A
few days before my return to
classroom teaching at Sichuan
University, I was biking across
a deserted stretch of campus when I en-
countered a robot. The blocky machine
stood about chest-high, on four wheels,
not quite as long as a golf cart. In front
was a T-shaped device that appeared to
be some kind of sensor. The robot rolled
past me, its electric motor humming. I
turned around and tailed the thing at a
distance of fifteen feet.
It was May 27th, and it had been more
than three months since my last visit to
the university’s Jiang’an campus, which
is on the outskirts of Chengdu, in south-
western China. In late February, when
the spring semester was about to begin,
I had hurried to campus to retrieve some
materials from my office. We were nearly
a month into a nationwide lockdown in
response to the coronavirus, which had
started in Wuhan, a city about seven
hundred miles east of Chengdu. The
university had informed the faculty that,
at least at the beginning of the term, all
courses would be online.
In those days, it still seemed pos-
sible to escape the disease by leaving
China, and a number of foreign teach-
ers at the university had departed. At
the U.S. Embassy and consulates, non-
essential staff had been evacuated, along
with the spouses and children of the
diplomats who remained. Throughout
February, I answered e-mails from wor-
ried friends and relatives in the U.S.
I reassured them that my family was
fine, and told them that we had decided
to stay in Chengdu, despite numbers
that, at least at that particular moment,
seemed frightening. On February 20th,
when I visited campus, China’s official
death toll reached 2,236.
Since then, the semester had crawled
along, as everybody’s perspective on thedisease changed. During the third week
of classes, the epidemic officially be-
came a pandemic; by week six, the U.S.
death toll had exceeded that of China.
That week, China’s borders were closed
to foreigners, and the evacuations re-
versed direction—Chinese nationals in
America and Europe, many of them
students, were desperately trying to re-
turn home. China was the first to ex-
perience the pandemic, and it was also
among the earliest countries to control
the spread and enter what would now
be considered normal life. In week
eleven, my nine-year-old twin daugh-
ters resumed classes; in week thirteen,
I boarded a plane for the first time in
the post-coronavirus era. And now, on
May 27th—week fourteen—I was finally
back on campus.
I followed the robot until it paused
on a street lined with dormitories. An
electronic voice called out, “Daoda zhan-
dian!”—“Arriving at the stop!” The street
was empty, because most undergradu-
ates hadn’t yet returned. One new pol-
icy was that students couldn’t leave after
entering campus, unless they received
special permission. Every gate to the
university had been equipped with facial-
recognition scanners, which were cali-
brated for face coverings. Earlier that
day, when I arrived, a guard told me to
keep my mask on while being scanned.
My name popped up on a screen, along
with my body temperature and my uni-
versity I.D. number. As a faculty mem-
ber, I could go through the gates in both
directions, unlike students.
Now I waited with the robot, look-
ing around at the silent dormitories. Fi-
nally, three students approached from
different directions, masked and hold-
ing cell phones. Each of them entered
a code on a touch screen at the back of
the robot, and a compartment popped
open, revealing a package inside.
One of the students told me that
she had ordered her package through
Taobao, China’s largest e-commerce
site, which is owned by the Alibaba
Group. Before the epidemic, students
retrieved their packages at a campus
depot managed by Cainiao, another
company mostly owned by Alibaba, but
now the robot was also making deliv-
eries. The student said that the ma-
chine had telephoned and texted her
as it approached her dorm.“And, if you can’t answer my prayers, I’d still love
some feedback. Thanks.”