THE NEWYORKER, APRIL 13, 2020 47rants, and night clubs should close that
evening and not reopen the next day.
Johnson longs to be liked; his default
manner is a blithe fulsomeness, which
even in the current crisis he has had
trouble shedding. “We’re taking away
the ancient, inalienable right of free-
born people of the United Kingdom to
go to the pub,” he said, as if delivering
the news with a jovial dig in the ribs.
(A week later, Johnson released a self-re-
corded video in which he announced
that he had tested positive for the coro-
navirus, and was in isolation at 10 Down-
ing Street.) In contrast, Rishi Sunak,
the Chancellor, appeared statesmanlike
when, in the same press conference, he
announced that the government would
pay eighty per cent of the salaries of
workers put on furlough because of the
virus, up to twenty-five hundred pounds
a month. Within days, the Transport
Secretary, Grant Shapps, effectively na-
tionalized Britain’s railways, to prevent
the private companies that run them
from collapsing. Having celebrated a
landslide victory in the elections last
December, the Conservative Party may
end up introducing the most socialist
policies Britain has seen in decades.
Beyond Regent Street, London’s the-
atre district, around Leicester Square,
was empty. Earlier in the week, John-
son had called on the public to avoid
theatres and cinemas, but stopped short
of ordering them shut, angering venue
operators who would thereby be de-
prived of possible insurance payouts to
cover their losses. By Friday, the order
to close had come. Farther north, am-
bulances with wailing sirens headed to
University College Hospital, on the Eu-
ston Road, while nearby Harley Street,
famous for its private medical clinics,
was deserted. On Saturday, the govern-
ment announced that a deal had been
struck with Britain’s private-hospital sec-
tor, making an extra twenty thousand
staff, eight thousand hospital beds, and
twelve hundred ventilators available.
I passed an ambulance parked on
the street outside a block of housing
for elderly people, its doors open and
its stretcher readied for use. Across the
street lay the green expanse of Prim-
rose Hill, one of London’s loveliest parks.
It was Mothering Sunday, and, while
the Prime Minister had urged citizens
to call their mothers and not to visit
them, earlier in the week he had reas-
sured Londoners that going outside for
fresh air was still something they could
do. As a result, the parks seemed hardly
less crowded than they would have been
on any other bright spring day; walk-
ers and joggers on narrow paths ob-
served social distancing only up to the
point of mathematical possibility. On
either side of Regent’s Park Road, a
pretty street of upscale boutiques and
restaurants, rival florists were open, their
storefronts bursting with bouquets, as
if for a wedding, or a funeral.
—Rebecca Mead
1
THEFRONTLINESM
aybe five weeks back, a friend liv-
ing in Tokyo hit me up online
about groceries. This was after the first
confirmed coronavirus case in the States,
but before the inertia of global inevita-
bility we’re all stuck in now. He said I
needed to stock up on Tylenol and rice,
and whatever the hell else I needed to
make myself comfortable indoors, with-
out restaurants, for an extended period
of time. When I asked why, he sent a link
detailing the virus’s spread from metrop-
olis to metropolis. Then he sent six more.
“You don’t want to be sick going to
the grocer’s,” he said. “And you don’t
want to be fucking around at the gro-
cery store if you aren’t sick.”
In Houston, preparation is tied to the
city’s topography. Harris County’s share
of upper- and lowercase storms in the
past few decades has produced a reliable
equation: if there’s even a whiff of an
emergency on the horizon, our grocery
stores begin to fill. The shoppers tend
to move in waves: there’s your First Wave,
folks who just triple up on everything,
because they’re older or they’re preppers
or they’re refugees, or maybe they’ve just
seen some shit in their lifetimes. Then
there’s the Second Wave, folks who sur-
face after the plausibility of an emer-
gency coalesces (more folks of color).
There’s the Third Wave, once the emer-
gency becomes imminent (the stores get
crowded), and then the Fourth Wave,
after city officials legitimatize the Bad
Thing. That’s when you end up texting
in line, hunched over your cart for hours.
So that weekend, just before every-
thing started getting cancelled, my boy-
friend and I made our rounds aroundtown. First, to El Ahorro Supermarket
and Fiesta Mart, for beans and eggs and
tortillas and paper towels. We hit Phoe-
nicia Specialty Foods, a Mediterranean
grocery on Westheimer Road, whose
shoppers piled carts with pita, garlic,
and lamb. Then we went to a Super H
Mart, just outside the city’s inner loop,
for face cleanser and chicken and shrimp,
and then to another H Mart, in Bel-
laire’s Chinatown, near where I live, for
everything else. We found shelves full
of chili oil and Clorox wipes and curry
blocks. It only took a few hours.
In line, at one point, I asked the reg-
ister guy if they had any Tylenol, and
he tossed two boxes into my basket.
When I asked if they had any face masks,
he laughed. “How about you tell me
where you find some,” he said.
Watching the shelves empty all over
America on Twitter and Instagram, you’d
think everyone in this country only
shopped at Sprouts or Trader Joe’s or
Whole Foods. But Houston is diverse,
and its grocery stores reflect that. We’ve
got loads of little markets catering to
their respective communities, and folks
in parallel communities pass through
them routinely: African markets in the
corners of strip malls, sprawling Asian
markets, Latinx groceries in clusters.
They carry the staples for their respec-
tive flavor profiles (furikake, Scotch-
bonnet peppers, ancho chilies, and thirty-
four varieties of doenjang), but they sell
basics, too. If you can’t find toilet paper
at Seiwa Market, chances are you can
find it at Karibu Mini Mart or Viet Hoa
International Foods. And if they don’t
have it then there really is a problem.
Two weeks later, as the work-from-
home decrees came down, and I started
missing a spice here or a morning crois-
sant there, I popped by my neighbor-
hood grocers to stock up. I could tell
that things were starting to get strange.
But, for most of my local stores, busi-
ness went on as usual. In a market tucked
inside the Hong Kong City Mall, lines
weren’t any longer than usual. Families
stalked the produce aisles, fingering ci-
lantro and scallions (scarcities else-
where), juggling cannisters of Lysol
wipes and packages of flour (which had
disappeared throughout the city). Every
fourth shopper wore a mask. Every other
shopper wore a pair of gloves.
At H Mart, I grabbed a bottle of