A Trip of Chances

1.

It was 10 o’clock at night when the airplane landed at Nanjing Lukou International airport. We were the last arrival that day. Ten days before, China had scrapped its zero-Covid policy. Out there in the city, PCR testing booths were abandoned overnight. Barricades and checkpoints at subways and train stations were taken down. It was almost like Berlin in 1989, except that people were getting sick all at once.

International travels into and out of China took a nosedive in the past three years, which may be why we were now forgotten by the system. Without a hitch, we were spirited onto the old track that had no logical connection to reality but was still running its own course in a forsaken space. Airport staff in hazmat suits herded us, guarded us, swabbed us, and performed their sanitation rituals dramatically like Taoist priests driving demons, although none of us could have got on the airplane without passing multiple Covid tests. The airport had been continuously sprayed with disinfectants since the start of the pandemic. All metal surface was rusted. Walls, tables, the custom officers’ keyboards were covered with a thick whitish layer. It was like walking in a guano mine during some apocalyptic time.

At around midnight, we were put on several buses and driven orderly to the quarantine hotels. The airport had an actual gate which closed and reopened after each bus. On both sides of the gate, high walls with barbed wires on top. It was too dark to see how far the walls extended. It was not 1989 after all.

A week before our departure, our parents were still trying to dissuade us from undertaking this trip for fear of a sudden lockdown which might keep us in China indefinitely. Then all of a sudden zero-Covid was no more and, almost at the same time, fever medicines were sold out. China had put this type of drugs under strict control to prevent people from suppressing Covid symptoms and covertly spreading the virus. A friend who has gout suffered much in Beijing during the past three years for lack of pain-killers. We had packed bottles of ibuprofen for him. The night before taking off, with a surge of paranoia, we drove by Walgreen and got another thousand pills of Tylenol and Advil between us.

At our Tokyo layover, Jiang learned that his parents were starting to have symptoms. From Tokyo to Beijing where his parents live, it was normally a 3-hour flight. But due to restrictions and the astronomical air price, we had to fly to Hong Kong then into the mainland. With all the quarantines along the way, it was a 9-day odyssey.

My parents live in Nanjing. Things were still relatively quiet there. The way I usually overlay the maps of the two countries when explaining geography, Beijing and Nanjing are roughly Buffalo and Charlotte. According to most of the predictions, it should take at least a couple of months for the virus to spread across the country. The most likely peak of the wave, they said, would occur around Chinese new year at the end of January.

2.

I kept strategizing how to get the drugs in my bag into people’s hands. I had heard that private courier service was cheap and fast in China. Like the forecasters of Covid though, I had not realized really how fast things could be here. Door-to-door pickup and delivery between two cities 200 miles apart could happen between late night and early next morning. As usual, however, one revelation followed another. Turned out that one needed a Chinese national ID in order to send anything anywhere. And even if I had that, courier service was forbidden during quarantine anyway. In a matter of days, family and friends all over the country was getting sick, many of whom did not have anything to control their fever, while I was in a hotel room in Nanjing, sitting on all the Tylenol and Advil I had promised to send.

“We are all feeling better now. My dad’s blood oxygen level was low for a while. Fortunately, we have an oxygen concentrator at home. It really helped.” A friend in Beijing reassured me.

“My parents just got Covid. Everyone in their town is sick.” Another texted in reply.

This friend actually got Covid himself in March in a city close to Shanghai, a rather rare event then and there. He was sent between hospitals and hotels, and eventually quarantined for 60 days. During his long wait in rooms that were sometimes windowless and always locked from outside, he learned to divine his fate for each day. For example, if he was waken at 5 in the morning to be swabbed, it meant he tested positive the day before. If no one bothered him at 5 a.m., that was auspicious, and he might be able to transition to the next phase of quarantine soon. For his sake, his apartment building went into strict lockdown for 21 days, a dozen families were taken to the quarantine camp. Neighbors threatened in their WeChat (a Chinese super app used for everything, from social media to mobile payment) group to work him over. When, at long last, it got to the home quarantine stage, he found his apartment thoroughly sprayed by public health workers, all his food and beddings discarded in the name of disease control.

My quarantine was far less grueling. At least there was a window and a fixed release date. Food was not bad, either—hot dishes plus soup and fruit delivered to the room three times a day for something like 15 bucks per diem. There was actually too much to eat.

