While we all watch with morbid fascination the daily scenes emerging from locked-down Shanghai, one student in Nanjing thought it was time for a closer look to see the bigger picture. And as it turned out, he was just the man for the job.
Chen Haoliang (陈昊良) is a freshman at Nanjing Communication College (南京传媒学院). Chen is also originally from Shanghai where he lived for the first 18 years of his life before coming to Nanjing.
But as any good media student should, when Chen found out about the severity of the epidemic situation in Shanghai, he took the decision to return home, in order to document what was happening in his city.
Speaking with The Paper, Chen said, “As a Shanghainese, I know exactly what Shanghai should look like. [I thought] it’s unlikely that it can be as unbearable as it looks on the internet”.
But just before he left, Chen’s health code turned yellow. His plans were put on hold. But he remained determined to go, and a few days later managed to take one of the few trains operating from Nanjing to Shanghai.
But he kept it a secret from those closest to them. “I never told my family. They all thought I was still filming in Nanjing”, he said.
“After returning to Shanghai, my first feeling was that it is so empty. The whole city has never been so empty”.
While most people in Shanghai would likely now do anything to get out of the city, Chen being prepared to return is admirable. But the student also has one eye on the future, both that of Shanghai and himself.
Chen says his film is “a souvenir of this moment for the future” and that he hopes the “images can be used to record the perseverance and courage of the moment”.
But as a media student, Chen is also smart enough to know that his making of a documentary in this time and place means he will likely never be short of job opportunities.
