32 THENEWYORKER,AUGUST17, 2020
began the semester in effectively the
same situation. During week one, I asked
students about their circumstances, and
more than a quarter responded that
they hadn’t stepped outside their hous-
ing compounds in a month.
The Chinese lockdown was more
intense than almost anywhere else in
the world. Neighborhood committees,
the most grassroots level of Commu-
nist Party organization, enforced the
rules, and in many places they limited
households to sending one individual
outside every two or three days to buy
necessities. If a family were suspected
of exposure to the virus, it wasn’t un-
heard-of for their door to be sealed shut
while tests and contact-tracing were
being conducted. One student I had
taught in the nineties sent a photograph
of a door in her community that had
been closed with two official stamps. “I
haven’t seen such things since I was
born, but people who are older must
have some memory of such scenes,” she
wrote, referring to the Maoist cam-
paigns. “We are becoming numb, which
may have more bad impact than the
virus, in the long run.”
In my own household, I could see
the negative effects on my daughters,
who were desperate for interaction with
other children. But it was also true that
the strict Chinese shutdown, in com-
bination with border closings and con-
tact tracing, had eliminated the spread
of the virus in most communities. Feb-
ruary 20th, the day of my lockdown trip
to campus, turned out to be the last day
that the Chengdu authorities reported
a symptomatic case from community
spread. The city has a population of
about sixteen million, but since late Feb-
ruary there have been only seventy-one
symptomatic cases, all of them imported.
Virtually every case has involved a Chi-
nese citizen who arrived on an inter-
national flight and proceeded directly
from the airport to treatment and quar-
antine. Chengdu’s success was typical
in China. In one of my surveys, I asked
students if they personally knew any-
body who had been infected. None of
them did.
During week six, I asked, “Are you
currently allowed to go outside in your
community? Are there any restrictions
on your movement?” Again, the re-
sponses were unanimous: from Yun-
nan to Jilin, my students were now mo-
bile. I decided to send them out to do
some reporting.T
he only student I had met in per-
son was named Serena. She lived in
a fourth-tier city in northeastern Sichuan,
where her parents worked modest jobs.
Whenever I called on Serena in class, I
heard traffic sounds: engines, horns, voices.
Later in the semester, she explained that
her building was poorly constructed, with
thin walls, and there was a busy road out-
side. Serena was an only child, like al-
most all of her classmates, but she seemed
to lack some of their confidence about
the future. Once, I asked my students if
they expected their lives to be better than
their parents’ generation, and, out of fifty-
two respondents, only Serena and two
others thought that they would be the
same or worse.
I had rejected Serena the first time
she applied for my nonfiction class. When
I was preparing to move to China, I had
asked applicants to submit writing sam-ples, in order to limit the number of stu-
dents. On the first day of the fall term,
Serena showed up anyway, and then she
sent an e-mail asking if she could audit.
I wasn’t accepting auditors, but some-
thing about the writing in her e-mail
made me think again. I told Serena that
she could take the course for credit.
From the beginning, she stood out.
She wrote beautifully—she majored in
English—and I was particularly im-
pressed with her reporting. She was
small, shy, and unassuming, but she
seemed to understand that these qual-
ities could put people at ease. In the fall,
I asked students to develop research proj-
ects, and Serena embedded with a group
of charismatic Sichuanese Catholics who
organized retreats and prayed and wept
with the power of God. For her next
project, she hung out at a Chengdu gay
bar. This transition wasn’t as abrupt as
it appears, because Chengdu is known
for both its Christian and its gay com-
munities. In America, such a pairing
would defy logic—San Francisco andPSEUDACRISCRUCIFER
The father begins to make the sound a tree frog makes
When he comes with his son & daughter to a pail
Of tree frogs for sale in a Deep South flea market
Just before the last blood of dusk.
A tree frog is called a tree frog because it chirps
Like a bird in a tree, he tells his daughter
While her little brother, barely four years old,
Busies himself like a small blues piper
With a brand-new birthday harmonica.
A single tree frog can sound like a sleigh bell,
The father says. Several can sound like a choir
Of crickets. Once in high school, as I dissected
A frog, the frog opened its eyes to judge
Its deconstruction, its disassembly,
My scooping & poking at its soul.
And the little girl’s eyes go wide as a tree frog’s eyes.
Some call it the “spring peeper.” In Latin
It’s called Pseudacris crucifer. False locusts,
Toads with falsettos, their chimes issuing below
The low leaves & petals. The harmonica playing
Is so otherworldly, the boy blows with his eyes closed.
Some tree-frog species spend most every day underground.
They don’t know what sunlight does at dusk.
They are nocturnal insectivores. No bigger than
A green thumb, they are the first frogs to call
In the spring. They may sound like crickets
Only because they eat so many crickets.