“Can I skip dinner today?” I messaged the staff. There was a phone in the room and it sometimes rang, but they refused to give me any number to reach the hotel reception or for others to call me.

“OK, no dinner from now on.”

“Wait, I just want to skip dinner for today.”

“That cannot be done. You either have dinner everyday or not at all.”

I should have enjoyed those days with room service, tried to read, meditate, do some bodyweight exercises. But it was hard to chill. Jiang’s father had been in fever for six days. They had medicines at home, but no pulse oximeter, while Jiang had three in his quarantine hotel in Beijing. A friend suggested antibiotics. He took some, and felt better for a while.

Every night I was dreaming about drugs. How do I get antibiotics for my parents now that the hospitals are overwhelmed? It took days to realize that it was, in fact, easy to get prescription drugs online. Just go to any online shopping app, search for the drug. A doctor, or perhaps a bot, would show up immediately to give you an online prescription. All he/she needed, besides money, is your national ID number. Fifteen bottles of Azithromycin? Done. Pretty much any drugs can be obtained this way except those in high demand or under government control.

Then there was the question of how to get home when the quarantine was over. I had to get in touch with the community net worker in my parents’ neighborhood.

I am not sure when the occupation of a community “net worker” was officially invented. It was not something I had heard of growing up in the 1980’s and 90’s. The idea is that a community of apartment buildings could be divided into smaller groups, like knots in a web, and someone could be paid to keep an eye on all the residents in those knots. Call them social workers with Chinese characteristics. When push comes to shove, they may be called to do something actually useful I suppose. But they only answer to people above them in this vertical net, never to those below. My father had reported my itinerary and flight number to their net worker before I departed, so I was accounted for at every point of my journey.

“I can’t spare anyone to drive you home tomorrow. Everyone is sick.” The net worker messaged.

“Understood. I can take the bus. I’ve had four shots. I’m not afraid of this virus. Do you guys need Tylenol? I have Tylenol.”

“No public transportation. It must be a close channel from quarantine hotel to home. That’s the rule. Do you mind staying in another hotel for three more days? That’s something we can arrange.”

“I fucking mind it very much. It’s your job to drive me home then? Do it!”

“We can’t. Sorry. We are all really sick.”

While I was researching my breakout options, Jiang’s mother managed to get hold of a pulse oximeter. His father’s blood oxygen level was around 92%, and he was breathing about 30 times a minute, not a good sign. We contacted the friend who had an oxygen concentrator at home. He brought it over to Jiang’s parents, which helped for a while.

Amid all this, I caught a glimpse of a picture of president Zelensky standing with president Biden in D.C. and for some reason got emotional. Jiang saw the news almost at the same time in Beijing. We joked back and forth about the young ‘un and the old guy. It was the most joyful and uplifting moment during my entire stay in China.

The next day, my father-in-law’s SpO2 dropped to 88. Jiang negotiated a quarantine release for himself a few hours earlier than the scheduled time. I was eventually sent home in a mini van which came to pick up another group of fellow quarantiners.

“I got dad to the hospital. Mom can rest a bit finally at home.” Jiang messaged me at around 8 p.m.

Then, at 9 p.m., “The CT results are out. Dad is dying. There is nothing they could do anymore. His lungs are all white and destroyed by Covid …. If your parents get Covid, monitor their blood oxygen carefully and send them to hospital early if it drops.”

My father-in-law was admitted into the critical care ward the next morning. No visitor was allowed.

3.

Two days later I learned that my father had been taking Tylenol since I got home. He was not feeling well, but never suspected that it could be anything but a common cold, and didn’t want to make a fuss. I gave him an antigen test. The result was positive. His blood oxygen level was 93. Pretty soon my mother was coughing all night, and her SpO2 was below 95 as well.

The friend in Beijing who had an oxygen concentrator helped me ordering one online. I had had no idea you could buy this kind of thing like buying a refrigerator, and assumed that it was prohibitively expensive. We ended up purchasing one on a food delivery app. It cost about 800 US dollars, and was delivered within an hour. It proved that I was an outsider and a slow learner, I guess, that the existence of a sliver of unregulated and highly efficient private sector alongside total state control of everything else was still taking me by surprise.

My parents thought it was outrageous to buy an oxygen concentrator, and unthinkable to go to the hospital. Except for the sore throat and the coughing, they said, everything was fine. I showed my father the criteria issued by a Beijing hospital—blood oxygen saturation at or below 93% was sufficient for the diagnosis of a severe case of Covid. He threw a tantrum.

