Anonymous, “I Was Lucky Enough to Live through a Joke”  

 
Anonymous, “I Was Lucky Enough to Live through a Joke”[1] (May 8, 2022)
 
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
The following is an example of a blog post on the Shanghai lockdown that went viral.  Penned by a young woman in Shanghai who lives with her mother and her younger brother (her father lives in Guangzhou), the four posts translated here recount the author’s stay at a quarantine center in late April 2022, followed by a second stay in a hotel for close contacts, as well as many adventures in between.  Although the blog is quite new, and the author completely unknown, the first post was read at least 1.7 million times (and probably more—the author reports this figure in the second of her four posts).
 
The posts are valuable for what they reveal about the nuts and bolts of the system, what works and what doesn’t, and how the citizens of Shanghai are bearing up.  The text presumably went viral because the feisty, yet likeable, author recounts her exasperation with the clumsiness and inevitable inefficiences and injustices of the system in a way that is often extremely amusing.  I have no idea if the author has ambitions to be a writer, but to my mind ​she is clearly a gifted humorist, combining Internet slang[2] and a clean prose style to great effect.  There are many passages of delicious irony, and probably nuances that I missed.
 
The tone of much Western journalism on the Shanghai lockdown is understandably grim, portraying the people as having been pushed to the wall by a politically driven health care system, implying that this might be the end for Xi Jinping or even the Communist regime.  There are instances of senseless inhumanity in the texts translated here that perhaps sustain such a reading—particularly the story of the pregnant woman who tested positive right before giving birth, and was not allowed to see her baby for almost ten days.  And it is clear that getting a handle on the virus has become such a ridiculous priority that the system is overloaded and functioning poorly, leaving many people in dire straits, perhaps even misery.  At the same time, I suspect that the author’s tone of bemused exasperation is not unique to her.  Like most of us, the Chinese people know the system under which they live, and make allowances.
 
The author’s blog posts include pictures, which illustrate and fill out the narrative.  Should you want to take look, here are posts one, two, three, and four. 
 
Thanks to Kevin Luo for sending me the first post.
 
Translation
 
Last week I went to the quarantine center and then came home.  It wasn’t really that bad.  After all, we’ve been locked down for two months, which has kind of worn me down, so being ordered around like this was completely within the realm of the acceptable.  The day I got out of the quarantine center, I had even written a letter of thanks on a heart-shaped post-it note, thanking the Jiangsu medical team and the Lingang Quarantine Center for their devoted care and human concern, and the phrase “please let me thank you” was on the tip of my tongue,  but I held it in.
 
Because while the quarantine center was a medical institution, they did not treat me for anything, and they didn’t even have any Chinese medicine (and if they had had any, I would have thrown it away).  Some people just did their self tests and uploaded their temperature while they smiled at the medical personnel.  Even if I had a high fever and my nose was so stopped up I couldn’t breathe, there was no medicine to be had, so I brought my own Saridon [an analgesic].  There was no way to take a CT scan of the lungs, unless maybe you were coughing yourself to death.  So as long as there were no scans, everyone was asymptomatic, a kind of Schrödinger's lung.
 
Things started to turn south the day I went home.  It’s like the things that happened that day were trying to warn me that bad things were coming.
 
It was when we were on the bus that day that we learned that the “long march” back to our homes was an unwritten rule.  Although the distance from the quarantine center was less than the 50 kilometers indicated on the Internet, we still had to walk the last five, because the bus would only drop us off somewhere in the general vicinity.  The funny thing was that none of the 46 people on the bus protested—see what good slaves we are?  Everyone was grateful to the point of tears, thinking “if only I can get home, things will be fine, and dragging my luggage for five kilometers is no big deal.”  I checked my smart phone, which told me it would take one hour and five minutes.
 
This pissed me off, so I rushed up and started arguing with the driver, who had long since stopped being a service provider and become a wielder of authority:  “Get out of my face,” he said, “it’s up to you whether you get off or not, but if you don’t get off here, there are no more stops, and we’ll head straight back to the quarantine center.”
 
Talking this way immediately scared all the passengers as well as my mother, and I myself changed from a righteous rebel to a group liability, like the people who refuse to come down to get tested and are criticized by everyone for dragging out the neighborhood lockdown.  The passengers were glaring at me, and my mother had started in on me as well, tapping me on the leg and pulling me back, telling me not to bother the driver, telling me to mellow out and not ruin everyone’s chances to get home.  But still, the arrogance of it all.  Our life and death in the hands of the driver.
 
