Lockdown Day 41: Cucumber spiral! And more Kafkaesque words and missing videos...

1500 cases. But who really knows. More below.

Breakfast was a nice bowl of steel cut oats, with flaxseeds and chia. Sweetened with maple syrup. Very comforting!

I had only an hour for lunch, but I managed to make a bowl of pasta! I pan-fried chicken chunks left over from cutting up the whole chicken from my friend, took that out of the pan, cooked my Chinese chive pesto (since I used raw chives I wanted to be sure to cook the sauce, not just heat it), added sundried tomato and the chicken back to the sauce, and then added boiled radiatore pasta to the pesto. And topped with parmesan cheese. I always weigh out my pasta nowadays - 56g for a serving - and it always looks like not enough, especially dry. But it was still quite filling. I love my Chinese chive pesto “invention” (I really am not the first to do this!)

Early afternoon snack was coffee with coconut creamer, and some chocolate chips. I’m going to finish the four bags of chocolate chips that I brought back from the US during this lockdown, I reckon.

Afternoon antigen test as usual.

Then time for dinner. I actually don’t have much in the fridge nowadays, so I decided it was a night for potstickers. There are actually regular dumplings I had bought from the Shandong dumpling restaurant across the street, just before lockdown. And I’d never prepared their dumplings in this way before. My little skillet with lid, which I had bought to make tortillas, was perfect for this task!

To accompany this, I decided to use up a partly-used cucumber. And I really wanted to try a cutting technique that I had seen twice on social media within a week. Basically you cut down crosswise, but not all the way through. I used chopsticks to keep the knife from hitting the cutting board.

Then you flip the cucumber around, and cut diagonally across on the opposite side.

And you get a cucumber spiral!

I put the cucumber on a bed of the carrot-miso dressing that I had left in the fridge.

This dinner really reminded me of dinners in Spain with my roommate. Pan-fried potstickers and side of cut cucumber. Very nostalgic.

The potstickers look burnt, but they weren’t. The black edges were just their frilly skirt.

And the cucumber was fun to eat. Functionally, the spiral cut worked well, because I could scoop up squce in the edges, kind of like spiral pasta!

I had a mandarin orange to finish the day.

And of course another antigen test tonight.

So today, apparently Xuhui district achieved “socially basically zero.” The government has been giving some new definitions of what “zero” means. “Socially zero” 社会面清零 means no new cases within society…. and society are those areas that are not “locked down” 封控区 or “controlled” 管控区, but ONLY those neighborhoods what are “precautionary” 防范区。So basically among those areas that have already not had any cases in the last 14 days, they still don’t have any cases day 15 and beyond. Logical?

And then “basically zero” are those areas which haven’t had something like 1 per 100,000 cases in the last X days. So, Xuhui is saying it’s reached zero, but specially they’ve had very few cases only among those neighborhoods that already have had at least 14 consecutive days without a case. The logic is rather… circular? I guess this is how “0” is now defined…

Not only is there a new way of defining “0,” but it turns out that the order that my neighborhood is under lockdown, even though we should be a “precaution” area 防范区 because we have gone 14 days without a case, is quite widespread. This is what they called the “quiet mode” “静默状态 in the order. So for reasons unbeknownst to normal people, many of us are being told to not leave even the front door of our homes for this period.

Last night, people started circulating this news that the WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said publicly that its COVID-zero policy was unsustainable, and that they’ve told Beijing as much.

Worse, their emergencies director Michael Ryan said that China needs to show “due respect to individual and human rights”.

I was surprised to see this news, given that since the pandemic started, the impression was really that the WHO was highly deferential to Beijing, almost being a Beijing booster.