Beijing-based cartoonist and contemporary artist Yan Cong describes his daily life during the quarantine. These comics date back to January 29, 2020, less than a week after the Wuhan lockdown began, when many across the country were cancelling their Lunar New Year plans in order to avoid spreading the virus.
During the period he describes, Yan Cong’s wife was practicing self-isolation for fear that she had contracted COVID-19. She’s now doing well.
Link
Comic by Yan Cong
Translation and design by Xinmei Liu
Foreword and editing by Xinmei Liu, R. Orion Martin, and Jason Li
Originally published by Art Book China as part of their Apple a Day series
Currently holding on, perhaps naïvely, to the prospect of returning to the job from which I’m temporarily on leave for an indiscernible/undefinable period of time, but potentially a layoff-in-waiting, which would reduce me to 1 out of 3.3 million newly unemployed Americans, I exist in a liminal space confined 1. physically, by the walls of my house, from which I’m not supposed to exit, and 2. psychologically, by the inability to progress emotionally via interaction with others, the value of which is inherently inconclusive.
So, as alternatives to personal growth, I’m devoting my non-unconscious time to staring at an array of screens that project momentarily satisfying objects of concentration, subjecting myself to a variety of sounds that also project momentarily satisfying objects of concentration, though often less tangibly, and organizing and cleaning my bedroom, which offers a false sense of productivity, as the result is neither novel nor inventive, but rather an alteration of the source.
Today's lesson is continue to support your community, at every level, however you can. These days, I think of my community mostly in terms of the internet and social media through which I meld and morph with a collective, usually like-minded group of some amount of people. Silently, I scroll through posts or read threads that 1. inform my own opinions about the way things are and the way they should be, 2. objectify everything into a compact signifier, reducing them to digestible nuggets of information, and 3. create, probably, a false sense of majority and minority beliefs by which I and others perceive reality.
Bandcamp is forgoing their cut of sales today (usually 15%, I believe), giving artists an opportunity to profit a concentrated amount of money in one day which will hopefully act as a buffer for the coming weeks/months/???.
Lots of musicians and other artists have been 'going live' on Instagram, performing songs or demonstrating their medium in action while most of the smarter people, young and old, are spending lots of time inside, restricting themselves from gathering together.
I had some things to say last night but I decided to curl up and go to sleep at 9:15 instead of writing anything down. I slept for about 11 hours then got up and got lunch ready for work. I put rice into a plastic bowl with a lid and placed it, along with a microwavable pouch of curry, a spoon, and two Clif bars, into a large Ziploc bag. I made coffee and took it 'to go' for the car ride.
Yesterday, on my drive to work, I started crying singing along to Bayside's "I and I" ("I and I, we're taking control of our lives") while thinking about how reality is usually a solid grounding for the confusion, sadness, etc. that I feel, but right now that reality is completely fucked and I feel more alone and dissociated from my body than ever before. Everything feels like a creepy nightmare that's just about to get intense. Things are familiar, but wrong and suddenly meaningless.
Today's car ride was normal, mostly. I walked in one or two minutes late to work, suddenly in the morning's staff meeting, to which my manager said "oh, there he is." It was our second day closed to customers and we'd be continuing the two sales practices we began the day before, curbside pickup and shipping. Still, a lot of people came up to the glass doors, which were locked and had many signs taped to them explaining that we're closed, and did any number of four things; 1. pulled on the doors' handles one to three times, 2. knocked on the doors, 3. looked through the glass to see what the situation was inside, and/or 4. grumble to themselves and walk away, frustrated and incredulous. I think there were two types of these people, the ones who haven't had their global pandemic reality check yet, and the ones who have decided, or been told, that this is all a hoax and/or that everyone's overreacting. I have some sympathy for the first type of person, as everyone has to realize what's going on at some point and some of us just figured it out earlier than others (although I still don't know how you can be looking at an unusual piece of paper on a business's door that has the word "closed" on it and still attempt to open that door). Honestly, I have some sympathy for the second type of person too, but they scare me more because they probably don't believe in science or facts and pose a threat to public health due to their careless and carefree trips "about town" to our empty parking lot while others frantically stock up on nonperishables.
