My nose was poked three times last week. As the UAB medical personnel swabbed my nostrils clockwise, the smell of rubber gloves and cotton tips brought me back to the hotel room in China two years ago, where I spent fourteen days quarantining right after entering the country. It was a similar occasion, the Covid testing. However, I couldn’t match the figure of the Chinese medical personnel in front of me, armed with Biohazard suits, goggles, and N95 mask, to his UAB counterpart with a surgical mask on. 

Spending the past two years in both countries, I’ve witnessed countless contrasts as such. While the covid cases in the United States surfaced one million, Xi’an, the city of four million and  home to my grandparents, entered the second most strict lockdown in China. With the Zero Covid policy, China landed herself on the polar opposite to the United States. The paralleled realities of the two countries befell upon me and other Chinese international students. 

One direct ambivalence upon most of the Chinese students is that they have to keep themselves from getting Covid amid the surging cases in America. Since last year, when the Delta variant went viral in America, the Chinese embassy restricted the policies for admitting Chinese citizens to return to China. The returning Chinese citizens need to test negative not only for Covid but also the IgM antibody, which will stay positive from one to six months after one has gotten Covid. In another word, if the Chinese students want to return home, they can’t get Covid. Fortunately, the community at Indian Springs has provided the Chinese students with a relatively safe environment from Covid. 

Another contrast that I am facing specifically is the huge difference between the attitudes toward Covid in America and China. To lots of people in China, it seems unbelievable that the Americans are still keeping their society functioning with hundreds of thousands of cases emerging per day. To lots of people in America, it also seems unbelievable how the Chinese manage to endure such restrictive lockdown and “zero-case” policies and some began to doubt whether the Chinese government is really keeping the Covid numbers low or it’s just fake numbers. In the past two years, I am growing used to such incongruity. In the process of imbibing information from different perspectives, I am learning to figure out a way to accommodate different views. These different views build up my growing understanding of the world as a teenager and therefore lead me to have a broader perspective when viewing politics and current affairs.

My father called me yesterday. He and I are trying to figure out a way to buy the flight tickets back home this summer. We both realize that the chance of going home is waning, given the increasingly restrictive policies from the Chinese embassy.

However, if there is one thing I learned from the pandemic, it is that when there is a problem, I actively seek solutions to it, because I know that panic will not help me at all. I don’t suppress my emotions, including panic, because one cannot deny one’s own emotions. But I also recognize that the best way to soothe the panic is to try to solve the problems. Besides, even if I can’t return to China this summer, I might as well book an Airbnb in Birmingham with other Chinese dudes and experience the lives in this city. I am a dancer, dancing and jumping between the two opposite poles of the world. No matter what, I will belong to a place.