The upbeat attitude hasn't always held, however.
because she's thinking about that Uno meme and saying, 'Plus four, plus four, plus four.'" And that actually, in the end, really helped her mentally get through. "And so our oldest, who is 9 years old, she had heard about this meme through her friends. It was also a helpful way to conceptualize the issue for Chuong and Davidai's two young children. It became a meme that riffs on the "+4" card in the popular card game Uno, and that in turn became another laugh-to-keep-from-crying crutch. What was initially going to be a four-day lockdown has dragged on.
Life inside the Summit means near-daily COVID testing, done by medical teams in full Tyvek suits. "There's these nice moments, of kind of levity and community, mixed in with what the heck is going on-type of stuff," he said. "We even started a Friday night trivia group, which was quite nice."įor Davidai, the WeChat group has two speeds right now. We had no connection to the outside world," Chuong said. Since then, the Summit apartment's WeChat group has taken on a new life as an information hub for food delivery and required COVID testing, and as a place to complain together and help each other out. NPR Hundreds of people have been kept inside the Summit building in Shanghai since the lockdown began. They haven't been able to leave their apartment building since April 1. She and her husband, Nadav Davidai, and their two kids have had to maintain a healthy sense of humor lately as Shanghai approaches its sixth week of the citywide COVID lockdown.
These get circulated, and we almost laugh at them," says Ha Chuong, who was one of my neighbors in the Summit. "One of the only ways, honestly, to survive this lockdown is to have to see it through some kind of humor. When a drone blasts out a recorded warning against singing, sometimes all you can do is laugh. Do not open the window or sing."Īs China continues to pursue a zero-COVID strategy, the 26 million citizens of its most populous city are subject to various degrees of lockdown amid a surge of the coronavirus. The message says: "Please comply with COVID restrictions. That's a government drone elsewhere in Shanghai, warning people who were singing from their balconies. Do not open the window or sing.” /pAnEGOlBIh- Alice Su April 6, 2022 A drone appears: “Please comply w covid restrictions.
As seen on Weibo: Shanghai residents go to their balconies to sing & protest lack of supplies.