Life in China Update: Coronavirus Troubles

Nanhu Park, downtown Nanning City, China

The new coronavirus, recently given the name COVID-19, has been all over the news lately and has now spread from China to 28 other countries (as of Feb. 23rd, according to the World Health Organization's website). As someone who lives and works in China, I thought I would post an update about how the outbreak has effected me. 

If you don't know much about the virus or what the current situation is, I recommend looking at this page of the WHO website for an accurate and updated report. Also, I highly encourage anyone reading the news about the outbreak to be skeptical and think critically about what you're reading, as there is a lot of misinformation about it out there. 

Every winter from about early January until mid-February, university teachers in China like my wife and I are given a long winter holiday for the lunar new year celebration. We always make plans to travel outside of China during the holiday because most Chinese cities get very quiet at this time of year, while all the local people are at home enjoying some quality family time. This year our plan was to visit Thailand for 3 weeks, partly because I'd always wanted to go there, and partly because two of our good friends were getting married on the Thai island of Koh Samui in late January.

If you have to get stranded somewhere, a tropical island is not a bad place to have it happen...

It was during our travels in Thailand that the outbreak really got going, and on January 31st I received an email from my college informing all the foreign staff to either go on lock-down on campus (in other words, go out as little as possible) or if outside of China, not to return until further notice. So our 3 week vacation was given an indefinite extension.

Under other circumstances, that might have been exciting, but it was stressful to wake up to news of a growing epidemic everyday, to be unsure how long we'd need to stay overseas spending all our savings on hotels and eating out for every meal, to make constant, daily decisions about how to handle the situation... And, of course, it has been even more stressful for our friends back in China who are living under lock-down conditions and slowly going crazy from cabin fever.

Over the past few weeks, Anna and I have had a lot of long talks about what we should do. Our plan at first was to make the most of the free time we'd been given by enjoying our travels in Thailand and Malaysia (albeit on a budget) and just waiting for things to get back to normal in Nanning so we could go home. But one week after another passed, and although the reports of new cases were declining in Guangxi, the situation overall was not really improving. The lock-down at our university campus seemed to be getting stricter, rather than more relaxed, with the decline in new cases. Our home countries and many others have continued to issue travel advisories against returning to China and there are many airlines restricting or canceling flights. 

All of this added up to a few big concerns for us. One: if the lock-down measures implemented by the Chinese government haven't been successful, there could be another major outbreak in China when the lock-down ends and everyone returns to work, school, etc. Two: if there is another outbreak, travel could become even more restricted and then it may be even harder to leave China later. And finally, three: if we stay, all the stress of living under lock-down, doing a self-quarantine, worrying about the possibility of future outbreaks, and so on, will become a part of our daily lives for the foreseeable future.

So we made the difficult decision not to return to China. We'll be going back to our home countries instead and trying to move forward with life. Anna will hopefully be joining me in the US sometime next summer to start our new life there, after a visit home.

It's really awful to leave Nanning under these circumstances. There are a lot of good friends, coworkers, and students there that I will not get to say goodbye to. So I am really sad to be leaving a job and a home that I cared about. 

The last thing I'd like to say is that we should all try to keep the human impact of this virus in mind. A lot of families have lost their loved ones because of this virus, which is truly tragic. I hope that China recovers quickly from this and that the global effort to contain the virus is successful. 

And to my former home of Nanning, I bid you a fond and heartfelt farewell.