Lockdown Day 11: Mild Relief at Not Being Sealed In
26,000 cases.
Last night, our neighborhood committee announced that homes in the entire Xuhui district would have our apartment doors taped shut with tamper-proof seals. Then maybe a couple hours later, there were some posts saying that that policy was being reversed.
This morning I checked, through my bathroom ventilation window that actually faces the corridor (which is open to the air) if my neighbors’ doors had the seal. They didn’t. I looked down my alleyway, where some houses have their doors facing the alley. They weren’t sealed either.
There was no official “news” of this reversal in the order. But I did check out Weibo, where there was a …theory… floating around. I won’t write it here, but you can read it below. And it was through this that I learned a new term, “形式主义。” If you type it into Google Translate, the English is “formalism.” Of course, I know formalism in an art history context, where it means art that is more about form, as opposed to conceptual art, for example.
I had to ask a friend to give me the meaning in this context. Here it means doing something for show, something surface level, but not really helping or adding value to the situation in any way. It makes people look good in front of others, who might also be in on it, that this is a paper-thin (in this case, literally) action. Essentially this was a staged scene for show. Which also created a ton of extra (needless) work for the neighborhood committees who had to go door to door applying these seals.
The thing is that this was real. Last night I already heard the neighborhood people going around telling residents to stay inside. Some people in my building were going to make sneak outside to buy some fruit for others in the building, and the entryway volunteers told them to go “quickly, quickly, quickly!” because our doors hadn’t been sealed yet - but would be soon.
It just created a whole lot of needless stress, confusion, and anger all around.
By the way, above and below were pictures that were shared my my entryway group. It just shows our neighborhood, with the empty streets of Shanghai in lockdown. So beautiful, whoever took these…
Besides the stress of these policy changes, one of the other things that cause stress is just the constant torrent of incoming communication. From the group buying WeChat groups. From my entryway group. For example, there could be a ton of messages about getting ready for testing, or there could also be a ton of messages about who wants in on a group buy of bananas. There’s no prioritization of topics. So even if I mute certain groups, I have to let in some information in case there’s something important. Nowadays,I turn my head and there are dozens of new messages.
Today for breakfast, I had my whole wheat sandwich loaf (which looks very flat, but is not too dense), with some cheddar cheese (it’s in crumbles, because I had frozen small blocks from the big piece I bought at Costco)!
For lunch, I wanted to use some of the celtuce and noodles from the weekend delivery of groceries. And the wonderful double-strength chicken stock from the chicken bones.
The recipe I looked up online has you blanch the celtuce and also the mushrooms, before stir-frying.
The color is so pretty and green!
I stir-fried the celtuce and mushrooms with chicken (from this weekend too), and added a sauce of soy sauce, oyster sauce, sweet potato starch, and white pepper. I thought it came out very well! I had them with the thin noodles we were given. This I feel like I could have cooked it for a shorter amount of time - 1 minute or even less, rather than the 1 minute 30 seconds I cooked it for.
For dinner, I roasted a chicken drumstick and chicken skin, along with the very last of my Thanksgiving stuffing. I just love this stuffing so much!
I also stir-fried some of that iceberg lettuce with onions, and some oyster sauce. Though there was oyster sauce, somehow the onions and iceberg lettuce combination worked as a side dish with the American flavors of roast turkey and stuffing, because they kind of gave off the vibe of the vegetables inside of a burger.
The high was in the 90s today, and together with the oven roasting the chicken, and heating and crisping the stuffing, my apartment was quite warm. I (re-)discovered that my balcony actually has an overhead light! For the very first time, I ate dinner outside. It was so lovely with the cool breeze. This pandemic has really made me use the features of my apartment for the first time!
