THENEWYORKER,AUGUST17, 2020 39
space the previous weekend. At the end
of the story, she said, “Every country has
its strong points and its weak points.”
D
uring week sixteen, I finally en-
tered the classroom. For more than
a month, there had been rumors that
undergraduates would return, as they
had in some other provinces. But the
final decision was always left to local
officials, because, in the Chinese system,
they are the ones who would be pun-
ished in the event of an outbreak. At Si-
chuan University, administrators seemed
to decide that it wasn’t worth the risk.
Senior students were called back to take
their final exams, along with others who
had made special requests, but most
younger undergraduates were encour-
aged to stay home. I was disappoint-
ed—I had hoped to finally meet every-
body. None of my first-year students
made it back to campus.
In the end, it became another type
of theatre: a dress rehearsal. The uni-
versity introduced the fever tents, the
delivery robots, and the facial-recogni-
tion scanners, but I sensed that admin-
istrators were mostly testing systems in
preparation for the fall. Chinese epide-
miologists told me that they were con-
cerned about the possibility of a second
wave of infections. Despite the coun-
try’s current success, they never seemed
satisfied. “There’s no long-term plan,”
a professor of epidemiology in Shang-
hai said bluntly. “No country has a long-
term plan.” Another epidemiologist ex-
pressed concern about the lack of social
distancing, believing that China needed
to be prepared to use measures that were
less aggressive than a lockdown but more
effective than mask-wearing. “This is
something we need to fix,” he told me.
“There are smart people in the Chinese
C.D.C. who realize this.”
The first week back, only four stu-
dents showed up to my nonfiction class:
Serena, Emmy, Fenton, and Sisyphos.
It was like having a studio audience—
the five of us talked back and forth,
but we used headphones and micro-
phones to connect with the others, who
were still scattered across the country.
Each returnee had a reason for com-
ing back. Emmy was the only student
who came from the countryside, and,
like Serena, she had grown tired of
being in a home that was loud and
crowded. Fenton needed to get some
dental work done at a university hos-
pital. And Sisyphos, as a senior, was
required to return for exams.
He arrived wearing a mask, but he
took it off when he saw that the others
were uncovered. He was tall, with slightly
wavy hair, and he said that in the fall
he would enter a graduate program in
economics, in Shanghai. It seemed that
most seniors were going to grad school;
the government had expanded academic
programs in order to reduce pressure
on the job market.
Even online, I had sensed that Sisy-
phos was shy, and I never put him on
the spot by asking about his name. But
now I did, and he reddened slightly. He
explained that he had chosen it in high
school, because he liked the Greek myth.
“So where’s the rock right now?” I
asked. “Is it high or low?”
Sisyphos brought his hand level with
his chest. “It’s in the middle,” he said.
I
often wondered what the spring’s ex-
perience would mean to this younger
generation: the Children of the Corona.
“This is the first time that I feel so close
to history, and I was actually reporting
on it,” Serena wrote, in one of her last
assignments. “I guess I’ll start to keep
notes from now on.” She said that spend-
ing time with the neighborhood com-
mittee, where she saw officials and po-
lice fighting the pandemic, had also
made her think about the previous term’s
research. She realized that in the past
such devoted and hardworking neighbor-
hood officials had been turned against
groups like the Catholics and the gay
community. “All of them are good peo-
ple,” she wrote. “They just happen to
be in different places, and sometimes
in conflicting situations.”
Throughout the semester, I had tried
to connect with the voices in my head-
phones, and I knew that such exchanges
would become even harder in the fu-
ture. A number of students had aban-
doned plans to study abroad or to at-
tend graduate school in America. In
July, after the Trump Administration
ordered the closure of the Chinese
consulate in Houston, the Chinese re-
sponded by shutting down the U.S. con-
sulate in Chengdu. Some of the damage
in U.S.-China relations was bound to
be long-lasting, and, in any case, the na-
tional experiences had diverged. By the
time I handed in final grades, in early
July, the U.S. was recording more cases
every two days than the Chinese had
reported during the entire pandemic.
And the lessons that a young Chi-
nese drew from the crisis were likely
very different from those of a young
American. In my students’ last essays,
many expressed a renewed faith in their
government. Jiang Xilin, the Rhodes
scholar who had fled Oxford for Shang-
hai, told me that he had also noticed a
change in his peers from the élite Fudan
University. “Even my most anti-govern-
ment friends began to have trust in the
government,” he said. For my last sur-
vey, I asked the students to rate their
feelings about the future on a scale of
one to ten, with one being the most pes-
simistic. After everything that had hap-
pened—the collapse of U.S.-China re-
lations, the explosion of the pandemic,
the death of half a million people world-
wide—the average rating was 7.1.
Only three students came to the final
nonfiction session, in week seventeen.
Sisyphos was gone: like all seniors, he
had finished early. Somehow, Serena,
Emmy, and Fenton had learned that my
birthday was the previous day, and they
threw a surprise party. The robot had
brought them balloons, confetti, and let-
ters for a birthday sign, and they had a
cake and a spicy Sichuanese dish called
maocai delivered to one of the gates. Se-
rena printed and bound a book with mes-
sages and photographs from her long-
distance classmates. In the Chinese way,
the notes were self-deprecating. “Thank
you for reading my rough essay (quite a
torment to you),” one student wrote.
For four months, I had known them
by their voices, their writing, and their
projects. Now, in the pages of the book,
I finally saw faces: Cathy, who re-
searched the liquor-milk man in Hebei;
Elaine, who spent time at the lesbian
bar in Xi’an; Hongyi, who shadowed
the Chengdu bank manager. The de-
tails mattered, as we had emphasized
all semester: Patrick wore glasses, and
Dawn had shoulder-length hair, and
Meredith stood on a beach with a dog.
All of the students were smiling, their
poses natural, unlike the photos of old.
I wished we had met in person, but it
was good to know they were out there
somewhere.
