At the end of 2019, when there were rumors spreading in WeChat groups about an unknown pneumonia outbreak in Wuhan - I was not afraid, and I even dared to transit through Wuhan on my way home - I believed the official reports and did not trust those rumors.
In early 2020, when Wuhan was locked down and the company's business plummeted, and a few months later I was laid off - I was not worried, and I was even a little happy after receiving N+1 compensation, planning to take a few months off - I believed that the epidemic would disappear at most a few months later, and everything would return to normal.
In 2021, as the tourism industry gradually recovered and offline physical stores reopened - I thought that life was starting to turn around, and the time for returning to normal had finally come.
In the spring of 2022, when serious outbreaks occurred in Shanghai, Jilin, Hebei, and other places, and news of various human rights violations emerged - I felt like I had returned to two years ago, as if nothing had changed.
Today, when I saw that even the company is recruiting nucleic acid testing volunteers, I begin to feel afraid.
Looking back at my initial thought of "thinking that the epidemic would end in a few months," how ridiculous and naive it was, just like what Gao Songfen thought when her home was raided during the Cultural Revolution:
Because they had taken away all our savings and cash, I didn't know how we would live in the future, so I asked the leader of the Red Guards if they could leave us some living expenses. After discussing it, they left us five hundred yuan and said, "Don't worry, it will be resolved in three months!" At that time, of course, we didn't understand the true meaning of "it will be resolved in three months": whether our property would be returned to us after three months, or whether our property would be officially confiscated after three months? In fact, I think the leader who said this wouldn't even know how reliable his own words were. But no matter what he meant, I think at that time, there was not a single person in the world who would believe that the "unprecedented" Cultural Revolution would last not three months, but a whole ten years to resolve!
── Gao Songfen, "Memories of Mountain Living"