Ten Days in Xi’an: Episode Two
Episode 2: A city in lockdown - No one could have predicted that after just two days, all the people in Xi’an would be forced to look for food online.
Acclaimed, independent journalist Jiang Xue documents the spiral of her city, Xi’an (with a population of more than 13 million residents), into complete lockdown.
2. Surviving markets
At least at the beginning of the lockdown, everything seemed to make sense. Many supermarkets and fruit and vegetable stores at the entrance of the community were still operating in secret. Although the movement of people had stopped, basic living supplies were still available, albeit at a much slower pace.
In my housing complex, PCR tests are done once every two days in the yard. Although we can’t enter and exit freely through the main gate, the property has an “exit permit,” a small piece of paper which enables its residents to go out. It is said that the quarantine policy allows: “one person per household to go out to buy groceries every two days.”
The images above show people who cannot go back home because of the city’s sudden lockdown. The man shown in orange is a cleaner.
I don’t need to go out to buy groceries. First, I have reserves. Second, the convenience store next to the community is still open. The diligent proprietress writes down everyone’s needs from across the fence, whether it is vegetables, rice, noodles, oil, or daily necessities; she gets the goods ready, and then hands them over the fence to the residents. On December 25th, it snowed, and there was a vegetable truck parked outside the gate of the community. The vegetables were very fresh, and there was fresh meat. Neighbours on their own initiative queued up to buy their goods. People looked on enviously as a woman took away a large bouquet of flowers that she had ordered.
No one could have predicted that after just two days, all the people in Xi’an would be forced to look for food online. So many people in the city were frustrated and panicked so they rushed to shop online. As a result, it was difficult for everybody to buy food. In an era of material excess and everyone trying to lose weight, eating suddenly became a difficult task.
On December 26, the fourth day after the lockdown, I happened to see on the Internet the news that Teacher Tiantian,[1] who everyone had been focused on, had returned home. While I was happy for Teacher Tiantian, at the same time I thought of Chang Weiping, a young lawyer friend, whose wife was also calling out on the Internet at the same time, hoping that her husband would return home. But her voice was just too weak.
Depressed. I decided to go out for a walk in the name of “grocery shopping.”
Holding the “road ticket,” the exit permit, I swept off a shared bicycle on a road where the snow had not melted and enjoyed this rare freedom. On the main road, the buses were still running, but no one was riding them. On a reclining chair at a certain platform, there is a homeless person. On the street, food delivery guys and couriers passed by from time to time.
There were many police cars on the road. Ten minutes after I came out, I saw about four or five police cars.
The entrance to Ganjiazhai Village, where I would often go to buy vegetables, was covered and blocked with a baffle. Several sheets of paper were pasted on the board, with the words “seasoning,” “chili,” “Yulin tofu,” and “earth pork” written crookedly, telephone numbers were left alongside all of them. There were two men on the other side of the baffle, one handed out the deliveries, the other scanned QR codes to settle the accounts.
This is a huge urban village resettlement area, with a famous market in the surrounding area. Every evening, the village is brightly lit and, like a world of mortals, full of people; business is booming, bustling, and noisy. Many courier companies’ service stations are located here. Compared with the neighbouring communities, here, stocked with supplies for everyday needs from clothing to food to transportation, this urban village is self-sufficient. Although the city is closed, many small restaurants in the village are still open for business. At this time, a line of delivery workers stood outside the walls of the community. Soon, a few owners of the restaurants hurried over and handed them the meals to be delivered through the fence.
A young delivery guy is sitting on a motorcycle and playing with his mobile phone. I chatted with him for a while.
The young guy’s surname is Liu and he is 29 years old this year. His hometown is Baoji. He said that on the 22nd, when he heard that the city was going to be closed, he wanted to hurry back to his hometown. But when he asked, he learned he would have to quarantine in a quarantine center when he returned to his hometown. He would have to pay the quarantine fee himself, which cost 210 yuan a day. It was too expensive, so he decided to stay. He rented a place in Shajing Village, but the village was already sealed off, so he couldn’t go back.
There was nothing else he could do, so he stayed in a hotel, because he could go in and out freely, and he could continue to run orders. A room in the cheapest hotel on the street is 150 yuan per day, which he shares with others. These days, fewer restaurants are open, there are fewer orders, and fewer delivery workers, so he can still earn three or four hundred yuan a day making deliveries, which even exceeds his previous average daily income.
A few days later, I read about a man whose hometown was in Chunhua County, Xianyang prefecture (in Shaanxi province), and that after the city was closed, he took a shared bicycle in order to get home from Xi’an, riding from 8 o’clock in the evening until 6 o’clock in the morning through the Guanzhong Plain in temperatures of minus six or seven degrees (Celsius). After riding nearly 90 kilometers, he was “caught” by the epidemic prevention personnel as he was approaching his hometown and was fined 200 yuan. There was also a young guy who walked from Xianyang Airport to Qinling Mountains in order to get home. He walked in the mountains for eight days and eight nights until he reached Guanghuo Street near Fenshuiling, where he was eventually caught.
I thought of poor Liu again. I don’t know if he can still leave his urban village, as the lockdown gets tighter and tighter. Even if he can come out, will there be orders to run? How can he bear the accommodation fee of 150 yuan a day? I regret not jotting down his phone number that day.
When Xi’an was under lockdown, another incident caught public attention all over the country on the Internet, particularly in WeChat: this was about the experience of 27-year-old Li Tiantian, a primary school teacher in Yongshun County in western Hunan Province. Earlier in 2019, Teacher Tiantian published posts online, criticizing China’s education officials at lower levels keen on engaging in formalism, which caused a lot of attention on the Internet. On December 19, 2021, she was not only warned by the local education bureau because of her comments but was forcibly sent to a mental hospital on the grounds that she should be treated for depression. But Teacher Tiantian was pregnant at that time. The news circulated very quickly on the Web. Concern ran deep for the teacher and netizens throughout China became very angry and strongly condemned the local authorities. Under extreme pressure from all parts of the country, local authorities had no choice but to send her home to appease the storms on the Internet.