March 30, 2020 Issue

Two excellent pieces in this week’s issue: Peter Hessler’s “Life on Lockdown” and Adam Gopnik’s “Abundance of Caution.” 

Hessler’s piece reports his experience of China’s recent nationwide, forty-five-day coronavirus lockdown – “the most ambitious quarantine in history, with at least seven hundred and sixty million people confined largely to their homes.” He and his family rent an apartment in a nine-building complex in Chengdu. Here’s the opening paragraph:

On the twenty-seventh day of the coronavirus lockdown in Chengdu, in southwestern China, five masked men appeared in the lobby of my apartment building in order to deliver a hundred-inch TCL Xclusive television. It was late morning, and I was taking my nine-year-old twin daughters, Ariel and Natasha, outside to get some air. The three of us also were wearing surgical masks, and we stopped to watch the deliverymen. I had never seen such an enormous TV; it arrived in an eight-foot-long box that weighed more than three hundred pounds. Two of the deliverymen stood inside an elevator with a tape measure, trying to figure out whether the box would fit. Otherwise, it was going to be a long haul up the stairs to the twenty-eighth floor.

That passage hooked my attention completely. I relish descriptions of everyday life. Hessler’s piece is about everyday Chinese life struggling to continue under extraordinary circumstances. He describes the Chengdu subway:

Anybody who arrived at the main gate was greeted by an infrared temperature gun to the forehead. The gun was wielded by a government-assigned volunteer in a white hazmat suit, and, behind him, a turnstile led to a thick plastic mat soaked with a bleach solution. A sign read “Shoe Sole Disinfecting Area,” and there was always a trail of wet prints leading away from the mat, like a footbath at a public swimming pool.

He describes what he sees in his apartment building lobby:

On the thirty-ninth day of the lockdown, the packages in my lobby included a box of houseplants for 3703 and some flowers for 2903. It was now March, and sometimes I saw people on their balconies, tending plants. But it still seemed rare for residents to leave the compound. When women went downstairs to pick up packages, it wasn’t unusual for them to be dressed in pajamas, even in the afternoon. In the lobby, management provided a spray bottle of seventy-five-per-cent-alcohol solution, and sometimes I saw a masked, pajama-clad resident standing in a puddle of the stuff, spraying her hands, packages, shopping bags, whatever.

He uses one of my favourite forms of description – the list:

Masks also make it easier for people to ignore one another. If residents passed me in the courtyard, they avoided eye contact; some wore see-through plastic gloves and surgical booties in addition to the masks. These costumes of the quarantine, along with all the other restrictions, helped turn citizens inward, and people directed their energy toward whatever space was left to them. Among the packages in my lobby, I noticed many home furnishings and cleaning implements: a Pincai-brand storage cabinet for 602, a Deema vacuum cleaner for 2304, a giant carpet, wrapped in tape and plastic, for 303. There was home-office equipment (wireless mouse, 4201; file cabinets, 301). By the forty-fourth day, somebody in 3704 had felt the need to buy an electric footbath machine from Kosaka. (“Powerful by Dreams.”)

I devour such writing. Hessler is a superb noticer of quotidian detail. “Life on Lockdown” is one of his best. 

Gopnik’s “Abundance of Caution” is equally good, but with a twist. It eschews the personal perspective in favour of a cooler, more documentary look. (The Philip Montgomery black-and-white photos that illustrate the piece abet this impression.) It’s a series of “notes on things seen by one walker in the city,” at a time of pandemic, when that city (New York) “became a ghost town in a ghost nation on a ghost planet.”

Gopnik rides the subway, walks the streets, visits J.F.K., scouts supermarkets, visits Grand Central Terminal, on and on. Every where he goes, he makes notes, some of them strikingly beautiful – verbal equivalents of Brassaïs:

On a sparsely peopled 5 train, heading down to Grand Central Terminal on Saturday morning, passengers warily tried to achieve an even, strategic spacing, like chess pieces during an endgame: the rook all the way down here, but threatening the king from the back row.

Walking home down the almost empty avenues, you could see the same silhouette, repeated: dogs straining toward dogs on long-stretched leashes, held by watchful owners keeping their distance, a nightly choreography of animal need and human caution.

On the East Side, outside a Thai restaurant at 7 p.m. on Saturday, a single deliveryman balanced five bags of food hanging from his handlebars. His livelihood hinges on his getting meals to people who are self-isolating, a luxury he doesn’t have. 

He’s attentive not only to sights, but to sounds:

In Grand Central Terminal, what some call “the tile telephone”—the whispering gallery in front of the Oyster Bar, under the beautiful basket weave of arches—has never been so clear. The noise of the station is usually so intense that the tiled ceiling turns mute. Now, for the first time in forever, the abatement in the roar and press of people allows couples’ murmured endearments, spoken into one corner, to race up through the solid Guastavino tile and carry all the way over to the diagonally facing corner.

New York City’s coronavirus state of emptiness and absence is a great subject. Gopnik and Montgomery capture it brilliantly.