Essays ⁽³⁴⁹⁾

My favorite flower is the gardenia. This has a great deal to do with the environment in which I grew up. In our village in Huanggang, many households grew gardenias in front of and behind their houses. The gardenias we grew are not the potted…

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.

This outbreak of the epidemic in Beijing has lasted for more than 40 days. Tomorrow we can finally basically return to normal life, although it is still hard to say whether the epidemic will rebound. It is just that from now on, Beijing residents, like…

On June 3, 2022, the fifth day of the fifth lunar month, which was the Dragon Boat Festival. I made my first harvest on my balcony vegetable garden. This batch of vegetables had been sown on April 20 and grown for over fifty days. For…

Shanghai, locked down for two months, finally lifted its controls today, and I am genuinely happy for its residents. Beijing's Haidian and Fengtai districts remain under upgraded controls, and we must continue this summer of "holing up at home." For someone who loves nature like…

As outbreaks in Shanghai and Beijing come under control, the hardest days of this year are behind us. Universal routine nucleic-acid testing should, for a long time to come, effectively contain large-scale spread of COVID variants within China, although small local outbreaks will keep recurring.

This wave of the epidemic in Beijing has lasted nearly a month. I have already taken nineteen nucleic acid tests, and it is far from over. Thank goodness that although the neighborhood directly opposite our back gate and the one immediately to our west have…

This wave of the epidemic in Beijing has now lasted twenty days. For these twenty days the three of us in our household have basically been staying home. Apart from taking nucleic acid tests, buying groceries, and taking out the trash, we have not stepped…

On April 18, sensing trouble, I gave up the shared community garden I had been renting. On April 19, I ordered online all kinds of balcony-gadgets and fertilizer. On April 20, I bought some vegetable seedlings suited to balcony growing and planted them on the…

Three years into the epidemic, lockdown has finally come to us. From May 1, cases began appearing one after another in the compounds around here, spreading across a wide area; more than 500 residents in our community had pop-up warnings on their Health Kit. My…