“All of us, when we travel, look at the places we go, the people we see, through different eyes. How we see them is influenced by the books we’ve read, the things we’ve seen, the baggage we carry.”
[Anthony Bourdain]
I don’t get to read much during the year, so summer break is always a welcome oasis of word osmosis. I wake up in the morning with books on my face, glasses askew.
By day, I feast on more books, journals, magazines, tv shows, film, podcasts, poetry, social media and more.
By night, I sleep beneath their comforting weight, my dreams wild and unbound by the silencing of the six alarms of the work year.
I read about Britney, and Anthony, Dolores and 52-Hertz. I read a journal from 11 years ago chronicling the growth of my son in my body, my first born, my sweet ninja.
The sunny naivety of the narrative voice therein, the miniature 4×6 inch meanness of the page and the way I had to squint to make out the lilliputian cursive script tell me the author of these words is as strange to me now as the place in which I wrote them. And changing place, necessarily changes perspective.
From the moment our eyes flicker open in the morning, to the last swirling thought before sleep descends, every moment of every day is determined by mindset. Every thought, every perception, every emotion; it’s at once an empowering and intimidating thought.
Especially in times of crisis, this idea of such ownership, such responsibility seems repulsive.
This time last year, I wrote about the personal agony of the Nanjing Monsoon season. Yes, I am Irish. No, I can’t stand the rain.
This year, older, and wiser, I planned to spend the monsoon season far away from the toilet flush torrential month of wetness, temperatures on par with planet Mercury, and humid as the inside of an armpit.
As all territories outside of China and Macau remained “high-risk”, Nanjing’s foreigners and natives alike hit the trains, planes and automobiles of Middle Earth to get our dose of travel endorphins. We flew to Yangshuo. We flew to Hainan. We flew back to Nanjing to empty and refill suitcases before flying up to…..
Nowhere. Nine airport workers tested positive for CV19. All but one of my friends had passed through the airport during the high-risk period and the possibility of close contact suddenly became very real.
We had worn masks all the time, hadn’t we? Washed our hands like we were Lady Macbeth?
And it was only nine workers, surely it would be a blip, a hiccup, a mere cloud in the sky of our COVID-free existence since February 2020. Or it could, as it did, go the other way completely.
Halfway through the refuelling stop in Nanjing, suitcases emptied, washing machine working overtime, our health code, the green “Sukangma” that has allowed Middle-Earth dwellers to live our best lives since March 2020, turned yellow.
This was rather unfortunate for several reasons, not least because we had been back a full week at this stage, and true to my best post-beach form, I had been socialising like the clappers; BBQs, Nintendo Nights and Jam sessions were in full swing as many other travelling minstrels took a mid-summer pitstop in The Southern Jing before heading off again. Great minds think alike.
Tanned and relaxed, we partied and social-distanced like it was 2017.
And then, like stars emerging, the health codes turned yellow and testing centres popped up citywide like mushrooms. In 2 days, seven million Nanjing citizens completed the first round of nucleic acid tests. Cases began to emerge, first 20, then 30, then the number was in the hundreds as citizens lined up for rounds two and three of testing. Hazmat-suited angels of the epidemic swabbed our oesophaguses. My smaller ninja clung to my elbow. The lines, the masks, the cloying heat filled her with dread. We were All Going to Catch Covid and Die.
Had it been this time 1 year ago, I am pretty certain I would have agreed with her.
It’s Britney, B*tch! really needs no introduction. Spears shot to fame in 1998 for her sugary voice and lollipop-licking, school-girl video, “Baby One more Time”. Hailed as the Princess of Pop, this song launched Spears to stardom and was named the greatest debut single of all time in 2020 by Rolling Stone Magazine; “One of those pop manifestos that announces a new sound, a new era, a new century”.
One of the world’s best-selling music artists, with a career spanning more than 2 decades, Spears wigged out in the 2000’s in the wake of her second divorce and the loss of custody of her children.
The media gored on stories of her addictions, stories of speed and molly and crystal-meth. An incident involving a paparazzi car and an umbrella wielding, bald-headed Spears still dominates the media coverage of the artist to this day, coverage which in no small way contributed to her breakdown, subsequent “involuntary psychiatric hold” and conservatorship led by her father, Jamie Spears.
This was in 2008. Now, Spears has been reclaiming the right to make her own life decisions and claims that the conservatorship is abusive. In light of recent revelations regarding her restricted rights to reproductive, legal and fiscal autonomy, no one can disagree that perhaps 13 years under the control of a megalomaniac parent may not be in her best interests.
