In early March, I left Shanghai, not knowing it would take 100 or more days to return to my family there, even though I was living just an hour’s drive away. My second home in Kunshan, where I live and work on the weekdays, became a fortress of solitude as both cities locked down for an unspecified length of time. As the numbers of people testing positive rose dramatically in April, Shanghai’s lockdown was lengthened from an initial few days to two months or longer in some places. Kunshan faced a milder lockdown, which last from the beginning of April til early May. Even so, it took a few more weeks for folks in Kunshan to get back to their normal lives and enjoy full mobility, at least within the city itself. Only recently did Shanghai open up and only a few days ago did Kunshan finally allow people from Shanghai to return there without a long 7+7 quarantine phase. Last Monday, June 20, I finally drove back to Shanghai to reunite with my family. Since then I’ve been getting reacquainted with the city in its current post-lockdown phase of re-opening.
I’ve already written two blogs about my experiences in Kunshan under our softer lockdown. I was able to move around in my community during the height of the lockdown, and in May I began to replenish and restock my dwindling supplies with a few trips to our bigger supermarkets in town. By late May, the campus of Duke Kunshan had re-opened, just in time for the graduation ceremony for our first class, the pioneering Class of 2022. I wasn’t able to make it to the ceremony, but I did get back onto campus the following week.
As the city of Kunshan opened up again, I was finally able to make the Big Move into my new home on Dianshan Lake. I’d moved over there in March, just in time to experience the Big Lockdown. But most of my belongings were still in my previous apartment, and almost all of my books were stored in my office, which I had turned into a book repository the previous year. Now I was able to consolidate all my stuff in my new home. It took two big moves with the assistance of a local moving company to do the job. I have a lot of stuff. More than I need. And you don’t really realize how much you have until you try to move it all.
Once I’d moved the stuff over to my new place, I then had to spend a lot of time unboxing, organizing and moving stuff around the new home. All of this took around three weeks of intensive labor to complete. But I’m glad I did it. Now all my books are once again organized and shelved in my new home, and I can access them anytime. One of the frustrations of the past couple years was the inability to have any control over campus access, since the campus would close now and then, so moving my books to my new home was a must.
This is a little aside, but I wanted to mention that I often have dreams about my book collection. In my dreams I’m always finding new places to store them. And they always connect to projects I’m working on, either ones I completed like my dissertation and first few books, or ones that are still hanging out there in space, waiting for me to attend to them. Now that I’m settling in in my new home, my fortress of solitude by the lake, I’m hoping to re-engage with some of those bigger projects.
I have to admit that since the semester ended in mid-May, my attention has scattered in multiple directions. Most of my energy was focused on the Big Move. For some strange reason, unbeknownst to me, I also became fascinated with drawing and painting. I made a whole series of paintings of local images, including flowers, trees, birds, cats, and especially a local abandoned fishery that I pass every day while walking along the lake. I also became entranced with a small village down the lake called Jin Village, and took a lot of photos, talked to folks there, and painted a few images. Given that my painting and drawing skills are not what they used to be, the results were mixed to say the least, but I’m hoping to continue to develop my rekindled interest in drawing and painting over the next few months and years.
This was one of many eccentricities that I adopted while living in solitude all those months. Another was to let my hair grow longer (didn’t have much choice there at least until late May) and to cultivate—if that’s the appropriate word—a rather unkempt beard. By the time I arrived in Shanghai, my friends knew me variously as the Caveman, Robinson Crusoe, the Homeless Dude, and the Unibomber. Needless to say, as soon as I re-entered the realm of civilization, i.e. returned to Shanghai, I went to our local hair salon for a long-awaited haircut and trimmed my beard way down to a cool summer look.
It’s funny how living in solitude for so many days and nights brought out the Bohemian in me. I’m sure I’m not alone in this tendency. I believe the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove lived alone in their huts, back in the North and South Dynasties Age (200-300s AD). One of them was known for going around his home naked. When neighbors complained, the local constabulary came to check him out. He opened the door nude and beckoned them inside. When they addressed the complaint, he replied, “Gentlemen, I believe that the whole universe is my home, and my house is my clothing, so what are you doing in my pants?” At which point they made a hasty departure.
No such complaints from my lakeside neighbors, I’m afraid, just a mild noise complaint about playing guitar and singing on my back porch at night. In fact I held two barbecue dinner parties on the back porch with some nice neighbors and with a few of my DKU colleagues. That was part of my vision for the place, and hopefully as things improve, there will be more to come. And maybe we’ll float glasses of wine down the local canal and compose spontaneous poems, as did the great sages of old.