Alive and __

Hey, this is Biyi. Long time, long, long time.

For those of you who have no idea why you are subscribed to this Elephant Room thing (we did get a certain number of new subscribers from our website in the past year even though we were in silence mode for, let’s just say a really long time), please wait a second and don’t quit the tab just yet. I do believe you subscribed for a reason (typing a personal email address into a website’s pop-up bar and confirm is quite a task for modern digital human isn’t it? ), and maybe I can help you figure out that reason later. But before that, l have a more important thing to do -

HELLOOOOOOOOOO!!!

A big, loudest shout out to our dearest old fellas. For those of you who have subscribed to us from the old days and are still here reading this, 你好, 好久好久不见。

Skipping 1,000 words of self-explaining, Yan and I are both alive. I was going to say we are both “alive and well” but after some time of hesitantly typing out and deleting, I eventually erased the last two word.

Are we well? What a question.

We are well in that we are, and have been Covid-free. Extremely lucky.

We are well in that we have our family members, friends and intimate partners by our sides.

We are well in that all of our loved ones are healthy and safe.

We are well in that we still have “something” to do. In specific, I mean our Chinese company hasn’t died and we are trying our best to keep it alive for a little longer.

But our life also sucks.

It sucks in that our company is at an extremely difficult time. Yan and I have co-lead our small company as VP and CEO for over four years now, and this year things are seriously rough. As a media company, our main income comes from advertising clients, usually domestic consumer brands or internet companies. If you’ve been following China news you’d know how the economy is like at this point: the big, official numbers are still hanging at a certain height (but who believes them?), in reality, the entire private sector is dry like dessert. Everyone’s pocket is tight, no one has spare budget on marketing anymore. Private companies, big or small, are dying like dominos; who knows if we are not the next one?

It sucks in that after rounds and rounds of abusive quarantine (not abusive in the physical sense but really, I can’t think of a more accurate word), we are mentally exhausted and terrified. In March, Yan and I, along with all of our Chinese colleagues, were quarantined at home for 7 days because of a diagnosed case in our office building. Then, in April, Yan was quarantined for 14 days because of a case in her residential area. Then came May and boom! The whole city of Beijing fell into quarantine. The government never announced citywide lock-down (they didn’t even announce so for Shanghai remember? “上海并没有被封城，只是打了一场’大上海保卫战’!”) but the city was virtually emptied with everyone trapped at home. For almost six weeks, office buildings, shops and restaurants were shut down; the only places with signs of human crowds were the endless Covid-test stations. Everyday we’d go downstairs and stand in long lines waiting for our daily throat swabs, the only means to prove our innocence as negative, decent human beings.

It sucks in that freedom, something once so big, abstract and even romantic, has now turned into a concrete, small and grim format. To qualify as a free person in today’s Beijing means you must be equipped with two things: 1) a green window on 健康宝 (Health Kit, the official health pass associated with everyone’s WeChat or Alipay), 2) a number of 3 or under on the page, meaning that you hold a negative Covid record within 72 hours. With these two conditions we could travel basically anywhere in the city, yet cross-city travel is still an adventure since as long as we go to a destination with one diagnosed case, our fragile, sensitive 健康宝 baby could immediately turn yellow. Following that is endless calls from local bureaus to investigate every single detail of our trips, then, most likely, a round of 7 or 14 days of forced home quarantine, again and again and again.

Getting daily swab in a 36 degrees summer day (no complains really, the medical staffs are the ones who are truly physically suffering).

Two weeks ago, my friends and I went hiking to a mountain about 70km away from the city. Before starting, we wanted to use the pubic toilet located in the foothill village. A man with a red-armband that reads “党员监督队 (Party supervision team)” stopped us, ordering everyone to scan 健康宝’s QR code twice with our phones, once at the entrance of the village and once at the toilet before allowing us to go inside. Feeling ridiculous, I confronted the man why I had to scan two QR codes just to take a pee, “the village and the toilet belong to two different level of regional bureaucracies,” he glanced me cross-armed, “who’s in charge who’s responsible. If you want to pee, you scan, if you don’t want to pee, you leave!”

I had reminded myself many times to not to let this email turn into a rant, in specific, not a hate letter targeting the stupid 清零(zero-Covid) policy. Unfortunately I failed; having suffered and witnessed so many peoples’ sufferings this year caused directly or indirectly by the government’s stubborn will to “clear up” a virus, I have become cynical, desperate and mostly just sad. Everyone knows this collective, pointless effort is solely for the “big meeting” happening this autumn, yet no one could say a word about it (to talk about the elephant in the room, aha!). So many peoples’ perceptions about the society and the government have been altered drastically this year, yet with no open space to talk, we could only stay as angry beasts as we are, murmuring as pathetic, lonely souls.

Anyways, this is more than enough rant in one email. I must go back to the main agenda now to introduce to our new subscribers about what this actually is. So in a nutshell, Elephant Room is a media project I started with my best friend Yan in 2017. As two girls in their mid-20s, we wanted to do a simple thing that we didn’t find a lot of people were doing at the time: to write true stories about China, our motherland, in English. We wrote relentlessly for two years (you could find most of our works on our website), then our main focus shifted to running a Chinese company irrelevant to Elephant Room. With our management roles getting busier, we wrote less, and eventually stopped writing, pushing Elephant Room to the side stage of our lives.

Yan and I both turned 30 this year. We are no longer the two girls who just came back to China with stomaches filled with “Western inks”, as some people liked to say. After several years of actually settling and building a career in Beijing, we are now more grounded, perhaps more “Chinese” in some ways. Nonetheless there are still so, so, so many times we feel curious, angry, proud, confused, hopeful and hopeless about our country. These emotions, potent and raw, got me eager to get back to writing. So even though our company is not doing very well. Even though our lives are completely messed up by 清零 (Fresh news this week: the city government just announced that all hotels are prohibited to take weddings and other “unnecessary group gatherings” until no one knows when. There are currently under 20 Covid cases in the city. My wedding is scheduled to take place this September with venue already booked and everything under planning. Perfect!). Even though we are so jealous of those of you who can now travel freely in your post-Covid world yet back here we cannot even apply for a traveler’s visa. Even though we are so irritated by so many aspects of the government yet we feel so afraid to speak up. Even though most of the time we just feel exhausted and want to 躺平 (lie down! Shout out to Ali Wong) on our couches, somehow I opened my laptop today and decided to start this letter.

I’ve always known that I needed Elephant Room even in the time that I felt the laziest to write (shame on me! Knowing yet not doing anything). Five years ago, I needed it as an anchor for my journey to understand more about China. Today, selfishly but completely honestly, I need it as the lens to know more about the world. The girl who was once so enthusiastic about cross-cultural communications and so proud as being “international” is now stuck and sluggish, losing touch with the outside world. This is not the state of mind that’s healthy for my own personal well-being so perhaps, as the last straw, I shall get back to writing Elephant Room and talk to you.

While I am writing this, Yan is busy preparing a new work project that we wish could save our Chinese company. In terms of Elephant Room, we haven’t figured out exactly how we want it to be in the future but the bottom line is we want to keep it alive while we can. For me personally, there are still numerous stories about the Chinese people and China I want to write about, and Elephant Room will continue to be the place that I share these stories with you.

As always, thank you for tuning in and do let me how things are going at your end. Are you “free”now? Is Covid still a part of your life or are you out of its shadow? What do you think about this world, I mean, as big or as small as the answer can be, is everything all good?

Hope you are well. I’ve missed you.

Talk soon,

Biyi (and Yan, absent in voice but never in spirit!)