For me, everything still feels fake. A friendly waitress serves me a plate of delicious fish, but I can’t enjoy it the same as before. I know the restaurant wouldn’t even have served me a few months ago. Even the few places that I was allowed to enter would require me to hide my face. Now they act as if nothing happened, but I wasn't dreaming.
That was not the type of job I hoped for, but I prefer cleaning toilets without a mask over doing anything with a mask, and the physical work helped me focus on my research in my spare time.
I was aware that only a minority of those protesting against mandates were such extremists, and that in fact the mandates itself are extremist and in violation to what had been widely regarded as constitutional prior to the pandemic.
I never imagined I would leave Germany because I did not feel free anymore. I never imagined I would leave because I felt trapped in a society where the government decides whether I am allowed to leave my house and whether or not I had to cover my face when doing so. I thought we had guaranteed human rights in Germany, and while our government cooperated a bit too closely with other governments…
Just a few days ago, getting off the metro [in Milan] and walking towards my friend’s apartment for a small gathering, I saw one person sneezing. He was at least 20 steps away. I did not think much. Yet, a woman who was walking almost right next to me saw that. She threw her hands […]
Please note: this post discusses suicidal ideation. Volcanically, the elements of an public health emergency unseen in my lifetime built up slowly through the first few months of 2020, only to erupt spectacularly in March of that year, as we all know. What was once unthinkable now seems inexorable, and the unthinkable’s influence now pervades […]
A translated and subtitled version of a young Shanghai-based rapper's passionate diatribe against injustice. "you didn't get COVID so you don't fucking count as sick/the so called humane society doing inhumane shit"
Agonizing deaths and the loss of beloved family and friends are not the only form of inhumane treatment that ordinary folks in the People’s Republic of China have suffered. Here, I am presenting the voices of some “netizens” (social media users) in the cities of Xi’an, Changchun, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou—with populations in 2020 of about 13, 9, 17.5, and 18 million people, respectively, or 57.5…
This is a different type of post. Here, instead of presenting the voice of a single person, I have translated selected stories shared on Weibo and elsewhere on the Chinese Internet—or more fittingly, Intranet. Weibo is the People’s Republic of China’s equivalent of Twitter, which has been banned in that country since 2009 along with […]
I was insulated from a lot of the popular lockdown things like Tiger King, banana bread, Zoom quizzes... instead, I worried over headlines about financial crises, semiconductor chip shortages....