“Isolated, medicated, financially exploited and emotionally abused”, is how Spears described her 13 year conservatorship in a 20-minute-long statement in open court in July, 2021. What she described would not have been out of place in a Magdalen Laundry transcript or a turn of the century suffragette plea for sovereignty.
Her father declared her as suffering from dementia. This was 2008. A man speaks for his female child’s mental health, despite her protestations to the contrary. In her 20-minute testimony, Spears claims her children were used as pawns to ensure her compliance. Silence is violence, in one form or another. Spears turns 40 this year. Her pleas for autonomy fell on deaf ears.
As we go to print, Jamie Spears has stepped down as conservator amid accusations of embezzlement, but the conservatorship remains in place.
Anthony Bourdain was world renowned chef, author and documentarian who died by his own hand in June, 2018. Revered by fans of his award-winning, foodie-travel documentaries, he catapulted to fame in 1999 for his book, “Kitchen Confidential”. Bourdain’s acerbic memoir, “laying out his more than a quarter-century of drugs, sex, and haute cuisine” (Amazon.com blurb), paved the way for his TV career, while “No Reservations and Parts Unknown” firmly established Bourdain as a charismatic storyteller, a friend magnet, a wanderlust.
An outspoken supporter of the #MeToo movement, he also spoke candidly of his polymath addictions; heroin, crack cocaine and alcohol, to name but a few of the more illicit. Having overcome his addiction to opioids, Bourdain travelled the world making friends, chowing down and getting trashed. On a wander around Buenos Aires in a Parts Unknown episode (Nov. 2016), Bourdain details “spirals of depression” that plague him. He notes, as is common in the depressive experience, “how an insignificant thing, […] a small thing, […] a hamburger,” can draw the curtain of darkness, depression. He said, “I feel kind of like a freak, and I feel very isolated”. He said he never looks out the window and feels happy. He told us. More deaf ears.
Concepts and theories frame our thinking on certain topics. Raw facts don’t interpret themselves. Simple descriptions of an empirical reality do not create meaning.
What would Bourdain have made of Britney’s 18th century crazy-woman-in-the-attic experience these last 13 years? The #FreeBritney movement was born in 2019, the year after Bourdain’s death. But if we extrapolate from his remarks on #Me Too, “In these current circumstances, one must pick a side. I stand unhesitatingly and unwaveringly with the women”, it’s not unfair to assume that Tony would have been on board with freeing Britney.
Multiple perspectives. Diversity. The perspective you take guides questions you ask and assumptions you make. Perspectives on life, perspectives on death, perspectives on living. On how we treat the women and men struggling under the weight of life, how this treatment is influenced by so much more than the problems of each individual.
Our code stayed yellow for 9 days. Each time I checked our test results, a small pebble of fear rattled in my throat. Each negative result was a wave of relief. Each morning, the still-yellow pixels of the Sukangma made me sigh, but Typhoon Fireworks and Typhoon In Fa helpfully deluged outside, washing away any pretensions of leaving the house for any reason whatsoever.
We read, we cooked, we danced to our favourite music. I thought, if this had been last year, we would have spent all summer in the rain, in the house.
If this had been last summer, we might not have gotten out of it with our lives.
Friends and family in Ireland sent emojis of gaping disbelief at the measures implemented by the Nanjing Municipal Government, and the speed and efficiency with which these were rolled out. 9 cases, and citywide testing, they said. Here we have 12,000 cases a day, and everything is opening again.
It’s all relative. Perspective is key.
One part of me, quite a considerable part, has its hands on its temples. “What about travel this Christmas?”, it asks, whilst dreams pop like soap bubbles to sad violin music in the background.
Soft lockdown is ongoing. The pandemic sees us Nanjingers masked up, hand washing and wary.
We cannot leave the city. But at least we are freer than Britney. We cannot begin to think of the long-term implications of this new outbreak. But we are not alone in our dread.
We cannot envision a future when CV19 is “over”, done with, gone. But we still have a future to embrace. Our mindset is our own to hack.
All these things I have lived and read this summer. Yes, CV19 is back. And yet, I’m strangely grateful. Grateful for having travelled early, grateful for the support of found family here in the eye of the storm, grateful for the epidemic crisis management on a micro and macro level across the city during this second wave.
Most of all, I’m grateful for the perspectives gained by living another year, reading everything not nailed down this summer and for the baggage I carry.