But I still didn’t give in:  “I’m not getting off the bus.  Even if I wind up staying on the bus today I’m not walking.”  The driver muttered a curse and I sat back down in my seat and pulled out my smart phone.  Passengers began to get off and walk toward their homes, grateful to the driver as long as he dropped them one red light closer, all of them saying “thank you” yet again.   Seeing that we were getting ever further from our home, my mother began to think about cutting off relations with her daughter, and ran to the front and pleaded with the driver to head back a little ways, saying it didn’t matter if we had to walk a few more kilometers. 
 
The final result was that the driver went in a big circle (we had already gone from the Yuanshen Sports Center Stadium to the Xupu Bridge), and after everyone had gotten off, he dropped us at the gate to our compound (close to the Sanlin Expo Homeland).  There’s no way to know if he did this because of my grim refusal or because of my mother’s pleas.
 
Once this farce had concluded, another disaster approached only two days after my mother and I had begun to enjoy our peaceful Cold War life.  “This disaster was the worst of my life, destroying everything, including my looks and my body, my social relations, my good character and personality, and even my soul.” [This is copied from an online meme].
 
On May 4, a big white[3] came to the door to administer a test for my little brother.  My mother and I had been transferred to the quarantine center on April 27 and had returned home on May 2, so there had been eight days since April 27, and I don’t know why it was after precisely eight days that the covid people would suddenly make a stubborn mistake and remember my brother.  On April 27, it is true that an unidentified caller had told my brother to prepare his things for transfer as a close contact.  But after he got his things together, no one came to get him.  So my brother lived through his infection at home, his fever went up and came down, and then my mother and I came home.  During this period, he did not go downstairs to get tested, because the door was sealed, and anyway since he was positive it was not appropriate for him to go out.
 
On May 5, my brother tested positive and was taken to the quarantine center, and my mother and I were notified that we would be transferred as close contacts.  You can only laugh—my brother was a close contact and no one paid any attention, but now we were close contacts and were expected to go immediately.  I guess it was our fault for testing negative too quickly, getting out of the quarantine center too quickly, and coming home too quickly.  Quicker than the efficiency of the covid minders?  Quick to the point of being our own close contacts?
 
The question may linger for years:  did the positive come first or was it the close contact?
 
I immediately fought back, and sent a message to the building committee, but my mother, as a docile subject, just started packing her bag again.
 
Me:  “We just came out of the quarantine center, so how can we be close contacts?  And why was the close contact in our home not taken away?
 
Committee:  “Well, we checked our records, and your brother refused to go.”
 
Me:  “Nonsense.  My brother packed his bags, but no one came to get him, nor did they test him.  They paid no attention to him for eight days.”
 
Committee:  “So what is it that you are asking for now?” (trying to avoid the issue).
 
Me:  “I’m asking that we not be treated as close contacts.  We have come back from the quarantine center after testing positive, and we don’t want to go back.”
 
Committee:  “No.  You are on the close contact list, please help us do our job and go along with everyone else.”
 
Me:  “Didn’t you say my brother refused?  Well, then I am refusing.”
 
Committee:  “In any event, this is the procedure.  If you have a complaint, call 12345 [a one-stop hotline meant to optimize government services].”  (Another attempt to avoid the issue + unfeeling behavior).
 
Subsequently, logic be damned, my mother and I were taken away as close contacts, and spent the first night at a transfer station.  This so-called transfer station was a makeshift building with four base walls, and sleeping in a jail would have been more comfortable.
 
Sleeping in this unfinished building that night, I was thinking:  I live in a big city like Shanghai, and have broken no laws, and my health has not completely recovered, and yet I am sleeping in a makeshift building as if I have no rights.  If I went out and tried to call a car I couldn’t get one, and I can’t go home, so even if I were the king of heaven or the richest person in the world I would still have to sleep in this dump.  There is no way out, I have no choice.  Because I am a close contact.  This is Shanghai.
 
According to regulations, when people leave the quarantine center they should stay home for six days, without doing nucleic acid or antigen tests; on their last day in the quarantine center, they are still together with a fresh bunch of people who just arrived, which means of course close contact, which is why they should stay at home for awhile.  No one cares about basic logic, there is no system, there are no uniform standards, there is no way to complain, there is only the stupid 12345.  At this moment, 12345 stands for the mess that is Shanghai.
 
