We made it!
After a 19-hour flight from San Francisco to Shanghai, plus a four-hour wait in the airport, followed by another hour of traveling, and then another two hours of waiting at the quarantine hotel to be registered, our family made it to the room where we would exist for the next ten days. Why ten and not seven? I’ll explain later.
As you go on to read my true quarantine story, do keep in mind how everyone’s quarantine experience can vary a lot. This is due to an odd top-down administrative choice to randomly assign quarantine hotels to travelers flying into China, which applies to both locals and foreigners from what I’ve seen. This air of mystery is probably what confounds the entire experience and makes it so frustrating, especially for families.
5 Things I Learned About Centralized Quarantine in 2022’s China
1. Paperwork, Schmaperwork
Seven days before even setting foot in China, we were told to opt for self-quarantine in the city of our departing flight. Full disclosure: We didn’t. We didn’t go partying around town, but we certainly made the most of our remaining days of freedom. And then 48 hours before our flight, we proceeded to a designated facility to perform a NAT or PCR test. *Warning: This is a nose swab variety and deeply unpleasant. This test was repeated at the same facility 24 hours later, and the results were sent to our email later that day. We printed this out, as well as our vaccination certificates (from China) and Health Declaration and Travel Declaration Forms detailing every city we visited while on vacation.
As Linkin Park put it so eloquently, in the end, it doesn’t even matter.
After we arrived in Shanghai, we scanned at least three QR codes, which led to a different form each time that we had to fill out to generate yet another QR code, which was required to pass each checkpoint in the airport. No one asked to see our small mountain of paperwork at all. What a waste of trees.
One of many QR codes you’ll have to scan
2. NAT NAT NAT
We did a NAT (Nucleic Acid Test) on-site at the airport. This was of the throat swab variety, which I had always preferred, until this deep-throat version that made all of us gag. Later, we would do another NAT on-site at the designated quarantine hotel. And then every other day during quarantine.
3. The Waiting Place
I had over three hours for Dr. Seuss’ words to echo in my head as we stood in line that night. One of the longer waits was the usual airport customs clearance line. Fun discovery: As we stood in the line for foreign passports, a customs officer tempted me with a shorter queue when he found out that I bore a non-US foreign passport (Singapore).
No more pee places for a while after this point
Make sure you pee in the airport before you claim your baggage, because after that there isn’t an easily-accessible toilet until after you get assigned your mystery quarantine hotel, and that wait was over three hours long for us. Some details to this vague process: You will get grouped into different sections following a letter of the alphabet – our family ended up in section F. I would like to emphasize that it doesn’t matter whether you stand at the front of the queue here, as every person in the group will need to be registered before we can all move on to, you guessed it, yet another waiting place – this time for the shuttle bus to bring us to the hotel.
4. Answering the Million Dollar Question: Do They Split Up Families?
In our case, yes. Once we got to the hotel, we were told that each adult gets a room. This meant that even if you are a family of two adults + one kid, they would want to split the family up into one adult + one kid in one room, and the other adult in another room. Now pay attention: This can be avoided if one of the adults has a medical condition that requires medical attention. This can be proven by prescription medication in your possession (Excedrin doesn’t count) or a doctor’s note or prescription. Be courteous as you make your request, no matter how exhausted you are and how justified you feel about your right to stay together as a family because that really helps your case.
5. What’s it really like?
We were intensely relieved when our shuttle bus pulled up to a JW Marriott hotel, even as I noticed that it was fenced off entirely, and as we were processed for registration inside a shipping container-turned makeshift office at the service entrance of the building. This wait was hours long again and resembled that scene in movies where people are shoving to go first to escape the zombie virus outbreak, except this time they all brought their luggage with them.
As I stood at the back of the line and watched one boy, close to my own child’s age, perched unsteadily on top of his father’s luggage, his eyes heavy with sleep and fatigue, I wished they would have prioritized those of us with young children. But we were lucky that a couple of the 大白 running around in hazmat suits did try to help process us faster, and some even helped us with our luggage. I can’t promise the same of everyone you will encounter through this process, but I thank the universe for sending me little acts of kindness that kept my faith in humanity alive.
After I managed to convince the registration staff that my migraines were debilitating enough to require my family to stay together in one room, we were subjected to another NAT before finally heading to our room. We secured a luggage trolley for our 10+ pieces of luggage and were again kindly assisted by the 大白 who saw us to our room. The hotel was eerily quiet, but it was after midnight at this point. A short coffee table sat outside each room door – the landing pad for our meals and any other things we might need during our “stay.”
The room itself was dusty and the linoleum they had hastily installed over the carpet kept wrinkling no matter which direction we pulled it in. There was dirt and hair in the shower, and even though we had been thrilled to see a bathtub in the bathroom at first, we quickly discovered it did not have a plug to stop the water from flowing. Our hopes of enjoying a bath went down the drain, literally. After I begged for a vacuum cleaner and rigorously performed the housekeeping the room sorely needed, it began to shape up into a pretty nice place.
Ah yes, why ten days instead of seven? Well, the rule is for seven days in centralized quarantine, with an additional three in your own domicile in the arriving city. But since our domicile is in Beijing, we had to stay all ten days in this quarantine hotel (especially since they told us that nobody else would take us for the last three days). Truth be told, we had been ready for 21 days of quarantine when we first left the country, so ten days is totally doable, right?
Stay tuned to see if I maintain my sanity over the next few days in quarantine!
KEEP READING: Quarantined One Day After Giving Birth To Baby; New Mom Tells It All
Images: Vivienne Tseng-Rush
