A Calamitous Nostos

Around September 2022 we got the wind that, after three years of

hermeticism, China was starting to allow foreigners (e.g. we Americans)

to apply for visa to enter the country. At the time, Yi and I thought

the government could keep the country closed to the outside world for

God knows how long, so we jumped at the window of opportunity,

temporarily ajar, and then jumped, and jumped, and jumped, through

numerous bureaucratic hoops to secure that visa.

Only after we got the visa did we really start to worry: China was still

having the most extreme zero Covid policy: locking down cities of

millions---meaning literally no resident stepping out of his or her

apartments except for one PCR test per day---for a mere few hundred

infections, and carrying away all those infected, symptomatic or not, to

concentration camps. I'm not being hyperbolic: the so called "Covid

Isolation Points" offer little medical treatment, often one toilet per

hundred prisoners, and lights on 24 hours, with no possibility of

leaving until multiple consecutive negative tests. And after the victims

are hauled away to those camps, government workers enter their homes to

spray disinfectants everywhere, frequently ruining books, furniture and

appliances. Often victims' pets starve to death or in some cases get

killed outright by those "disinfector".

Given such heartless and mindless policy, our primary fear before

setting off was that we would get Covid in our travel and be sent to the

camp, ending up with no chance to meet our parents after all the

troubles. And troubles they are: even if we are not infected, all

foreign traveler have to be cooped up in quarantine "hotels" for two

weeks before being set free. In addition, the round trip tickets to

China, which used to cost some $1500 per person, now cost closer to

$8-10K per person. So we had to act as our own travel agent and devise

elaborate routes through Japan and Hong Kong, and figure out numerous

vaccination and testing requirement throughout our routes. Much of my

energy for the last fall was spent on preparing for the trip, getting

documents, stocking up vitamins and famine food like nuts, and buying

noise-canceling headphones, all to prepare for the worst case scenario

of being sent to the camp.

It turns out, however, we had been worried about the wrong thing. Just

when we were setting off in mid-December, after some unprecedented, and

frankly quite understandable protests against Zero Covid and likely some

rapid community spread, realizing that they could no longer stick to it

at a tolerable cost, the government abruptly shifted course and decided

to open up, completely, without no preparation whatsoever. Hospitals

and pharmacies learned the decisions to open up completely at the same

time as everyone else. There was no stockpiling of medicine or

preparation in hospital for the inevitable surge. The government had

refused to import Paxlovid for most of the year, just as they had

refused to approve any foreign mRNA vaccine before. Even fever medicine

like Tylenol of Advil started to run out. Indeed sometimes people could

not even find thermometers in stores! The semi-official exhortation was

that "the Government has protect you for three years, and now you

need to take up the responsibility to protect yourself when covid has

become as mild as flu!".

Much of our few days in Hong Kong, our last stop before entering

China, was spent hurrying to get pulse oximeter and even more cold

medicine for our relative at home.

Meanwhile, predictably, Covid ripped through the urban population.

Within about three weeks, more than half of the 20 million or so people

in Beijing got it, including pretty much everyone we know. The hospitals

became swamped. Long line queued outside Crematorium.

So we returned to an utterly different world we were preparing for. I

had thought, in the best case scenario, I would be locked down with my

parents in their apartment, helping them to stock up and trying to

persuade my dad, who was skeptical about "western" (i.e. modern instead

of herbal) medicine in general, to get vaccinated, since I was convinced

that an relaxation and then a Covid wave would come later, perhaps the

spring of 2023.

Instead, both of my parents were already infected by the time I was in

Hong Kong. (They had antigen tests).

Absurdly, despite already having the fastest spread of Covid infection

in the world at the time, if not ever, when we entered China on Dec.

17th, and after we had had *four* PCR negative results within four days,

we were still required to quarantine for eight days, down from two weeks

before, which could be reduced to five if some conditions were met. I

have pulse oximeters and medicine but could not send it home where my

parents were ill with Covid.