The next day, 60 people in the community transit center made a fuss, saying that they had been sleeping in the makeshift building for several days, and no one had come to get them to take them to a hotel.  It’s like they had been forgotten.  Three police cars came, but the policemen just kept repeating that they should make allowances, they should cooperate, and that there was nothing the police could do.  The result was that these 60 people, old and young, dragging their suitcases, left the center and went home.  The police did not try to stop them, but simply looked on helplessly as they headed down the road.  Who knows whether these 60 people will get home or if their neighborhood will let them in.
 
I guess I was lucky that day, because a bus came and took me to the hotel.  Sadly, those 60 people’s names were still not on the list for that bus.  I’m still thinking about those people today, their mixture of disorder and dignity, enduring the difficulties of life in Shanghai, having done nothing wrong but still unable to bathe for days on end, their own little group, not knowing who was positive and who was negative.   The old guy who was leading them kept shouting “Let’s stay together.”
 
I hope they got home safely?
 
“I Don’t Represent any Opinion, I’m an Actual Human Being”[4] (May 9, 2022)
 
Yesterday, on Mother's Day, I posted something on line in which I said my mother was a “docile subject,” and it mysteriously went viral.  This was a unique treat of the mom-could-have-killed-me-right-there-in-the-close-contact-hotel variety.  I spent all day asking for forgiveness.
 
In fact, before the post went viral, only three people in my friend group had forwarded it—Ma Qiuzhen, Teacher Winnie, and Male 33—so the 1.7 million people who have read it are the fruits of their efforts, and they have my admiration.  Once it went viral, since I don’t know how to turn on the comments section, I kept getting private messages.  At present, the ratio is that, of the thousand or so people who wrote me, five criticized me, which is not too bad.  So 995 people liked my sense of humor—thanks, guys, you have a sense of humor, too—and the five people that criticized me said things like I was an sb (idiot),[5] that I was an agitator, that I was smearing Shanghai, that I’m arrogant.
 
I couldn’t stop laughing.  I was born and raised in Shanghai, what’s in it for me to smear my home town?    I’m just like everybody else, and when I’m in a bad mood, I write about it, and that’s it.  Everyone has seen my online account, and rumors to the contrary, it’s just a place to write a diary, and mine is not all that active, and in fact is about as bare as the transit center I wrote about in yesterday’s post.  If you think I am going to rile people up, than I don’t know whether you have too much respect for me or not enough respect for the things you believe in.
 
Oh yeah, somebody criticized me not taking Chinese medicine, which made me laugh out loud again.  Is it not ok that my stomach is cold and can’t handle the heat of Chinese medicine?  If these Chinese medicine-lovers send me their addresses, I’ll mail it to them next time, but this time I didn’t take any, so at least I did not waste national resources. 
 
As for the transit center, some people said is was not unfinished, and I would like to thank them for that, but thinking that people might not believe me, I made a special effort to take a couple of pictures putting it in its best light—unconsciously I guess I wanted to help our fashionable metropolis save a little face.  I’ll post the pictures here for everyone to look at.  For me, the challenge pushed me to the limits, and I didn’t go to the bathroom for a day and a night.  At night I was too tired to sleep, so I watched Shengsheng buxi[6] 声生不息, which was pretty good.  I like Mike Tsang[7] 曾比特. 
 
Later I fell into a state of half-sleep that lasted until 7-8 am, and was awakened by the kerfuffle downstairs. Since I was on the third floor, the noise of the 60 people fighting with the big whites and the police cars arriving was really loud. From where I was, I could clearly hear what they were fighting about, and they were saying that they had been in this awful place for days on end.  This set my heart to pounding, since the mere idea of going to the toilet put me over the edge.  There was no way I could stay here for days, so I decided to go downstairs to talk with the big whites.  The elevators weren’t working, so I had to take the stairs.  The big whites said that the leaders had said to turn off the elevators, to keep more people from coming down to join in the melee.  But they told me to be prepared to stay, because there was no way to know if a bus was coming, and waiting was the only solution. 
 
So starting from 8 in the morning, I just looked outside, spaced out, and waited. I was exhausted but also kind of raw, as if I was thinking but at the same time my mind was completely blank, a painful state which I endured for six hours.  I couldn’t eat the box lunch they gave me.  It was also during these six hours that the big group decided to walk home, and the police cars did not leave until after the group did, so over the course of the whole incident, the police did nothing other than sit with the people on the ground.  I did not take pictures or recordings of these things because I was really not in the mood and felt my soul was hollowed out, so I just watched.
 
My neighborhood committee of course has a role to play in all of this, and out of desperation I decided to give them another call, in the spirit of “if you are wasting time, then you should rack up some phone bills.”
 
