One after another, the buildings in our community are being put under temporary lockdown, and at the market by the back gate, residents not yet locked down are buying and hoarding groceries by the bagful. I restock once a week; I always make sure the home has a fortnight’s worth of fresh vegetables and fruit, at least a month’s worth of meat and eggs, plus some dried vegetables.I used to shop when the market was quiet, but these days there seems to be no quiet time. Only at noon, when everyone is eating, are there slightly fewer people—still far more than usual. Grocery shopping is itself rather risky: if someone who turns out positive a few days later is at the market while we are there, we count as close contacts and the whole family gets sealed in. So I buy one to two weeks’ worth at a time, to minimize trips to the market.Today I bought an exceptional amount—carried by hand, on my back in a pack, and pulled in a trolley; I made two trips, and was soaked with sweat by the time I got it all back. My wife no longer scolds me for buying too much, as she used to, because Beijing’s daily new infections have been soaring, surpassing 4,000 yesterday alone. News of temporary control keeps popping up one after another in the community group; pooled-testing positives are far more common than before, and these past few days our neighborhood has had pooled-positive tubes pending verification every single day.We do not know when the next lockdown will come, nor whether it will still be only temporary. Our unit has already been under temporary control twice; at this moment, another unit in our building is under temporary control. Stocking up on food means that, if we are locked down, we will not have to trouble the volunteers to deliver things to us.For three years our community has been relatively lucky; until now there has not been a single confirmed case. Perhaps tonight one will appear, perhaps not. But this outbreak in Beijing is fierce, and it is only a matter of time before a positive case appears here—perhaps within the next few days—so we have to make some preparations.Logistics are no longer as smooth as they were; many parcels cannot get into Beijing, and many people cannot receive the parcels I send, so all my work has inevitably been affected. The whole family is at home: my wife is a teacher and my child a student, and both are now attending classes online at home, while I keep reading at home. Apart from nucleic-acid testing, grocery shopping, and taking out the trash, we hardly go out at all. Fortunately I bought a stationary bike in the first half of the year, so I can still cycle indoors and my exercise is not disrupted.I also read the news every day, and some of it is deeply distressing—for example, the Anyang fire and the Urumqi fire; those innocent countrymen who perished are heartbreaking. As the year draws to a close, I feel deep sympathy for the families of those who died in the fires. Being cooped up at home is uncomfortable, but the misfortune suffered by those people and their families far exceeds ours; I hope they can find a measure of peace.In the blink of an eye it has been almost a month since I last went to a country park; fearing that cycling on the road might expose me to infection and disrupt our child’s senior-year studies, we stopped going out back when Beijing’s daily new cases were only twenty-something. We have tried to live a two-point, straight-line life—work and family, nothing else. Until the epidemic policy is adjusted, to avoid holding our child back, this is all we can do.Once cooped up at home, I started plowing through such tomes as the Zhonghua Bencao (Chinese Materia Medica) and the Zhongyi Fangji Da Cidian (Great Dictionary of TCM Formulas). The Zhonghua Bencao runs to ten large volumes, and the Fangji Da Cidian to eight; I used to treat these as reference works, but now I have the patience to read them page by page, which is genuinely not easy. With my bad cervical spine, I now read standing up, and my concentration has improved noticeably. Medical books easily make one drowsy when read sitting down; standing up, that is less of a problem.Winter has come, and the chives and malabar spinach on the balcony have stopped growing, though a little green still remains. When I do not feel like reading, I look at them and daydream about the good life of having a vegetable garden—a small joy amid hardship. Now I look forward to the day I can lay down the burden of earning a living, go to our old country home, tend the vegetable-and-fruit garden my father opened up behind the house, read, write, treat patients, and enjoy the rest of my life.