My mom recovered within two days, but my father was hit hard. He started

to suffer high fever after two days, complained about terrible throat

pain so he ate very little for days, all the while insisting that he had

no trouble breathing. But from his labored and rapid breathing over the

phone, I started to fear the worst. Still, without a pulse oximeter I

could not know for sure. Two days before my scheduled "release", mom

borrowed a pulse oximeter and confirmed my worst fear. Then, with Yi's

help, I borrowed an oxygen concentrator from a friend, which likely

preserved his life for the day before my release.

When I came home after five days' of "shortened" quarantine, I went

around nearby hospitals right away, in the hope of finding one not

entirely overwhelmed, and then called an ambulance to carry him to a

smaller local hospital, the only one where the scene at the intake was

less than an raging Ragnarok.

It was about 6pm on Dec. 22nd when I rode the ambulance with my father

to the hospital. The next 24 hours was the worst in my life.

I have never been to a battle, but I imagine this must be what it is

like to watch, helplessly, the life of one close to you drain away in

front of your eyes. Only in my dad's case, instead of the shock of

gunshot wounds, he was being waterboarded to death.

When we first got to the ER, there was no bed for dad. So he was laid

on a mobile stretcher, IV drips and oxygen hanging from mobile stands.

Though on supplementary oxygen, suffering severe throat pain as well as

respiratory failures, and having had little food or water for days, he

was still miraculously lucid and, I thought, happy to finally see me

after three and half years.

Our best hope for a proper hospital bed, in the modest ER crowded with

patients, nurses and relatives, turned out to be that of an elderly man

across the room. Nurses were barking order at a hapless relative to get

their own car to carry him to a bigger hospital, since he was having a

heart attack and this ER here could not handle that and there was no

ambulance. The relative frantically worked her phone, loud enough for

both ends of her conversation to be heard by nearly everyone in the

room. The rub was that, there was a huge birthday bash, in the middle

of a raging Covid tsunami, and the whole clan, relatives and friends,

men, women and teens, were absolutely hammered and so were unable to

drive here to pick up the patriarch.

As I explained the absurdist situation to dad, the corners of his mouth

turned upwards ever so slightly under his oxygen mask, a last glint of a

chuckle, from a man with a great sense of humor, now forever seared into

my memory.

By the time a semi-sober driver was located to fetch the heart attack

victim, his bed finally free for my dad, I had already wheeled him to

the CT scan and fetched the results to the doctor--Chinese hospitals

often treated any relative around a patient as the lowest of all

orderlies. The CT scan confirmed my grimmest premonition. Dad's lungs

had long been infected. The viral assault and the immune defense

together turned large swaths of his lungs deathly white. The doctor on

duty, there was only one, with much appreciated candor, told me that

only a miracle could save him by then.

Numbly, I asked only for her best effort, and if nothing availed, for

palliative cares, and then called my mother. The news hit her harder,

likely because she had been less aware of how badly my dad had already

deteriorated.

By the time she hurried to the hospital, our attempts to crack one more

joke, or even to talk to dad, grew from desperate to hopeless. He was no

longer complaining about throat pain or thirst, but was simply gasping

for air. The whole night he drifted in and out of his shallow nightmare,

struggling to breath, through the fluid accumulating in his lungs and

phlegm in his throat, and perhaps to comprehend his own impending doom.

Sometimes the pain proved too much, and he tried to draw attention to

nurses, those brusque little tyrants of the ER, to do something,

anything, shaking the railing of his bed with his last remaining

strength. To no avail. Even if the nurses were inclined to help, which I

doubt, there was no painkiller against suffocation.

Assaulted by fatigue and helplessness, mom and I took turn on his

bedside, not knowing what else to try. The nurses eventually forbade us

to talk to him, or to give him water because he might choke, so mom

brought sesame oil and Q-tips from home to anoint his parched lips. We

beg for a herbal IV for reducing phlegm, which the doctor once mentioned

in passing, something that gave him, half delirious, desperate hope.

Mom was sent on a wild goose chase across the hospital at the crack of

dawn, ending up with no medicine and no hope for dad.

The machine he was hooked up to beeped incessantly, warning that his

breathing or heart rate or something else were failing. Pain and panic

never left his face, even as he drifted in and out of consciousness. I

wondered when would all these ever end, and whether it would be mercy if

the end should come earlier. But that, like everything else, was out of

our control.

