Lockdown Day 22: Shanghai 404
Today, I started out the day with another bowl of congee with rice, mushrooms, and black soy beans. I again topped this with salted olive vegetable, and this time, two! blocks of fermented tofu.
For lunch, I made myself a little platter: roasted carrots with the Chinese chive pesto and topped with parmesan cheese, roasted potatoes (these were made before and re-heated), Turkish braised green beans (made earlier and served chilled), and a fried egg. A perfect lighter lunch - I didn’t want anything too heavy, given that this afternoon I had a presentation to make from 1-3pm, and then a client workshop from 4:30-6.
Today, our PCR test was, like yesterday, perfectly timed: in the sliver of time right after lunch, and before my 1pm meeting. I got back to my computer right at 1pm. Amazing how a randomly occurring test could slot in so precisely!
On the way back up to the apartment, we were told to pick up a bottle of soy sauce. What a big bottle - 1.9 liters (half a gallon)!
Right at the end of the work day, I saw a message come through from the entryway WeChat group. The entryway leader said that we needed to do an antigen test, and submit the results before 7:30pm. Thankfully I finished my meeting right before, so I was able to submit with just 10 minutes to spare.
This was a really long day, to cap off a tough week. I did manage to do one of the shorter workouts that my gym started to offer through their app, called an “espresso” workout. The 17 minutes shorter workout really made the difference between me doing it and not doing it.
I celebrated the day by having a most delicious dinner. I used the roasted potatoes as my main starch, scrambled some eggs with a lot of New Mexico roasted green chile (practically 1:1 ratio!), took some of the cabbage curtido out, and refried the refried beans and added some more water. Then I topped everything with the roasted carrot, avocado salsa, and Tillamook extra sharp cheddar cheese. Most everything was already made, so easy to throw together. And I just loved the creaminess of the eggs and beans, combined with the potatoes and the sharp texture acidity of the cabbage.
This might be one of my favorite meals so far, this lockdown!
I was about to turn in, when I noticed a message from a former colleague, who mentioned some kind of video that was spreading fast online, but was cryptic about it because it was a sensitive topic and didn’t want to get the group banned.
Of course, I immediately went over to my WeChat moments to see what was going on.
People were sharing this video, which basically is a compilation of a lot of different audios which have been floating around, showing the challenges of this lockdown time. This video below has English subtitles.
But as soon as people posted the video, WeChat censors removed the videos.
What was amazing to me, was that just about every post I saw on my WeChat moments was about this video. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like this before, where the entire feed was this video. But because the censors were very quick at the trigger, people were trying all sorts of ways to get around the censors.
People posted the video sideways, upside down, mirror image…
Some people embedded the video inside of an image, like a frame, as in this Nam June Paik example! This image below is a screenshot, not a link to a video, because the censors got this before I could see it.
In the end, a lot of people simply shared a QR code to take you off of the WeChat platform, to watch the video.
A lot of people have labelled this “Shanghai 404,” 404 being that error message you get on the internet when a page cannot be found.
I wonder if this moment in the lockdown will have long term effects on the people, their relationship to the city, and to the government.. People have been very frustrated for a long time, but this was a moment when everyone - from uber-wealthy people I know to corporate workers to students - were trying to share the same content over and over, to try to get a message through.
