I was like, David, is that you?ĭAVIDAI: And that's how we got to know David. And the next day, he saw us, and he was like, oh, that was a great quiz. And even then, I didn't recognize him 'cause he - you know, when we see him, he's, like, head to toe with hazmat. That virtual quiz night I mentioned (laughter). And then it turns out he was one of the people in our quiz night.ĭAVIDAI. We never met this guy before in our lives. And he's doing this every day on top of his work. He's fully bilingual, really kind of engaging. And, you know, he - every day, we'd see him, and he was chatting us up. And one of those residents - he's wearing those dabai suits - right? - the, like, head-to-toe.ĭAVIDAI: Yeah. But the people to come call us, knock on our doors and get us downstairs and then check us off - all of those are residents. And they bring in the medical teams, the doctors, to do the testing. Today was the first day in 11 days we were not tested. NADAV DAVIDAI: So there's these nice moments of kind of levity and community mixed in with what-the-heck-is-going-on type of stuff. And then we figured out, oh, my goodness, you know, this is going to continue, and we really need to do something social beyond just the chats. I think that happened about, like, two or three weeks into it. We even started a Friday night trivia group, which was - you know, which was quite nice. But then there was, you know, all these other new neighbors that kind of came out and made it interesting and helped us through this time, like, helping with the group buys and helping with just making sense of, you know, when the testing was happening. And so this WeChat group - it was really nice because, you know, there are obviously some people that I knew there from before. We had no connection to the outside world. I asked both of them about that.ĬHUONG: Well, for me, it's been really a kind of lifeline. 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, as a place to complain together but also to help each other out and for whatever levity they can find.
China still maintains a zero-COVID policy, which, for Ha and Nadav, means 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 a citywide COVID lockdown. SCHMITZ: Ha Chuong was one of my neighbors. These get circulated, and we almost laugh at them.
HA CHUONG: One of the only ways, honestly, to survive this lockdown is to have to see it through some kind of humor. The message says, please comply with COVID restrictions. SCHMITZ: That's a government drone elsewhere in Shanghai, warning people who were singing from their balconies. My family and I left China months before the pandemic, but I still stay in touch with some of my former neighbors through the group messaging platform WeChat, which is where I saw this. For nine years, I lived in a giant apartment complex called the Summit with thousands of other people in the city of Shanghai.