Meanwhile, all night long, new patients arrived in ambulance and private

cars, seeking help and being turned away. Desperate relatives threatened

to call the authorities. The doctor told them to do as they please, then

nervously asked a nurse to note down their license plate number.

Finally, in the middle of the next morning, the relief came, from the

death of someone in the Respiratory Critical Care Ward, emptying a

precious bed for dad. After another painful suspense, waiting for a tank

of oxygen for him to breathe while being transferred, we finally wheeled

him to the secluded ward of the nearly dead, where, cruelly, or

mercifully, relatives were forbidden.

There, hooked to a ventilator, heavily sedated and in uncertain states

of consciousness, he drifted away from us unseen. Over the subsequent

days of suspense at a distance, only occasional updates a medical

orderly and a couple of phone calls from doctors reached us. Mom and I

talked about how to care for dad, surely much diminished, after he got

home, while knowing deep down he likely would not.

Five mornings later, the call came. The hospital made a show of asking

us to come in and to decide when to stop attempts to revive him, but the

orderly whispered that his heart had stopped by the time they called us.

We hope, unlike over the night when we were at his side, there wasn't

too much suffering in the days when we were not. But how could we ever

know? He died alone.

It was quickly made known to us that the hospital morgue had by then

long run out not just refrigerated storage space, but even body bags, so

it was imperative for us to take my dad away as soon as we could. But we

were then told that even the fastest crematorium was taking days to

retrieve bodies, so, it was implied, we had better start calling around

right away. Only after getting an insider's tip from the morgue and then

begging the crematorium over the phone did I get one to pick him up

three days later, and then only for him to be stored there for unknown

number days, before being turned to ashes. All we got was another phone

call when it was done.

As a final insult, when I picked up dad's death certificate, I was told

that, if the cause of death on it was Covid, by "regulations" his body

could not stay in the hospital morgue and had to be cremated within two

hours! Thus the authorities weaponized their own incompetence to force

us to acquiesce one last lie in his life, all so that they can continue

to boast that, unlike everywhere else, few died of Covid in China.

To this day, I could not shake off all the what-ifs. What if I had been

more persistent in trying to persuade dad to get vaccinated? Like many

of his generation and upbringing, he was skeptical of "western"

medicine. What if I didn't have to spent five long days in quarantine,

so that I could get him to the hospital before insidious hypoxia starved

his organs? What if I had searched harder for a better hospital that

would take him, perhaps one with life-sustaining equipment like ECMOs?

But surely there should be more what-ifs for the ostentatiously

paternalistic government, since my suffering and loss have been hardly

unique? What if there had been a more forceful campaign to vaccinate the

elderly, with more effective vaccines? After all, many localities all

but forced young children, at little risk from severe illness, to get

vaccinated, as the condition of going to kindergartens and schools. What

if the opening had been more gradual, orderly and prepared, so that, for

the very least, I could have time to send them my oximeter? What if

highly effective antivirals like Paxlovid had been made widely available,

as surely I would have insisted him getting it?

The rest of my stay at home had been spent on hectic dealing of the

aftermath of my father's passing. Because of its suddenness, there was

no will. So we were left to figure out ins and outs of the unfamiliar

legal system and bureaucracy in order to transfer assets under dad's

name to mom. Throughout, mom was in deep mourning though outwardly

strong. I had to come back to the United States---she insisted I should

not delay my return flight---and many legal steps had to be performed by

us jointly, so I was in a great rush.

Hurrying around, we had little time to properly mourn together, if there

were indeed a proper way. I shuddered at her coming desolation, when I

return to a home with Yi, while she spends her Chinese New Year by

herself. All I could think of is to call often.

Yi's parents in Nanjing were both infected, and her father, despite

being triply vaccinated (with the Chinese vaccine) suffered bad damage

to lung and was likely in early respiratory failure, before recovering

with the oxygen concentrator Yi bought for him *at home* (hospital could

offer absolutely nothing. They waited for five hours to take one CT, and

were offered five tablets, yes five single pills, of precious advil!)

Fortunately, like my mom, they seemed to be regaining their full

strength and faculties.