By shouting through the glass doors, I and three elderly men completed three transactions of the following: Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin, a box of three classic juggling balls (which he was buying for "her"), and The Last Race on DVD. They each paid by letting me scribble down their credit card numbers on pieces of paper and enter them into the P.O.S. system, which we all found amusing yet frustrating, as a silly dance back and forth, speaking at an above-normal volume. There must be some psychology about what makes a customer stay through the strangeness in that situation, after having made the drive there, each consecutive step is more unusual, but also stronger and harder to break away from as the process continues like an expanding bubble of water that, at the same time, is turning into wood.
I'm thinking of this time as training for when it will probably be more crucial for me to be cautious and clean. My hands hurt from washing them so frequently and I don't think I've washed them enough. I moved some of my food into my room along with dishes, utensils and towels to mitigate roommate contamination. I'm showering more often and trying to wash my clothes after each use, which is very difficult and somehow feels necessary and totally unnecessary at the same time.
Tonight I checked the current statistics for cases in the United States and found myself scrolling, as one would on Instagram or Facebook, through a chart of numbers which represent people, some of whom are now dead people, ten of them newly dead today.
I wiped down a lot of stuff at work sometime last week when I realized this whole thing was going to be a problem. Earlier than that, however, my parents warned me it could be bad and I should get some nonperishable food and ibuprofen. I brushed it off because I had about 10 packets of Top Ramen and some ibuprofen 'somewhere' which I figured was fine, as this issue would blow over pretty soon. To be honest, I really didn't foresee how massively and directly this pandemic would affect my life.
Last Friday (yeah, the thirteenth) I listened to an emergency episode of Michael Moore's podcast Rumble concerning the coronavirus and was shocked to hear that anonymous sources from a variety of high-level organizations, including the White House, had informed him that the president had known about the virus's seriousness and how severely the country was unprepared to handle it for weeks, if not months, before it began to spread to the United States. Moore explained that Trump's purposeful ignorance, not only of coronavirus, but of science itself, was going to literally kill people. This realization filled me with the following feelings simultaneously, as if my mind was demonstrating the spectrum of its abilities: anger, fear, panic, hate, sadness, depression, hope, confusion.
My attitude and perspective began to change daily, if not hourly, as I religiously checked social media, an activity that provided the comfort of community and solidarity, and the news, which kept me up-to-date on information and made me feel like I was participating in a larger issue, something I've just recently become mildly familiar with through the presidential campaign. I began to internalize that we were headed for a massive health crisis, for which we were embarrassingly underprepared, and an extraordinary economic struggle (which I understand now will most likely be an intense recession not unlike that during the Great Depression).
Work was difficult as my coworkers and I performed the newly required cleaning task of regularly disinfecting commonly touched objects and areas while sluggishly and solemnly carrying on with our usual duties as customers, seemingly unfazed by the impending social collapse, visited the store to leisurely shop, sell us their old books, and occasionally complain about the hysteria, all while coughing freely or into their hands and standing near us at undesirably friendly, unsafe distances. The constant anxiety and unease that interacting with customers caused me was intense, yet bearable, but triggered a moment of panic in the break room when I, frantically scrolling through Apple News on my phone, felt lightheaded and close to passing out, at which point I realized I had been mildly hyperventilating and probably dehydrated.
Tonight, in a matter of 2 hours, we received word that all stores in the company will be closing to the public effective tomorrow until March 31st, up to eight employees can still work 10am-6pm each day, and we would be closing the store early. While news of the mass closure, which I had known was the best option for public safety, even leaving a frantic voicemail for corporate late Sunday night urging them to close all their stores, was an emotional and physical relief, a phone call from my manager, whom I respect and trust greatly, during which we exchanged condolences, laughed nervously, and he expressed his concern that the company could stay in business without walk-in customers, was an emotional plunge and physical stir. I spent the rest of the night at work shaking, reading the news, using hand sanitizer, panicking about a customer coughing into his hand and touching many CDs, taking out the trash, wiping down countertops, washing my hands, and saying "it was nice working with you" to one of my favorite coworkers who may or may not have gotten laid off.
As of 11:05pm, I'm currently worried about the following:
being out of work
getting sick
being robbed/shot
losing hope
someone I know dying
Joe Biden
touching almost everything
Poem
Last week seems so foreign to me now
Like I just snapped out of a 25-year dream
Which was filled with pleasures and pains
Whose subject and lasting effect
Diminish now in my waking recollection
As reality appears through blurry eyes:
We are all in danger
Personal possessions are meaningless
People are everything
Fear is contagious
jacobvanloon
origamiaround
tangentwithtanner
