Condensation clung to our glasses of chilled chardonnay. Heidi and I sat at the seaside terrace of our hotel on the Northeast edge of Penang Island, Malaysia, and gazed over the light chop in the Straits of Malacca The humid breeze flapped at our cocktail napkins and dished the hair across Heidi’s eyes. Our school’s two-week lunar new year holiday wasn’t yet over and life felt normal, indeed pleasant.
But there was a virus trashing people in the city of Wuhan, China. Our home was about 600 miles (1,000km) away in the Chinese city of Guangzhou. Over our wine we discussed whether to return directly to China in a few days, at the scheduled end of our holiday, or to divert to Singapore, where Heather and Jamie (Heidi’s sister and her wife) lived. We’d been traveling with them in Kuching, Malaysia at the beginning of this holiday, and they encouraged us to go stay in the city-state with them “for a few days” while things got sorted in China.
We had gone to Kuching to see the orangutans. Heather, Jamie, and their colleague, Angie, met us on the island of Borneo. We didn’t see orangutans, who stayed deep in the jungle since it was fruit season and food was plentiful away from the tourists. Who could blame them? Kuching was delightful nonetheless.
We did, however, have many conversations about the virus among the five of us as new information became available almost hourly. Heidi and I bought N-95 masks at a local pharmacy in response to the constantly breaking news; just days earlier we hadn’t even known what they were. Although there weren’t yet many cases near our home in Guangzhou, colleagues from school reported no fruits or vegetables in the supermarket, and bottled water seemed in short supply. Schools in Hong Kong were already announcing delayed re-openings, and our school was considering the same. This was all in the first week following our departure, when things were changing rapidly. There was still no sense in us that this might go from a regional issue that took a couple weeks to resolve into a worldwide pandemic measured in years.
Shortly before we left for Malaysia, we received the expected message from our water delivery man that he’d be out of town for three weeks during Chinese New Year. He was part of the greatest annual migration of humans on the planet; Bloomberg predicted that the Chinese would rack up 3 billion trips for the 2020 lunar new year travel season over 40 days.
The explosive spread of the virus across China was facilitated by the lunar new year holiday, and the response was complicated by it. Most Chinese people traveled over the holiday – including lots of contagious people, it turned out – and traveled in very cramped circumstances.
The holiday also hindered the early response to the virus. Health care facilities were running on light staff because many workers were visiting family. Truck drivers were out of place and not available; our water delivery man was in a different province. In a typical year that meant we bought some bottled water from the store for a couple weeks until our guy returned and could refresh our supply of 5-gallon containers. In a typical year it meant there wouldn’t be cheese at the grocery store for a while, until the dock workers returned to unload fresh supplies from Australia and the truck drivers returned to distribute them from the ports.
Now those truck drivers, delivery people, and health care workers were visiting family across the country, and they were trapped as transportation shut down and provincial borders closed. Seeing the supply chain for basics like vegetables and water collapse influenced our thinking about a Singapore sidetrack. We had confidence in China’s ability to mobilize and provide for people’s necessities, but it might be best to give them a little time to do it. As we finished our glasses of now-warm wine on the terrace, we read emails from friends and family in the U.S. encouraging us to “be careful and safe” – just before their own safety would become a much graver concern. We made the final decision to divert.
We had concerns about Singapore as well, about bunking with Heather, Jamie, and their live-in helper, the five of us in a their 1,000 square foot apartment. We had traveled and hung around extensively with Heather and Jamie, to the general enjoyment of all, but this would require everyone to compromise to maintain harmony. There was no guarantee we had it in us.
Heidi and I were neither mentally nor practically prepared for a pandemic, and had packed our carryon suitcases accordingly: some clean underwear, shorts and t-shirts, the basics for a couple weeks in a tropical environment, but nothing in case we got stuck outside China for an extended period of time. We thought about things we might need, and the answer always was, “It’s in China.”
This was the beginning of the burn, the constantly-evolving circumstances, the smoldering uncertainties and anxieties – and occasionally the wildfires – of the pandemic. This decision to divert, to spend “a few days,” (or a couple weeks – worst case in our minds at the time) in Singapore shaped all that followed for us.