Both of my parents were avid consumers of health-related information. They had followed Covid news religiously and learned sundry facts, such as the origin of the virus (biological weapon developed by the US), how to prevent infection (stay very warm and put something spicy in the mouth like garlic or Sichuan pepper), and what to do when you get Covid (stay very warm, eat a lot of eggs, do not take a shower).

The media landscape in China, like its commodity market, sometimes gave an impression of utter wilderness. But it was an artificial jungle. Speeches representing certain perspectives were, of course, instantaneously and systematically mowed down. In the case of Covid, when there was too much to cover up, and things developed too quickly to be justified by one steadfast narrative, confusion ensued, and practical information, even if unmolested by the propaganda machine, could be hopelessly drowned. People were left on their own to make sense out of nonsensical messages.

The speed with which Covid swept China in the end of 2022 had defied all previous predictions. Various hypotheses have made their rounds among medical researchers, I was told. Based on my personal observation, it may be a contributing factor that many people lacked the most basic information for self-protection or the protection of others, such as the importance of washing their hands and covering up their coughs. People in my parents’ neighborhood were very disciplined about wearing their masks, but tended to yank them down while coughing. Sometime later I found myself in a restroom at a park entrance in downtown Nanjing. It had some of the most expensive-looking wash basins I had ever seen in a public toilet, but there was no soap or even any soap dispenser.

My parents ended up taking the oxygen out of curiosity. Half of the times the nasal cannula was hanging loosely on their ears. They still insisted that they felt perfectly fine, but they were losing their strength rapidly. The fifth day of my father’s illness, I saw him struggling to take his socks off while breathing like he was running a marathon. Later that night, my mother couldn’t stand up from the toilet seat and fell in the bathroom.

I had had no medical training or any experience taking care of a very sick Covid patient. My only reference point was Jiang’s father. As far as I could see, both my parents were going down that road. I never got along with them very well. But the thought of having an empty home, in perhaps as soon as a couple of weeks, kept me shaking uncontrollably in bed till daybreak.

Sometime in the small hours my mother wanted to go to the bathroom, but couldn’t get up from bed, and wasn’t able to hold it. She somehow dragged herself into the bathroom. When I heard something at 5 a.m., there were feces all over the apartment. She refused to take a shower.

“They say no shower during Covid.” She took prohibitions very seriously.

It was useless to argue against “them.” I wiped her clean, then took care of the rest. Jiang sent a message later that morning. My father-in-law had passed away.

4.

On day 7 my father felt better. He decided to go out and run some errands. It was an activity that he enjoyed too much to delegate to me. He had the whole map of this 10-million-people city in his head, businesses overlaid upon public transportations upon streets. It was his favorite game to compute a multiple-stop route, often combining taxi and buses to minimize an overall function of fares, waiting time, and the amount of walking.

At my suggestion that he might still be infectious and should therefore limit the scope of his outing, he shook his head in disbelief. What he found unbelievable, as I understood it, was not his own infectiousness, but the request that he should be quarantined for it, and by someone with no official authority whatsoever.

My father was a small-time bureaucrat in a state-owned enterprise before he retired, got as high as perhaps the 20^th tier out of the 27 classes in CCP’s officialdom. He grew up in a peasant’s home during the famine years, went to college in the Cultural Revolution, and spent pretty much his whole career in this system that, as far as I was concerned, came directly from Gogol’s novels. The system required very little communication, at least among the lower ranks where he inhabited. Whatever you say, what makes it hold water is your position, never the reason in your words.

So I went out with him. There were a lot of cars in the streets but few people in the shops. Pharmacies had empty shelves inside and big hand-written signs at their doors: “Thermometers sold out!” or “No antigen test!” We passed the First Hospital of Nanjing, the closest one to us that had good facilities, a neighbor had told me. I took a mental note.

Later that day, after a nap, my father lost his voice almost completely. His pulse reached above 150, SpO2 dropped to 91. When I was starting the oxygen concentrator, I heard him breathing intensely for a while. “Were you just out of breath?” I asked. “Yes. I’ve never felt that way before. But I’m fine now.” I called 120 (911 in China), and was told that there were hundreds waiting in line. Meanwhile, my mother regained the strength to get out of bed on her own. Her blood oxygen level was now 97, and she was not in fever anymore.

5.

