My experience in the Fangcang-Hospital
I know everyone is facing a hard situation now and has already burst into too much negative and terrible news. So the third part of this text is about some happy records here. You could read it from that part. But it is also necessary that we should face to the difficulty and think about whose fault caused all of these and how to avoid it next time.
This pandemic is too complex. The situation in Shanghai is too unbelievable and caused by so many factors. Some are inevitable while others are entirely avoidable, but unfortunately, we made it all happen anyway.
I'm not going to analyze why all of these are happening, which is being done by many people currently. I will only share my experience as a confirmed Covid-19 patient living in the temporary quarantine center which is known as Fangcang-Hospital.
The most valuable and treasured thing I learned from this experience is that what we think and what we feel emotionally can totally separate from what we experience physically. I think it's the most respectable and sweetest nature in humanity.
01 What is the Fangcang-Hospital?
To understand what I have experienced these days, the first and the most important thing is to understand what Fangcang-Hospital is.
Fangcang (方舱) means rectangular storage area in Chinese. It looks like Fangzhou (方舟) in Chinese. Fangzhou means Noah's Ark, which can save people from the end of the world.
When I came and lived here, I said to myself in my heart, fortunately it is not called Fangzhou, otherwise I would be quite sad, because what happened here only shows the end of the world of humanity, instead of saving.
02 Give up living as a human. Accept being an animal or livestock.
Nobody cares about your time and your feeling.
The first time I was told I was confirmed infected was at 11pm. They told me that the test I took at the hospital might be positive and they would come immediately to redo the test for me. I waited all the night and didn't sleep even a second. Finally, they came on the second noon, around 12 o'clock.
Still at 11pm they called me again and told me that the infection was confirmed and that they would come and pick me up immediately and take me to a hospital. After the first time I thought I basically got what 'immediately' they meant. So I decided to sleep first. And no wonder that they picked me up around 10pm the next night. I don't mind waiting. But keeping a person waiting with an 'immediately' promise and no further information should be one of the most disgusting things.
I finally arrived at the Fangcang Hospital around midnight. We still weren't told anything, we just had to follow the medics one by one who were wearing the white protective suits.
The entrance of Fangcang Hospital.
When I arrived on 28.03, Fangcang Hospital was still almost empty.
But the next morning when I woke up, the whole hospital was full.
It doesn't matter who you are.
When I entered the Fangcang Hospital, I filled out a form and was given a wrist band with my name, age, gender, and a number as my identification there.
The wrist band with my information and number.
The nurses and doctors here never call me my name. They just call me my number. If I need something like tissue or medicine, they only check my number. They don't care at all why I need them or how I feel. The hospital is divided into a few smaller zones managed by different medical groups. If my number does not belong to the zone, they refuse to give me anything, even just a paper cup.
We did not receive any treatment for the first four days. There are not even disinfection measures at all. Crazy. It's totally a virus theme park.
Although I know it's not dangerous for healthy people. It could be just like the flu. But there is no point in sending us here without treatment. We can recover better if we stay home.
I think the only explanation is that the government doesn't want us, who are already infected, to infect others. How we feel is not so important in this special moment. They just want to keep the number of confirmed cases as low as possible.
I am no longer a human. I'm a number in the hospital that's stuck on the bed I sleep. I am a set of statistical data from all confirmed cases.
Ironically, I'm even a number that's been hidden.
First, they didn't upload my positive test result. They only informed me by phone and told me that I would not see my positive reports. When entering the hospital, my health code is still green.
Second, after being sent here, I checked the news where they report the locations of confirmed cases every day. I have never seen my place displayed on the list.
What are they trying to conceal? How much did they hide? Why do they want to cover up? As a Chinese, I often ask myself these questions. I find it difficult to understand the government that claims its ultimate and divine purpose is to serve the people.
The living conditions here
Since we are not treated as human beings, it's no wonder they arrange our lives here like farming cattle.
There is no privacy at all. The hospital was transformed from an exhibition hall. Around 5,000 people live here together, men and women, seniors and youngsters. No single room, no kiosk, no partition.
There are no basic sanitary facilities, no bathroom, no shower facility, no sink, even no tap for running water. Everyone gets only a small plastic wash bowl and a toothbrush when 'check in'. There isn't enough water in the toilet. The whole place stinks of excreta. It depends on luck whether there is excrement or not when you open a toilet kiosk door. I even try not to drink water, so that I don't need to go to the toilet.
There is no day and night. The blazing light is never turned off. The nurses always take our temperature at 5am. No one could sleep tightly here.
When mentioned food, considering most people outside even can't get enough food supply these days, I can't complain about it, even though it's so salty and oily. At least we still have enough to eat. They offer three meals each day. Steamed buns, eggs and milk for breakfast. Box food for lunch and dinner.
The standard that we can leave here is that we get adequate and continuous negative results, at the beginning twice, now three times. But we can’t check the results by ourselves through the mini program we used before. We can only check it from nurses. I don't understand why they can't make the information transparent.
People are taking drinking water to wash their faces and brush their teeth.
In the toilet, the girl in gray tries to find a kiosk with no feces.
