeouts, producing quantities of garbage in the process. Yesterday I noticed at lunch hour that the woman across the hall had not taken in her free breakfast. I imagined that she had “given up.” But that’s just my imagination. She could very well be putting the quarantine to productive use. Worrying about productivity in quarantine feels both incongruent and inevitable. I blame the dim room lighting for my not doing anything useful after sundown, but there aren’t enough days left to make it worthwhile to modify my behavior.
Day 12. Took up home improvement to make sitting more comfortable. Caught a rare sight of the takeout re-deliverer pushing a dolly loaded with orders. (Takeouts are delivered to the lobby, then taken upstairs by hazmat-suited workers.) The temperature checker seemed more relaxed today, perhaps loosened up by his exchange with the occupants in the room at the end of the hall. Tomorrow morning—the 13th day—there will be another round of tests.
Day 13. PCR test and blood test in the morning. This time there was just one nurse. Relax, she said. You are opening your mouth too wide. You are going home soon! I asked her if anyone on my flight was tested positive. No, she said. If there were positives you would all have been taken to a different place. Where would that be? Another hotel. In the suburbs. And there we’d have been put under more intense observation. More tests, CT scans, everything. Don’t worry, she said, no positive would slip through. We are making sure of it. That’s why even though we are a big country with so many people, case number has not exploded. It’s hard to disagree with her. I realized how lucky I was: it would have been hard, realistically, to protect oneself on a packed flight had there been people who were ill. And then if one person had tested positive, even just antibody positive, it would complicate, maybe prolong, the quarantine for everyone on the flight. This morning there were a lot of commotions. So far the usual hotel noises had been eerily absent. While the nurse was doing the tests, a hotel room service cart was parked outside the room to my left. Across the hall, one door to the right, there was another door open. The man in that room had also left. Then afterwards I heard more voices and went to the door. The woman across the hall was checking out. There was some kind of a glitch. Maybe she had overslept. Through the peephole I watched her wheel out two suitcases, bowing slightly in apology, said thank you and disappeared. Her street clothes stood out among the hazmat suits. Then more commotions: two women were cleaning the room that had just been left empty. This I saw when I opened the door for temperature check. One of the women was picking up things from the desk and dropping them into a garbage bag. There were already several garbage bags outside the door. I was surprised at the amount of garbage. But maybe they needed to strip everything. I wondered what they would do with things like the chair cushions. The ones in my room didn’t seem too clean. I heard the two women talking to each other. Suddenly it felt like a hotel.
Day 14. Quarantine officially ended at 6:30 pm, right when the sun set behind the buildings. There is a scale in the bathroom that I had never used. (There is also a torch where, in another setting, one might find a Bible.) Maybe I should have weighed myself coming in and going out. I am thinking about the experiment that had led to the discovery of oxygen: the unaccounted for weight loss caused by combustion. I am going to pack. So far nothing is up to me. From now on everything is up to me.
The plan was to check out at 6:20 am and leave for the airport at 7. But typical of me, I found the elevators but they were the wrong ones. Had to have a hazmat-suited man come and lead me out of this red chair labyrinth. Downstairs another man was waiting to check me out. I asked him if he used to work for the hotel. Yes, seven years. But now you are all doing this. Five months, he said, I have been wearing this. Is it uncomfortable? I asked. What can you do? He said that except for the temperature checkers, who were medical professionals, most people we interacted with were hotel workers. There was some problem refunding my credit card and he was most helpful. Perhaps we were both glad to play a role that reminded us of better times. When I got into the van there were already three others. The man who sat next to me came from Germany. We compared notes about how things were in Germany and in the US. We agreed that what we had gone through, weird and inconvenient though it was, could not be called hardship. He said, he had gained four kilos. (So someone did think of weighing himself!) At the airport our driver (not wearing hazmat suit) took us to two special counters reserved for people like us. At security check everyone was carrying too much of something. For me it was cables and backup disks, for someone else it was jewelry. For yet a third person it was coins. The atmosphere in Beijing was more relaxed than I had thought. The taxi driver from the airport talked about possible food shortage due to the pandemic and asked if I thought Biden would win. As for the condition of my health app? It’s green, which is good. This app works with a totally different logic than the ones I have been maintaining. Set out on August 3. Now I am home.