Neighborhood committee: "This has nothing to do with us.  You guys have to go, and somebody will arrange things, but it has nothing to do with us."
 
Me:  "But what if we wind up stuck at the transit station?"
 
Neighborhood committee: "Someone will arrange it, it has nothing to do with us." (might as well have been a recording).
 
I just hung up.
 
Anyway, the bus came to pick us up at 2:00, and I thanked the gods for coming to earth, my ancestors for accumulating virtue, and wished long life to socialism.
 
How to put it…over the past two weeks, I stayed one night in a transit station at a school (the Shangnan Experimental Primary School), four nights at the quarantine center, one night at the unfinished transit station, and five nights at the Express Hotel.  Outside of the time in the Express Hotel, I took one shower during all that time, at the quarantine center.  You can call me an arrogant princess if you want, but I quite like to bathe, it was just that I could not.  The people who criticized me perhaps had just gotten out of the shower, taken a swig of a cold drink, and then picked up their cell phone to curse me online, saying “what a bitch—she can’t even put up with this.” Or maybe they don’t like to bathe, which would be something else to talk about.   But it is true that I do not like to suffer, and have been a lowly person since birth, for which I must apologize.
 
Before having gone through everything I have, I observed the suffering of the world through my cell phone, and sometimes I felt bad for people, but sometimes felt like it had nothing to do with me.  But now I am who I am, an actual human being who has suffered specific things, and it is no longer a question of having a certain standpoint or of understanding others.
 
I would like to thank all of my friends for their concern, and in fact the most frequent message I received was that of encouragement.  In fact, these days, the online world is full of people in much worse shape than I am, cases that are truly horrific, and I don’t know why my post went viral.  I’m really in comparatively good shape, and it’s only the speed with which I got out of the quarantine center and became a close contact that might get me into the Guinness Book of World Records.
 
My mother and I are currently staying at the Express Hotel. The double room has no sheets and pillowcases, only pillows and sleeping bags. We pass our days sitting back to back on the beds, like a couple of trains that only meet up at night, when I get lost in the small double bed.  The place is not very clean, and there is hair all over the floor.  My useless little brother tested negative on the first day at the quarantine center, and then positive on the second day, so who knows what’s going on, but it looks like he won’t be home before us.  Quarantine for close contacts is five days, and we’ve done three.
 
My mother is watching a hundred online home sanitization videos every day and is freaking out. I shouldn’t say this, but I would really like to skip this round of sanitization.
 
Let’s just say everyone should wish me a dry house when I can go back home, thank you very much.
 
P.S.  I have noticed that a lot of people are posting my article on their WeChat or Weibo to try to boost their numbers, which maybe means I bad lucked my way into a fortune.  My Weibo account is 布莱斯白.  It is a purely social account of no interest, and I don’t talk about the pandemic, but if you see other accounts using my post to try to make money help me out by reporting them, ok?
 
It seems like everyone who followed me got an automatic “how are you” and a happy face by way of reply.  If the notification noise startled you in the middle of the night, sorry, but who told you to stay up so late?  I’ve written back to about half of the people who wrote to me.  I’m doing my best.
 
“Selected Messages”[8] (May 11, 2022)
 
Dear neighbors and friends:
 
The good news is, my mother and I came home to a dry house today.  The bad news is, it is only temporarily dry, because my little brother is still at the quarantine center.
 
My brother has had it rough.  He didn’t have the luck my mother and I did.  He was taken to the Shifu Quarantine Center, which is bursting at the seams, and where new sick people keep streaming in every day.  He tested negative on the first day, positive on the second day, negative on the third day, positive on the fourth day, and negative on the fifth day.  This is too heart-breaking, because you have to test negative two days in a row to get out, but now he’s just hitting the refresh button over and over.  He says they are constantly broadcasting messages telling people to remain calm, that because there are so many people at the center, it is easy to have alternating positive and negative results, and they should not panic.  Sorry, little brother, I should not have called you “useless,” it’s all my fault.  I really am worried.  My mother and I were super lucky to be sent to the Lingang Number 3 Quarantine Center, a huge empty place.  I tested negative the first and second days, and then waited another day for my mother, and we were done.  For stories about the quarantine center, you can check out my Tik-Tok (Douyin) page, where there are three videos.  My account number is 10025149, and the name on the account is BAI.  

Now my brother is super depressed, because he likes to bathe, too, and there are no showers at the Shifu Quarantine Center.  We had them at ours.
 
