Troubled Times Reveal the Charm of a Country Cottage
The news of the past two days has been very unsettling. Several thugs in Tangshan openly harassed and beat weak women, and a man in Shanghai publicly slashed a woman on the street; all of this makes one indignant and longing to beat them soundly. The outbreak linked to the Heaven Supermarket bar in Beijing has cast the city, which had painstakingly controlled for over forty days and just lifted its city-wide lockdown, back into the shadow of the epidemic. My child was again notified that he could not return to school and had to continue online classes at home.
Sweltering Beijing has had overcast weather for days on end. Some parents working from home and accompanying their children in online classes at home cannot bear it. Last night a mother of an eighth-grader upstairs from us broke down; seeing children running wildly without masks in the community garden drove her frantic, and she angrily called the police, throwing a hysterical fit. The police were also helpless, because those children, for all this time, have had nowhere else to play except in the community; if they are not even allowed to play in the community, I fear their psychological development will be affected.
With Beijing's epidemic rebounding, the government did not immediately require everyone to work from home again until the district had seven consecutive days with no new community cases before returning to normal. Facts have proved that in megacities like Beijing and Shanghai, epidemic prevention is extremely difficult; unless everyone stops working and stays home from now on, there may never be a way to eradicate the virus's spread. How much longer can we delay the epidemic? I fear every day of continued persistence ahead will be hard, and the defenses could break within a few months.
Some friends on the front lines of medicine told me that grassroots vaccination is not ideal, and there are still many elderly and chronically ill people who have not been vaccinated. They have many concerns and refuse to be vaccinated; colleagues have painstakingly done their work, but with little effect, and cannot force them to be vaccinated. It is instead all kinds of vaccine conspiracy theories that spread easily, leaving many people anxious. I have made all the elderly in my own family get vaccinated; anti-scientific conspiracy theories cannot convince me.
Many of Beijing's epidemic prevention policies are purely armchair strategy and cannot be implemented. I do not know whether those leaders at the press conferences truly do not know the actual situation, or whether they know full well but have to say so many false and empty words. Most residential communities cannot possibly verify health-code information 24 hours a day; in our community, before 7 a.m. and after 10 p.m., the gate is completely unmanned, everyone comes and goes freely, and there is no scanning at all. So for those accustomed to nightlife in bars and other entertainment venues, all those policies at the municipal press conference are mere scrap of paper. Such loopholes in epidemic prevention are countless; in a megacity with such strong population mobility and such poor enforcement of prevention work, it is no wonder the epidemic rebounded so quickly.
In this round of the Beijing epidemic, at least two infection cases have been reported of people who did not take nucleic acid tests as required. These people buy groceries through apps, choose unmanned hours to enter and leave the community, and go out without masks; all kinds of monitoring measures are ineffective against them. As long as one in a thousand such people exists, zero-COVID in Beijing is impossible. In fact, in metropolises like Beijing and Shanghai, how could we possibly achieve not even one in a thousand slipping through the net? Therefore absolute zero-COVID is truly harder than climbing to heaven. Pursuing absolute zero-COVID can only harm the economy and people's livelihoods and cannot achieve its goal.
The shocks of the epidemic and the war have led to a series of economic and social problems, so extreme ideologies are also spreading. Many people are living anxiously, and extreme incidents in society are increasing; this is an unavoidable phenomenon in such special times.
These past few days I have been reading A New Biography of Su Dongpo on WeChat Reading, and when I came across a poem he wrote—"Only in troubled times does one know the comfort of a country cottage; in lean years wild vegetables taste especially sweet"—I suddenly felt a coolness in my heart. In such troubled times, I really long to return to a country cottage; even if I could only live a simple life of coarse tea and plain food upon returning, what would it matter?
Many things that have happened this year give one a sense of having crossed into another world. Let alone returning to life before 2019, even returning to life in 2021 would be far better than now. I am not depressed, but to be honest I have lost interest in all the rallying cries, no matter whose mouth they come from.
I only want to return to the original state of life, to enjoy the joy of being alive, the simple and pure joy of living. For me, this joy lies in the fragrance of the soil, in the misty wilderness shrouded in rain, in the bursts of cicada song, and in the reflection of white clouds in the river. If this world could have less bloodshed, less brutality, and less insincere empty bombast, I would love it more than I do now. If not, I wish to return to the country cottage and be a cottage old man; in the slack farming season, I will study medicine to help save the world a little.