Day 8. I went to the breakfast stands in the back streets early in the morning to get a roasted sweet potato for my father. This was his favorite food since he was a kid. I was not sure how much time he had left.

I tried one more time to persuade him to go to the hospital. He wouldn’t budge. No, there was nothing he could learn from my father-in-law’s case, because “he was in poor health to begin with.”

“How about we just make some preparations to go to the hospital, like ordering a wheelchair? What if you do get worse?”

Alas, there was no what-if. Plan B cannot be entertained in his world, not afforded in his childhood home, and never allowed by the superiors in his adult life. My American friends sometimes ask me why China dropped zero-Covid so suddenly without any preparation. No one knows for sure. But friends in Beijing said that hundreds of people already tested positive in their neighborhoods in early December. There might not have been any deep reason behind the about-face. They simply had no plan B until Omicron forced their hand. It may sound absurd to compare president Xi, who surely had access to all the smart people in China, with a lowly retiree like my father. But from the way they made certain important decisions, I could not see a qualitative difference in mentality.

I went to the hospital on my own—the lines were not as bad as I imagined—bought a wheelchair on my way back and hid it in my bedroom. I thought for a while and called dad two.

Dad two is my father’s younger brother, a well-connected business man living in Beijing. He had bragged a few days before that he knew a Covid expert. While explaining the situation to him, it became clear that he hardly knew what an oximeter was and had no idea what I was talking about with those numbers. He commanded, nevertheless, that my father must go to the hospital, now! As I was regretting calling him, he gave me an idea. He said he tested himself everyday after getting Covid, and turned negative faster than all his friends. So this was what people cared about and were competing on.

I gave my father another rapid test. The result was still positive. I told him that dad two turned negative on his sixth day and most people did on the seventh. He was visibly shaken. I produced the wheelchair. We packed cash, phones, toilet paper, and hot water thermos, and headed for the First Hospital.

6.

I left China more than 20 years ago after graduating from college, and have only made short visits in between, so it’s still relatively easy for me to imagine the amazement had the 20-year-old me been dropped directly in today’s China. I would have been helpless in the paper-less and cash-less daily transactions, and completely lost around the urban neighborhoods which were almost all walled, gated, and barb-wired. If anyone told me that my pictures were taken every second while I was walking in the streets, and could be matched automatically to my parents’ phone, address, national ID, and, almost certainly, my US passport number, I would have dismissed it as science fiction.

One of the few places that would have felt relatively familiar would be the hospital. It would have been reassuring to see that things were not so futuristic there yet, and that you still had to run around between windows and offices, paying fees and collecting all sorts of paper tickets and documents. I ended up visiting many hospitals while I was in Nanjing. There were usually rules and procedures written on the wall, but there was always a nurse standing in the middle of the reception hall all day, explaining to people some new rules about what to do and which lines to stand in.

On the day when my father and I visited the First Hospital, it was crowded but rather orderly in the emergency room. People on stretchers were continuously rushed in and channeled somewhere else. Every hour or so, someone would bring out a gigantic kettle of boiled water and paper cups. There was no place to sit, so the lines were mostly made up of younger people, their older relatives resting somewhere else.

My father sat in his wheelchair in the line with me. He was impatient. Everytime the line moved, he rolled his wheels till they touched the calves of the young man in front of us. The guy didn’t seem to mind at all. I was a little embarrassed, but I understood. The young man probably did as well. I remembered the buses we sometimes took to get in town when I was a kid. We lived hours away from the city, and people only got one day off per week in those days. There were usually hundreds of people waiting for a bus. When one finally came, we’d fight to get on like fighting for a lifeboat, women screaming in the crowd, trying to protect their kids. It was among the most violent things I have ever experienced.

The hospital was not exactly idyllic compared to the bus station in my childhood, but it was as civil and peaceful as could be wished for under the circumstances. People followed orders to make the whole process extremely efficient. A CT scan was complete every minute or so. Occasionally the company of the patient was trapped inside the CT room. No one made a fuss about it.

In five hours we went through all the lines, printed out the results of the CT scan and blood test, and finally sat down with the doctor. The room was packed. There was another doctor sitting across the desk seeing someone else, and half a dozen patients standing behind us.

“Lungs are infected. Viral pneumonia.” The doctor pronounced.

“Can I be admitted to the in-patient care?” My father asked.

“We don’t have any bed available. Go home, rest up, and get some drugs.”

