Thursday, Jan. 23
Today we wake up around 10:30. I get ahold of my dad Bruce, and he’s winding down 9:30 PM Wednesday night – he wakes up at 4:30 AM nowadays to get to the gym before work at DND. D&D is a totally different thing that I’m into, mind the difference. After the 30 minute game, where my dad whups me 7-5 as the “all-time all-stars” versus the “all-time grits,” we make Lin’s famous CQ spicy noodles. Hers has a ground meat sauce, I substitute quinoa and my spicy garlic and turmeric hummus. Afterward, while I’m editing the news, we both discuss Wuhan. A city roughly the size of London, UK or New York City is going into quarantine mode at the end of the day. We hear there is a rush to the highways and airports for Wuhanians hoping to travel for Spring Festival. It is the most important holiday of the year in China and the largest human migration on earth, and it starts tomorrow night officially at midnight. In Chongqing, our headline is “Chongqing Reports 9 Confirmed Cases of New Coronavirus Pneumonia.” Nine cases in a city of 8 million downtown and 32 plus million metro area doesn’t sound like a lot. I wonder what it must be like to be in Wuhan right now. I feel an empathic pain for them in my gut. Sometimes it’s the panic and fear that is worse than any real pain.
We have only two family dinners this year, and Lin has a big extended family in Chongqing. We took the big family out for her mother’s 70th birthday, and 60 people came to the hotel buffet. I imagine the buffets around town are pretty quiet this year and these days. Lin offers that I can stay at home if I’m worried about travel, but my mind does the math, and there’s no difference if I stay or go. If she comes back sick, I’ll catch it. I might as well go and remind her to take precautions on the way there and back. Plus, I like spending time with family, even if my Chinese isn’t very good. Still, after 6 years, its’ definitely getting better.
We just relax all day, happy to be home and free. This year has been the busiest of my life, with 3 basically full-time jobs plus the books I’m trying to write. I’ve been a teacher in China since the fall of 2014, but we also tutor on the weekends. Since June of 2019, I replaced a good friend who moved to Shanghai as an editor at iChongqing, the English language news division of Chongqing Daily Newsgroup. So with work every day and a few hours of editing and writing every night, just doing nothing feels like a dream to me. I hope to transition from teaching full time to writing within 5 years, so now with a foot in each profession, as tired as I’ve been, it feels like progress.
After a lazy day of TV and video games, we get suited up to take the subway to my cousin’s place. Almost everyone wears a mask. The few that don’t look around puzzled. Not everyone could be sick, they seem to be thinking. We take a taxi from the closest subway and keep our mask on. I get the door handles for Lin with my gloved hands. We are trying to take severe precautions at this point.
We get to Panzi’s place – a nickname meaning “fat guy” in a loving, kind of way. He is actually the husband of Lin’s cousin, and he’s a pretty impressive guy. He doesn’t speak more than 10 words of English, and my Chinese is not yet conversational on the topics we like to discuss. We use digital dictionaries, and apps like Google Translate with speech to text and speech to speech translations to bridge the gap. He’s a bit chubby, it’s true, and loves to smoke and have a few drinks, but used to be a serious Kung Fu champion and now he’s an Air Marshal for a major airline. We discuss a few things, such as the quarantine expanding to nearby cities and 20 million people altogether in that part of the Hubei province. Hubei borders the Chongqing municipality, which was previously part of Sichuan province until the government made it an independent region in 1999. Panze has to fly to XinJiung the following day. He’s nervous, he wishes he didn’t have to. We predict it’ll be over in a couple of months but should stay safe until then.
At the dinner table, it’s local CQ fare: spicy food, lots of pork, and meat, but a few dishes are vegetarian, green veggies, and carrots, and I pig out on them. All the men sit at one table, the ladies at another, and the children have their own, as is tradition. Unlike Beijing, an international super hub or Shanghai, a very westernized city, Chongqing is an ancient mountain and river city steeped in preserved traditions. We pour the Baiju, a bit like bathtub gin, and cheer, “gambe,” meaning, empty your bowl, bottoms up. I toast each man individually, my father-in-law, my uncle, my cousins and my nephew, who’s drinking cola. Then I move to the ladies’ table and cheers with them too. Mama comes over and salutes the men. We have a few glasses of liquor, and it warms my belly. The kids eat fast and go sit on the couch to play on their phones quickly while the adults linger.
After dinner, Lin tells me they’re debating canceling the dinner at our parent’s house tomorrow. Her sister is all for being safe, with old people and a 1-year-old staying in the house, but Mama is stubborn and doesn’t think it’s a big deal, and she worries she mightn’t have too many Chinese New Year dinners left. So we say we’ll be careful and come over for lunch and stay until after the gala is finished at midnight. We take a subway home at about 10 PM, getting back just as the line is finishing. It’s not so busy on the subway, but everyone is wearing a mask. This will be the last time I step on the subway …. for who knows how long. We go home, watch some Criminal Minds, and go to bed. I stay up too late, one earbud in my ear, listening to the news.