Singapore finally evicted us, but they were polite about it. They declined our appeal for extended visas in the most proper English: “We regret we cannot accede to your request.” They didn’t regret it as much as we did.
Our welcome in the island-state would officially end June 30.
We kept hoping China would reopen, solving our problem, but that appeared increasingly unlikely. Heidi and I scrambled to find a new place to hide from the virus without returning to the U.S. There were precious few countries accepting outsiders, and getting anywhere was punishing.
There were hints South Korea or Vietnam might open, but no actual changes as our exit date approached. We took a hard look at Cambodia; they had a fairly low infection rate and were accepting foreigners who paid in advance against possible COVID-related medical costs. Unfortunately, the flight from Singapore to Phnom Penh, a couple hours if taken directly, would require more than 40 hours at that point in the pandemic, transiting via Amsterdam. That was the state of international air travel.
As time elapsed, we accepted the inevitable and booked flights to the U.S. on June 25, leaving ourselves a few extra days to rebook if those flights were cancelled. I spent some energy critiquing my melt-down that prevented us from already being in China. Heidi’s job felt at significant risk. Mine was already gone.
On our day of departure, Changi, Singapore’s airport, was virtually deserted, most sections closed and dark. Our early morning flight was one of 3 passenger aircraft scheduled to depart that day, at an airport that hosted more than 1,000 passenger and cargo flights daily before COVID.
After transiting through a nearly empty Narita airport in Tokyo, Heidi and I arrived in San Francisco, where a polite customs officer seemed most concerned about whether we had stashed any fresh fruit or cured meats in our luggage. He didn’t mention COVID and wasn’t wearing a mask. He seemed not the least bit concerned about a pandemic. We were stunned.
No quarantine was required in the States, but Heidi and I felt it best to separate ourselves for a couple weeks in case we randomly picked up the bug in transit. A friend offered us a mother-in-law apartment on his property, where we spent two weeks teaching online summer school and trying to get our minds around the America we’d just inhabited. We walked outside, visited drive-through restaurants, and did enter the grocery store a few times, but mostly tried to protect the safety of others, though many didn’t seem to care about that.
We had gone from a place where communal good was prized to one where individual choice was worshiped, from one that was calm to one roiled by multiple conflicts. The reverse culture shock was brutal.