“What drugs?”

“Drugs that are good for your lungs.”

“Can you prescribe something?”

“We don’t have drugs,” He was racing through some electronic forms in his computer, “monitor his vital signs and send him over if things got worse.”

“What vital signs? And what can you do if things do get worse?”

“We have a rescue room if he’s really in danger.”

“So how bad is it now?”

“His lungs are not white yet.”

“What’s his chance of recovery?”

“I don’t know.” He printed out a visit summary for us and signaled the next in line to move up.

We tried the hospital’s pharmacy anyway, and were eventually offered six pills of ibuprofen as well as a bottle of “lung-clearing” herbal drink which would last him a day and a half according to the instruction. I read the visit summary. It said that my father didn’t have a very good appetite but had normal bowel movements etc. Most of the things summarized on that sheet of paper never came up during the two minutes that we spent with the doctor.

When we left the hospital, people were still waiting calmly in lines, leaving a little bit of space for each other. A gentleman was bathing his feet with a plastic tub in the blood exam room, enjoying what little respite he managed to get after a long day. Even in the “rescue room” there wasn’t a great amount of noise. All the suffering went on without a sound.

7.

Dad two shared the contact info of Dr. Hua, the Covid expert he was talking about, via someone called manager Hua. I had never met either of them. Manager Hua said that he was a great friend of dad two, and started a WeChat group for us right away. He was very solicitous about my father’s health, constantly pressing me to ask more questions to Dr. Hua. When I did have a question, he would paraphrase it in a way that sounded more urgent and desperate, as if I needed a translator. Sometimes he even came up with questions of his own, even though he had no idea about my father’s situation.

Dr. Hua prescribed antibiotics, which my father was already taking, Oseltamivir (Tamiflu), and a bunch of herbal medicines. Two days later, we received a box of them that manager Hua sent from Beijing. I realized how precious that box was at a time when it took weeks to get a sore throat drop, and I was grateful. Although none of the herbal medicines came with a clear statement of their active ingredients, they all had written directions that promised great things in treating everything related to the respiratory tract, and it gave my father hope. Later I figured out that manager Hua was dad two’s asset manager. Apparently this was part of his job description—to hoard whatever resources in short supply for your client, ranging from dandelion roots, pygmy water lily flowers, to a live doctor.

It was now the last day of 2022, and my father’s SpO2 fluctuated between 89 and 94 in the morning. I tried to think what else could be done. I had taken pictures of his CT scan and sent them to Dr. Hua and a cousin of mine who graduated from medical school. They both said that the infection was still in a  relatively early stage, but the cousin also urged me to get him hospitalized as soon as I could. I marked down the nearby hospitals on the map, and went out after breakfast.

The hospitals all had new and grand architecture, but there was no bed available anywhere. What they might be able to offer was some sort of IV injection, if we could get in the lines for hours again.

“I tell you what to do.” a taxi driver advised, “Go to the small private clinics. There are lots of them around. They give you IV injection right away. No waiting. They can’t do X rays or anything. But you know how they deal with it? They just treat everyone as a severe case. They would always assume the worst for you.”

“My father was also really sick for a while,” he continued, “I took him to one of those clinics, and he’s fine now…. Right, they should have invested more in the hospitals. You know why they didn’t? ‘Cuz they were duped by the ‘experts’! All those flip-flopping scientists, lying through their teeth. They took the government for a ride.”

Sitting in the taxi, I felt the tenseness of my body. Everything that I did or did not do might change someone’s chance to live, someone close to me at that.

In the afternoon, my cousin obtained a piece of intelligence. She sent the names of two hospitals, one about seven miles from us, the other much farther. “Go to one of these emergency rooms now,” she said, “and you might find a bed available.”

I packed the bags and woke my father. He wouldn’t hear about it. This time I couldn’t blame him. It would take at least half an hour to get to the nearest hospital, and then we had to wait for our turn. Would the bed still be there when we got a chance to ask for it?

“Do you remember how the doctor treated us the other day?” He said.

I thought of how we fought to get on those buses to go to the dentist’s in town or to take a visiting relative to a nice park. But now he was too tired, and perhaps too humiliated, to keep on fighting.

“People would probably pay a lot of money to get this information.” I tried one last time.

“I know. I’m not going.”

8.

