Last winter, I decided to move my residence in Kunshan. After living in the same place for nearly seven years, I felt I needed a change of scenery. Also, the neighborhood I was living in had been thoroughly transformed and urbanized over those years. Even though it boasts a wonderful park (Forest Park), it has become a noisy mess, with a new subway line being built along the main road (Qianjin Road), and constant construction of buildings in all directions. Moreover, my next-door neighbor decided without consulting or informing neighbors, as is the usual case here, to thoroughly renovate their apartment, which resulted in a great deal of banging, chiseling, hammering and various other noises and smells emanating daily from the walls and hall of my apartment, a place that I often use as my primary workspace. This was the decisive signal that it was time to move on.
Moving out was not an easy decision. Over the years, I’d made my apartment in Kunshan into a cozy home. I’d cleaned up and fixed out the balcony, which was a wonderful space overlooking the canopy of trees outside the fourth-floor apartment. I had spent much of the previous year fixing up the kitchen, which was now a fine place to cook, eat, and watch the birds flitting about the canopy of trees outside the windows. Recently I’d acquired an amiable flatmate, a colleague from DKU where I’ve been working and teaching for seven years now. Perhaps the finest point of the apartment is that it is a ten-minute drive to campus. At DKU, I was the pioneer settler of this apartment complex, which hosts thousands of residents in dozens of high-rise apartments. Over the years, as DKU expanded its faculty and staff base, dozens of other colleagues moved into this apartment complex and into the neighboring complexes, creating a vibrant community of DKUers.
Thus, it wasn’t easy to depart the apartment and the neighborhood. Nevertheless, I persisted in searching for a new place, and I targeted the lake district to the south. I wanted to find a bigger place, one where I could hold parties, host events, and even arrange sleepovers for friends and family coming out to the countryside from Shanghai, a kind of B&B if you will (call me Basil Fawlty). I envisioned a place with a back yard where I could cook up barbeques on a grill and sit on the back porch in the early evening with a beer in hand, strumming on my guitar in the light of the setting sun. I also envisioned a music room where I could play my instruments and invite my bandmates, students and others to practice or record music.
Lo and behold, I found such a place, a house in a community off the biggest lake in the region, Dianshan Lake. I hadn’t spent much time in that region since joining DKU and moving to Kunshan. I’d been to some of the water-towns such as Zhouzhuang and Jinxi, which are quite attractive if touristy, but other than that I hadn’t had any reason to explore this area of Kunshan. After communicating with an agent, I was shown a home for a very reasonable rent, not much more than what I was already paying for my apartment. I looked at a few other places nearby, which were more expensive and not as charming. The clincher was that the home was fitted with a karaoke room, soundproofed, which made a perfect music room. Also, it was a two-minute walk to the lakeside. Those two factors sold me on the place.
I started moving in at the end of winter. In March, I took a few carloads of stuff from my apartment and started settling into the new place. Then the lockdowns began. At first, I was stuck in the new neighborhood for two weeks because I had been to Shanghai and my travel code had a star on it. They wouldn’t let me drive or even walk out of the compound. As soon as I was free, I drove to campus to grab some books for my new course on Documenting City Life. I also went to the Metro shopping center to stock up on supplies of food and beverages, and I grabbed a bunch of stuff from my apartment, including my record collection, to bring to my new home. You never know when you’ll need to put on an album to comfort you in these times.
I had a hunch that things would close down further, since the situation in Shanghai was getting more intense over the month of March. People in Pudong were being asked to stay in their homes. “Asked” is a mild term for it. Puxi was next. By the end of the month, the city announced a five-day lockdown plan, with Pudong first and Puxi next. I couldn’t even get back to Shanghai, since all the highways were blocked. (All of this is well known and I also discuss it in a couple of podcast interviews I’ve done recently, so I won’t go into details.) Suffice it to say that the initial lockdown plan was extended indefinitely, and as of April 24, there is still no clear indication of when the people of Shanghai will be released from this total lockdown. My wife and daughters have been stuck inside our Shanghai apartment for 24 days now, as have millions of others. A few neighborhoods have been allowed some freedom, but in a very limited way, and for all practical purposes the city is still completely shut down.
Meanwhile, here in Kunshan, roads were being closed and roadblocks going up, more and more every day. Eventually we also settled into a lockdown, though a softer one than in Shanghai. People were forced to stay in their communities and could only go out of their residential areas occasionally to buy food. I was completely cut off from the northern and central districts of Kunshan where my campus, apartment, and the major food centers are located. It’s a good thing I’d prepared for such an outcome and had stocked my larder with food and drink supplies. Now, for the past month or more, I’ve basically been confined to my own neighborhood residence. For a while, we were still able to walk outside the residence and enjoy the beautiful lakeside walks that my new neighborhood affords. More recently, these perambulations have been strongly discouraged and more guards are posted on the main gates of our residential area to deter us from going out of them. The exterior entrances to the food and goods shops lining the main gates of our residence have also been shut, and you need to enter these establishments from the back doors inside the residence.
For a while, it was getting hard to find fresh vegetables and fruits, let alone anything else. More recently, the fresh fruits and vegetables have returned to the local shelves, though at much higher prices than usual. Last week I paid around 75 RMB for a melon!
In many respects it’s been a soft and easy lockdown for me. I live in a large home now, with few neighbors. I have an entire backyard to myself, which I share only with the chattering birds and the buzzing bees. The residential area in which I live is very expansive, lined with large houses (mostly empty) and flowering trees, and has canals and a smaller lake. The month of April has been gorgeous, and I get to experience the flowering of various trees, bushes, and plants. I can take long walks with my dog on the tree-lined streets, soaking in the redolent aroma of the flowering plants and trees. I have even been able to head out to the lakeside for a few long walks. I can also cycle around the neighborhood.
Most of the residents here seem to be quite well educated. Mandarin Chinese seems to be the main language that I hear, although some people speak in the Shanghainese dialect. Judging from the license plates of cars parked in front of various residences, people are mainly either from Jiangsu Province or Shanghai. The occupancy rate for the homes here seems to be very low. I was told this is more of a weekend-holiday-summer retreat area, so I suspect in normal times people head here from the cities for weekend and summer fun. There are gazebos and pavilions lining the lakeside, where people can hold barbeques. There is a boat rental business at one of the gates, with canoes, kayaks and other boats for rent. I’ve seen a few kayakers on the smaller lake and I plan to try that out myself one of these days.
All in all it’s really paid off for me to move here. To be sure, the commute to campus is much longer, around 30-40 minutes in normal times. But that’s a moot point right now, since the campus is in a “closed loop system” and most of us aren’t allowed on campus even if we could travel there. Instead we are all teaching online again. I have mixed feelings about this. My current course lends itself well to online teaching since we do a lot of analysis and interpretation of artworks, photographs, films, and other visual records of urban life. Of course my plan to have the students conduct their own fieldwork was completely scuttled by the lockdown.
On the other hand, I’m glad to take a break from the constant grind of commuting for a while. Normally I drive to Shanghai every weekend, and also around the area of Kunshan and environs for various reasons. I haven’t even entered my car in over a month now.
Naturally, I’m looking forward to reuniting with my family and friends in Shanghai, and with colleagues and students in Kunshan as well. I suspect that this madness will end soon, perhaps in the next month or so. Meanwhile, I’m trying to take advantage of my solitude to enjoy and explore my new environs, and to catch up with some research projects that I can do from home. One of my big rationales for moving here in the first place was to have a “fortress of solitude” where I can conduct “deep work”, not unlike Carl Jung and his castle. Fate and the PRC government have now dictated that I have that solitude whether I like it or not.