I hope his test result on the sixth day comes back negative, otherwise what is he going to do?  If it keeps going back and forth like this, he will smell awfully bad by the time he gets home.

As for our homecoming, this time they brought us to our door, and we thanked them from the bottom of our hearts.  The bus sent by the hotel was well organized, and had our proper names and addresses, unlike when we got out of the quarantine center, and the bus brought us to the Yuanshen Stadium Center, where we were supposed to find buses ourselves for the rest of trip.  This makes no sense, because it is a matter of luck to find a bus, and writing our addresses down was no use, because the driver only remembered the general area.
 
But nothing is perfect in this world, and when we got to the neighborhood gate their was another trial awaiting for us.  According to the most recent regulations, no matter where you are getting back from, your luggage has to stay outside the neighborhood for two weeks.  When we came home from the quarantine center on May 2, there was no such regulation, and we just had to disinfect everything.  Because my mother was afraid I would call her a “docile subject” again, this time she started arguing with people, and I was the one who tried to calm things down, because life cannot always be smooth sailing.  As a result of my earnest pleading, I managed to extract my computer and the fruit from our luggage, the computer because I need it for work, and the fruit because it would go bad.  So we left everything else at the gate, no muss, no fuss.

Then we had to disinfect our bodies, and after that were made to stand for half an hour, the idea being that once you complete disinfecting your body you need to be still for half an hour.  All in all, getting home was not a problem. 
 
[In the remainder of this post, the author discusses messages she received after her initial post went viral.  It is witty and revealing of online life in China, but is full of screenshots and Internet humor and is thus quite difficult to translate, so I will omit this section].

“Covid Trivia Info + A Guide for Pregnant Women”[9] (May 13, 2022)

My brother came home and our house is wet.  One chapter in our family farce draws to a close.

There is no way to avoid getting your house disinfected, and I was very impractical to think otherwise.  But now that it’s happened, I can share some trivia with everyone, in case you should ever need it (and I hope you don’t).

First, you’ll get a call from the neighborhood committee, at which point you will refuse.  The neighborhood committee will report to the covid minders, who will call, and you will refuse.  The covid minders will report you to the police, and when they call, you will give in.  But where there’s a will, there’s a way, and it turns out that you can discuss things with the guys who do the disinfecting.  Good luck made its way to our door (here you can see how crazy I am), because the two sanitizers who came to our house were easy going and kind.  We politely pointed out that the house had been empty for a week, which means seven days of no activity, so perhaps they could show a little mercy.  So the guys turned their machines on low.  The key point here is that the amount of spray can be adjusted, which means that a waterfall does not have to visit your house.

When they finished spraying, one of the men tripped and fell, for which I am very sorry.  I have never understood the design of the steps in our house, and their only purpose seems to be to trip people up.  My grandfather’s mother once took a fall there.  Perceptive friends may have noticed the clever placement of a liquor cabinet next to the steps, which means that if you trip and try to steady yourself with your hand you can easily knock over a liquor bottle.  This is what happened to my great-grandmother, and she blamed herself for days.  I sort of feel like things are set up to intentionally trap people, as one wrong step leads to another wrong step, with everything heading in the worst possible direction (I’m not hinting at anything deeper).

In any event, we are definitively out of the woods, at least temporarily.  I welcomed my brother home, telling him how wonderful he is, because everyone likes flattery.  But why the word “temporarily?” Because the covid war is not over.  If by chance we had a family get-together we might reenter the static management period, in which group purchases and deliveries are all shut down.  Heaven knows we won’t starve to death.  Luckily, on the day before the last static management phase, we got our food supplies from the government and the company, so we’re ok for the moment (a lot of food for a family of three for seven days, which is nothing to sneeze at).

Next, I would like to highlight this bit of trivia, which is that when people come back from the quarantine center, they should absolutely not test themselves for six days, because the possibility of false positives is too great, which means they risk heading back to the quarantine center and the whole drama starting over.  When my mom and I came back from the center, the close contact thing meant that we had to take any number of antigen tests and three nucleic tests, and came within a hair of having to go back to the quarantine center, but we managed to survive, thank goodness. 

Still, the door to our apartment is full of seals—three of them.  One for me and my mother having tested positive, one for our being close contacts, and one for my brother testing positive.  Does having three work better than having one?  I went out anyway, which, LOL, is really not against regulations, because the neighborhood says that when government supplies get to the gate of the complex we can pick them up ourselves, and we have to leave garbage at the same place.  And being locked in is not a completely bad thing, because my company provides covid relief money each time you have to go to a quarantine center or a transit center, which means I’ve received it twice.  Sorry  boss, but this is just hilarious.  I’ve been too good, and have had too much luck this time, no one can beat me.
 
