Before the Covid-19 pandemic, I have no idea how the word “quarantine” may have anything to do with me. After finishing my school works last summer, I took a flight back to China. As soon as we completed all necessary procedures in the airport, several buses came to bring us to the nearest hotels. According to policies made by the central government, anyone who had traveled internationally must be quarantined for fourteen days without any exception. I was assigned to a single room with a normal bed, few chairs and a desk, a medium-size bathroom, pens and papers, and a quite decent wifi-connection. Nothing particular, except that you can never leave your room for the next half a month. Nurses would bring everyday food to you and they would come to measure your body temperature two times a day.
Suddenly, you felt like an animal living in a zoo, locked in a cage, with no tourists came to visit you because of the pandemic. I am not suggesting anything negative either about the government policies or staff in the hotel. It’s just the feeling of compulsory confinement that totally altered your comprehension of life. I could bathe in sunlight. I could hear birds were singing. I could smell the sweet fragrance of primrose. Everything stayed the same, but I just could not join them. And there is a real difference between “do not want to” do something and “can not” do something.
Certainly, I was not the only one who has experienced quarantine in 2020. Millions and millions of people have either voluntarily or involuntarily spent weeks or months indoor, sometimes without any companions. Many years later, I wonder, will future historians interest in those personal thoughts and feelings generated in solitude? Maybe not, since those records are too trivial to possess any historical significance. Maybe yes, if they want to evaluate how pandemic brought pain and stress to individuals. No matter what, eight months later, occasionally in my dreams I will find myself in the hotel room: the moist odor, the plain decorations, the insipid lunches, and dinners. I would not call them nightmares or PTSD reactions, but undeniably the quarantine period has imprinted an engraved memory in my mind, which still remains alive in my subconsciousness. Though you will not read similar experiences recorded in official archives, they are definitely an indispensable part of the collective memory of the pandemic.
Should I become famous in the future, probably I would not feel comfortable having historians dig through what I have done during the quarantine. To be honest, I tried to make some rules in order to maintain a regular daily schedule: read three chapters of a book before noon, do some yoga in the afternoon, and never stay up late. Starting to write a diary was another ambitious goal. After four days, it turned out that I had broken those rules I set for myself one by one. I started to watch movies for hours and hours. Computer games, how could I forget about them? It will be super embarrassing if future historians discover that the prestigious writer Zerui Pan had zero self-discipline in his twenties. Meanwhile, I am afraid of any potential value judgments made on my behaviors during the quarantine. My brain was so numb and I was desperate to leave the room. They could not use that to conclude that I was an undisciplined and lazy person. Further, I would be really angry if they used the unpleasantness I have expressed to dispute that the quarantine policies were unnecessary and violations of human rights. Those were the essential measures a country had to take in extreme circumstances. Yet I would appreciate their endeavors to call for attention to how quarantine may unsettle human minds. Though medicines and vaccines can protect us from the pandemic, the aftermath of quarantine and the individual feelings of detachment should never be ignored. Hopefully, we can restore the world back to the golden time before the pandemic.
