Hotline life

Waking up to another day's life in limbo was at 7:44am on my watch on Wednesday 29 December. Another incredible 8 hours and 23 minutes of sleep, my Fitbit informs me. I've never slept like this before. I'm waking at a time my body wishes with no obliged run on of activities. Even on holiday before I left New Zealand I barely ever rose after 7am. Now I do without fail. It's winter here now so 7am is still pretty dark outside. I'm still too injured to run so I've got nothing to get me out of bed. I notice some of the kitchen sounds from the downstairs floor. My parents-in-law are about. Even when my younger brother-in-law is about, I'm always the first one down, and at least one younger generation (if I'm generous enough to call myself that) is enough to form quorum for breakfast to crystalise. We have congee, the "yauchei" (a glutinous rice flour inflated ball that's cooked on new years eve, that is delightful to eat then, but deflates by the new year and becomes rather hard and chewy for the coming days) and some turnip cake, which is divine. My grandfather-in-law has already had his coffee. He has a habitual 3-in-1 instant coffee sachet every morning. Blame me for my foreign influence that a man who grew up before the Communist revolution in the 1920s and 1930s, lasted the Cultural Revolution, now likes coffee. He certainly has "rightist" tendencies. After breakfast I have a coffee, too.

I check out the latest news. Don't they know that the Rat brought the plague to Europe? The Year of the Rat is barely days old and it's bad news all round. The numbers of infected are higher than the previous days. A quarter of the reported deaths in China since that ball got rolling happened in a single day yesterday, mostly in a single province. Qingyuan had a single extra case but still in a city of 4 million it's not a big advance. The numbers for Hubei province are nauseating. I remember seeing the pictures of masses of people queuing just to see a doctor. The logistics of an epidemic are apparent immediately. There is simply no place for a surge in any one kind of sickness realistically. They would not have the redundant space and expertise to deal with even a quadrupling of cases, let alone a septdectupling (don't check the dictionary for this word); no place on Earth can really cope when the inevitable Black Swan outbreak strikes. I was reading a story about families queuing for quarantine and being denied it because hospitals have expected standards for quarantine and can only accept a maximum. "Come back tomorrow to check if there's space." Hubei will be a bloodbath. 

My wife drifts down for breakfast and I more forcibly say what I've already told her I've already been musing: We need to get out early. It's not just the rising numbers. It's the risk of our flight being cancelled. Or Guangzhou being "sealed". To be honest, from my reading of the numbers there is next to no risk for me of infection. I'm in a village with no signs of infection. In a city where the "reported" cases are miniscule. (Believe me, if there was a case even remotely nearby, the village would be "sealed". We have a friend who's village has been "sealed".) Access to our eventual flight is paramount. We already know that we'll be at least "soft" quarantined on arrival in New Zealand. Suddenly I imagine spending my quarantine away from everyone on a beach, 27 degrees at Piha.

And so it begins:. I check our belatedly bought travel insurance. Apparently it no longer applied for Coronavirus-related claims based on the date when I bought it. REFUND! Then it's onto the China Southern "hotline". Actually before that there was a lot of mucking around with apps and what-not to come to the conclusion that you had to speak to a person to sort anything. We called the official number. Engaged. We called it again. Engaged. We had lunch and over lunch and some deliciously infused baijiu, we shared our plans of an early departure with my parents-in-law. And also my father's stroke. It was an important chat to have - they understood but were also a little tense afterwards.

While lunch was in session I kept occasionally dialing that hotline number and eventually I got through to the.... Kenny G waiting music. Unfortunate for him, and also a range of other illustrious famous classical composers, Chinese public companies thrash some songs in the making of their infuriating hotline waiting music. It was also a bit unfortunate that I'd switched back to my NZ sim for the call to the insurance company before miraculously getting through to the hotline. I waited 30 minutes listening to that same classic Kenny G saxophone riff. It wasn't even the full song. Just the most familiar bit again and again with the splicing of the recorded voice suggesting us options. Knowing I had limited "Roaming" and was burning through my minutes, my wife dialed again and again and after the umpteenth time she also got onto the Kenny G bandwagon. Amusingly the waiting music was synchronised - we could play them on speaker on both phones and enjoy them without confusion: "We're in stereo," I mused. I tried to read my book but "pressing 1 to continue" was rather disruptive. I should have just watched a movie during the wait if my phone wasn't where I would have watched a movie. I ended my call and let my wife's phone "hold the torch". My wife then promptly passed her phone, the torch, back to me. I told her we'd stay on the line for two hours and then call it a day. Two hours and barely four pages of my book passed and we were still deep in Kenny G's saxxy quagmire. 

"Should we end it?" she asked. 

"Let's keep it going," I said always with that fear that we might have been the next in line when we hang up. After another half an hour, I also thought we should give up and went downstairs.

Grandpa was in the yard on a fine, but cool, afternoon reading the newspaper. My parents-in-law were out fixing a fence to the veggie patch. We went for a brief walk but my wife didn't feel well with her cold and we decided to turn back. Once back, we mused with the now returned parents about the "hotline" coldness. My father-in-law said we should call the English hotline. We laughed at him then but still used both phones in calling the Kenny G appreciation line for the English service and the Mandarin service. Grandpa, though mostly deaf, tweaked with the feeling of stereo sound. It persisted while we read our respective novels. "Badminton?" my wife asked after tiring of reading. I agreed and tried to put her phone through the window outside while still attached to a charging cord. We got outside with racquets and all when I noticed that the "English service" line phone was producing a different sound. It was repeating the phone number of the caller - this was different to the repetitive mantra of the recorded I - I quickly told my wife to pick up and then she tossed the phone to me. (My father-in-law's strategy worked! The English line was faster!)

The lady spoke English well. Since we rang the English line it would be bad form to start using Chinese. As would have been the expectation, changing the date of our flights was exorbitant. After probing with all sorts of possibilities (and almost certainly keeping more never-say-die patient Kenny G fans in suspense) it was clear that it was a substantial pound of flesh, equivalent to buying new tickets. Since we had her on the line, we chose our seats for our original flight and hung up. Expedia couldn't help us choose seats. Since we called a combined total of about 4 hours, the least we could get is our seats chosen, if we were to keep the existing flight.

It was still 8 days to the flight. Tracking back 8 days, so much had happened. Now it was a simple equation: buy fresh one-way tickets and go back early at the price of our original return tickets; or hunker down and, dare I say it, enjoy our last week in China. The last bit was what I thought about most. The whole fuss and fluster of sorting out an exit plan, and also the holding mode we'd been in meant we weren't doing what we were planning to do: Spend quality time with people who might not be around or as able bodied when we next come. They're also people who, if it all "goes to pot", might rely on us to get them through. 

At about 9pm I told my wife that I wanted to talk about the situation. "Let's go early!" she said. "Well, actually I was going to raise staying." It defused a difficult conversation. I'd thought she might want to stay longer. And she thought I would like to go early. Now we could pick how we wanted to handle things knowing that the other person was open to a range. It could be shown to be a foolish choice within any 24 hours but we decided to stay until our original departure dates. 

And so it was a day of to and fro and ending where we first began. I'm writing this on the Thursday after the Wednesday. On the Tuesday I was writing that there was a total of 80 deaths; two days on there are 170 deaths (doubling). On Tuesday there were 39 cases in Guangdong and now there are 311 cases. But only 6 in our city. Looking at that number again I'm filled with doubt for Guangdong. Even with China's extensive system, those are big numbers to hold in quarantine. Especially with Guangdong sending medical staff to Hubei to staunch the bleeding.