So that’s our story for the moment.  I hope that other people will not have to go through this or have need of the trivia I’ve provided.  Actually, it probably won’t happen to you, because of the 1376 people in my WeChat good friend group, only one close friend went through something bad.  I feel like her experience was worse than mine (you’re thinking “can’t be,” right?).  So as a covid blogger, I feel that I must record the story of my friend Dayun.

Dayun was 36 weeks pregnant when she tested positive, so she took her maternity bag and went into the Jinshan Public Health Clinical Center.  At the time, there were videos online showing tons of infants at this center,[10] but Dayun did not see them because she was in a different building, so I don’t know the facts of the matter.  In any event, she was in a place that specialized in pregnant women and infants who tested positive.  What’s funny is that, as a pregnant woman about to give birth, she had not left her house since the pandemic started, so she must have caught it when she went downstairs to be tested, which is the same as in my family (although we were doing group purchases too). 

On March 30, Dayun went to Pudong for a maternity check-up, and at 11 o'clock, did two nucleic acid tests (one in the throat and one in the nose), and received the result that something was abnormal in the afternoon.  Please note—just abnormal.  Then they decided she would have to go into quarantine.  Her husband pushed back hard, arguing that she should be retested, and kept arguing until almost 10 o’clock at night, when they retested her.  But at midnight, before the test results came back, they took her away.  So a pregnant woman on the verge of giving birth spent 13 hours in the hospital, which completely wore her out.  Since her husband tested negative, he had to isolate at home (close contacts were isolating at home at that point).  So the pregnant Dayun was taken away alone.

The next day, the covid minders called her and asked her why she didn’t wait for her results before going into quarantine.  Dayun was like, what the hell?  It wasn’t like I wanted to go.  But now there was nothing to be done, she had already spent a night there, and if she wasn’t positive when she got there she was surely positive by now.  Because even though she was pregnant, she was sleeping in the hospital corridor, surrounded by people with fevers, and there was no way to avoid disaster.
 
On April 15, she gave birth in isolation, LOL.  Maybe because her resistance was low, she tested positive every day for her 15 days of isolation.  Jesus.  She had a C-section, and only the lower half of her body was anesthetized.  She may have been able to glance at her baby after giving birth, but the baby was whisked away to the Fudan Children’s Hospital and she did not see it again while she was in the hospital.  She finally returned home on April 20, and in the five days after giving birth, there were no nurses and no family members, and she had to take care of herself—with the help of the good-hearted positive cases around her.
 
On April 23, her husband, by hook and by crook, finally got the baby home, although he had a hard time getting a pass to cross the river.  So it took nine days for a mother to see what her own baby looked like.  This really floors me.  A new-born infant does not get their vaccinations, doesn’t get a birth certificate or anything.  A proper Shanghai resident becomes a paperless illegal at birth.
​ 
I wasn’t going to write about this, because it makes me feel bad and want to cry.  But my friend Dayun, like me, is optimistic.  She survived and her emotions are in good shape, and did not post anything to tell people off.  She is more stable than I am, way more stable.

So that’s it.  I hope that not one other person, not a friend, not a family member, not one of my readers, will have to go through this.

Notes

[1]“有幸经历了一场笑话,”  published on May 8, 2022 on the author’s WeChat blog.

[2]Click here for a lovely glossary of Chinese Internet slang, which is quite creative.  There are worse ways to spend an afternoon than reading through this.

[3]Translator’s note:  The “big whites” 大白 are China’s public health personnal, so called because they are dressed in puffy white protective gear.

[4]“我不代表什么言论，只是一个具体的人,” published on May 9, 2022. 

[5]Translator’s note:  SB is Internet slang for 傻逼/shabi, which literally means “stupid cunt,” but more often has the force of “idiot” or “asshole.”

[6]Translator’s note:  Shengsheng buxi is a television program celebrating the 25th anniversary of Hong Kong’s retrocession to China through pop music.

[7]Translator’s note:  Mike Tsang is a Hong Kong pop music star.

[8]“精选留言,” published on May 11, 2022. 

[9]“抗疫冷知识+孕妇指南,” published on May 13, 2022. 

[10]Translator’s note:  This is surely related to stories that circulated in Western media about young children being separated from their parents.