I woke up early on the first day of 2023 and thought over my plan for the day. My cousin’s medical school friend had suggested a last resort: try to get some Dexamethasone tablets from the hospital for oral use. Jiang had done some research overnight and found that it was generally considered safe with lower doses. But I heard someone making breakfast in the kitchen. It was my father. When I saw the way he moved, I knew immediately that he was out of danger. “My strength is back.” He said.

I went out to get a roasted sweet potato for him. My steps were much lighter, too. The sweet potato guy took a day off, but the crepe stand nearby was open. I’ve been getting a Chinese-style savory crepe from there every day. I told the young man that my father was doing much better while he was making my crepe. He was happy for me. I talked about how stressed I was the day before trying to find a hospital bed.

“Think about all the money they spent on rounds and rounds of PCR tests for the past three years!” I couldn’t help venting.

“Exactly. If not for those corrupt PCR companies, the government would have got everything under control!”

I was no longer surprised by such remarks, and was thankful to have someone to talk to anyway.

A friend sent me a video clip of a small group of people in Nanjing silently gathering around the statue of Sun Yat-Sen the night before. Sun was the founder of the first Republic of China 112 years ago. Perhaps they were trying to express their yearning for a true republic. But even this kind of small quiet gathering was quickly dispersed by the police.

In Beijing, my father-in-law’s body was still in a long line waiting to be cremated. My mother-in-law was in deep mourning and unspeakable rage. “I wanted to eat them alive.” She said quietly. The only relief was that she and Jiang could now say whatever they wanted about the CCP at home. It was not something she was willing to do when her husband was alive. He was a great fan of Mao Zedong and had always been pro-government, even though his own mother starved to death after the Great Leap Forward. Jiang had been re-reading his father’s memoir and trying to understand.

“I think the government, to him, was like the gods to the Greeks. You know the gods were immoral. They were stupid, too. But the Greeks worshipped them and pledged their loyalty anyway. The gods were part of the basic facts of their world. They may not love them like loving their mothers, but to hate them was like hating life itself.”

I recalled the first time I heard the term “government legitimacy.” I must be already in my twenties. It was really a new term for me to wrap my head around--isn’t government legitimate by definition? I mean I know they are bad people and all. But don’t they make all the rules? By whose law can I say they are illegitimate?

By the last week of my stay in Nanjing, the streets were getting crowded again. People were shopping for the Chinese New Year. I saw my neighbors in the elevator with bags of sausages, whole chicken, and, not infrequently, bottles of meds. I could often see the character “lung” on the bottles through the plastic bags. “Do they have fever medicine now in the drug store?” I asked a neighbor ten days into the new year. “Nope,” she shook her head, “still sold out.”

I now needed a negative PCR test result to get back to the US. To find out how long it took to get the result, my father decided to have one done for himself. The morning before he went to the hospital for the test, I saw him using the mouthwash. It was not something that he did everyday. I went to pick up his result the next day. He was pleased that it turned out negative.

“Did you use the mouthwash for the PCR test?” I asked.

“Yes, and I suggest you do the same. It really helps.”

“Why did you do it?”

“I always use the mouthwash before PCR.”

“But nobody asked you to take the test this time.”

He was quiet. I asked again. “I didn’t want any trouble.” He was a bit annoyed.

Whatever troubles may still lurk around, people were ready to move on. Although many who passed during the Covid tsunami could not have a funeral, weddings delayed by last year’s lockdowns were now back on schedule. My friend who was quarantined for 60 days in the spring of 2022 signed a new book deal. He finished the draft of a novel in solitary confinement. The book is coming out in 2023. The crepe guy got a trendy haircut and was getting ready to go home to Henan for the lunar New Year. The friend with the oxygen concentrator started taking my mother-in-law to join their weekly bird walk. The TV news, as usual, covered Covid deaths in the US comprehensively in the absence of some new provocations from the West. In her private journals, my mother-in-law was struggling to record the last days of her husband.

I took a walk along the Yangtze river before leaving China. It was a narrow and quiet branch of the river where, it was said, the critically endangered river dolphins could still be seen. The weather was nice. People took their kids out. They seemed genuinely happy, which I can certainly relate to, now that they no longer had to show some kind of health proof 14 times a day in order to go anywhere. There was a statue of the dolphin on the river bank. The tail was hollowed out, as if the whole body was vanishing in front of our eyes. It was the only public expression of sadness I saw in this trip. I stayed with it for a while, and felt strangely soothed for the time being.