People whose beds are close to the toilet use fabrics and screens to stop the smelly odor.
People try to create some privacy by using wasted paper boxes and plastic bags.
Extremely blinding light that stays on 24 hours.
People use deserted paper boxes to block glare while sleeping.
There is a small commotion and some people are watching. Because some people got two negative results but are still not allowed to leave. While the government started to let some new infected patients in. People are afraid of getting infected again.
We are required to wear masks 24 hours here including bedtime. Some people use tissues to protect their ears.
At the beginning, the management is chaos. People crowded and scrambled to get food. Now they deliver food to the bed one by one.
The volunteers prepare to deliver food.
Breakfast
Box food with meat that tastes not like real meat.
Not only the patients suffered, but also the hospital staff. They cannot drink or eat until they leave. Some faint while working. The hospital staff are waiting for the shift.
People line up in front of a nurse's station to check their nucleic acid test results.
03 Seek joy amidst in sorrow
I think the most valuable thing in humanity is that we can choose the way how we think, how we react and how we hold our moods by ourselves, instead of being completely dependent on the environment.
You can still see many people trying to stay optimistic and trying their best to stay happy here, despite the terrible situation.
Here are some sweet moments.
Mother and daughter, they are the same.
I don't want to worry my parents, so I didn't tell my parents that I was infected and was taken to Fangcang Hospital. So you can feel a lot of leaks when I'm on the phone with my mom. For example, when she asked why I didn't make a video call this time, when she asked if I could get some vegetables and any other food and how. I can only cope her with some unclear answers.
One day I heard that the lady living behind me also used these unclear answers to tackle her daughter. Her husband was sent to another Fangcang Hospital. She just told her daughter that the father is sleeping so he can't talk with them. After the call, I asked the lady if she hadn't told her daughter the truth. She said yes. I told her I didn't tell my mother either. We smiled at each other with tacit understanding.
The lady is on the phone with her grandson and other older daughter who knew she is infected.
An infected mother and her daughter put their beds together and sleep together.
A trip with China Eastern.
When I shared the photos of my meal here. A friend of mine joked that it looked like food offered by China Eastern.
Why not? I can imagine life here as a journey from spring to the beginning of summer. I can't shower because I'm a butterfly before summer, which means I'm a cocoon now. After I left here, I can rush into sweet summer's embrace.
Don't worry about becoming an Avatar.
I searched for side effects of the Covid-19 after knowing I might be infected. But I've never read any report mentioning that people may turn blue. However, it's true that I'm getting bluer and bluer all the time since I arrived here. When I wash my face, I can clearly see the water turning blue. When I wipe my skin with a wipe, it turns blue. Just when I surprisingly thought I would dedicate a bit to the study of the side effects of Covid-19, I found it's just because the blue sheets are losing their color.
The blue sheets also turned my khaki sweater blue.
We can enjoy our life no matter where we are.
Some scenes you can see here, you can also see in every other place in our daily life, like park, library, home, etc. When people have positive energy and share it, we can always carry ourselves and others through difficult times.
They play with friends like any normal night after school.
Some middle-aged people are playing card games together and others are standing around to watch, just as they do every relaxing afternoon in the park.
I used a deserted paper box to make a temporary table, on which I can take online classes and write. Stories and writing can always keep me alive no matter which situation I'm in.
A woman is lying on the bed and doing leg exercises.
Children are always full of energy.
Adorable father and son take a walk in the cute way.
04 a confused Chinese
Merkel said this in her New Year's speech of 2021. A previously unknown virus is invading our bodies and our lives. It hits us where we are most human, in close contact, in hugs, in face-to-face conversation.
I feel so deeply touched and a bit shocked. Because in ‘HIS’ New Year's speech of 2021, he talked about the Chinese people's collective overcoming of the epidemic, the economic progress we have achieved together, and many achievements that the whole country has achieved. But he never mentioned what each of us, as individual, experienced, felt and perhaps feared.
I think we're awake after the Enlightenment and the Renaissance because we started to think about how to achieve our own value as individuals, and we also started to learn to enjoy happiness as individuals.
But in China we always emphasize the collective. We always ignore the individual. In this way, we have achieved amazingly rapid development and effectively eliminated poverty. It is true that material civilization is the basis of spiritual civilization. But have we ever really cared about the mental feeling after the economic development?
To pursue the goal of zero confirmed case, we sacrifice solicitude of staying with friends and family; we ignored the yearn for freedom; we are afraid of losing our pet…
I think Chinese policies really protect most people from poverty, hunger and virus.
But I feel the way my motherland protects us more like treating cattle. She gives us enough to eat and nice places to live. But she doesn't care how we feel or what we think. Surely she doesn't care what we are screaming for, because it's just a howling in her ears.
I thank her for her kindness in letting us all get through the hard time, but I always think whether it's better to live happily like livestock or bitterly, but as a person with a clear self-awareness and self-consciousness?
Wellcome to connect with me, if you'd like to share or publish it somewhere else. I hope more people could know what is really happening here.
Twitter @LeonaCheng1608
Instagram @leona_ccy