00:00
[high pitched chiming]
00:07
I’m originally from California.
00:10
I moved to Shenzhen, China in 2012.
00:12
I met my wife here and she is from China.
00:16
♪ Burning like a silver flame ♪
00:20
We have two kids, our oldest one is turning four.
00:25
And our youngest one is about one and a half.
00:28
And we also live here traditionally, with her mom.
00:32
[speaking foreign language]
00:33
[speaking foreign language]
00:39
We’ve been in this kind of outbreak situation
00:45
affecting our home since January 24th.
00:48
[indistinct announcer speaking]
00:50
And now I’m in my fourth week back in the office.
01:03
Now, with things relaxed,
01:05
I’ll get my temperature taken five to 10 times a day.
01:10
In the elevator we have green squares on the floor
01:13
that you have to stand on.
01:15
Even when I go from floor to floor of the office,
01:17
I’ll get my temperature taken.
01:23
Keep our masks on whenever you go to a public space.
01:29
When you’re passing by people,
01:30
they don’t know that you’re smiling.
01:31
So sometimes I’ll just say, I’m smiling!
01:34
Just to make sure that they understand
01:37
that I’m having a good day and I hope they are too.
01:52
When things were happening here,
01:53
I was thinking, oh man, this is where everything started.
01:56
There was no head start here.
01:58
And there’s so many people here.
02:00
And we still don’t know how bad it’s gonna get.
02:03
Meanwhile, in America, things are great,
02:05
people are posting Instagram about being outside.
02:08
My sister’s pregnant.
02:09
My brother is managing this bar in LA.
02:12
They’re all kind of living life normally.
02:14
And I really just had this thought in my head of,
02:16
we’re in the middle of this.
02:18
Definitely we’re not gonna be going to work
02:20
in person for a while.
02:21
The country is effectively shut down.
02:23
Flights out of the country are still occurring,
02:25
but are becoming more and more limited.
02:28
I was thinking about flying everyone back to the US.
02:31
[yelling] [laughing]
02:35
One night, I just threw it out there.
02:37
Of course my wife would be asking why?
02:40
Hey. And we kept going
02:41
back and forth about the merits of staying versus leaving.
02:46
There’d be the risk of,
02:47
what if someone on the plane had it,
02:48
and we would all get it?
02:51
I have asthma, my daughter has a bit of asthma.
02:55
[baby talking] And my mother in law
02:57
is immunocompromised. Don’t fall over, let me go.
03:00
For someone who’s a natural worrier,
03:01
that just feeds on all of your fears.
03:05
But really it came down to, I did not trust
03:08
the Chinese government, as much as the American government
03:12
in terms of taking care of the situation.
03:17
I said that, and she took that to offense, of course,
03:21
as a Chinese person. [yelling]
03:25
The biggest question was my mother in law.
03:30
Because the US closes borders to any foreigners
03:33
who had been in China in the last 14 days.
03:36
Really on paper, she wouldn’t be able to get in.
03:39
So without that certainty, we just decided to stay.
03:45
Maybe a few weeks into the lockdown here,
03:49
when things started ramping up in the US
03:51
in terms of reported cases,
03:54
and the measures that different states
03:56
and local governments were taking, I was thinking,
04:01
maybe my wife was right.
04:04
Which spouses hate to say. [laughing]
04:06
Lily, teach her ABC again.
04:10
This is like a once in a generation type of situation.
04:14
That no one could really prepare for.
04:18
How do you set up all of the security measures,
04:21
and health measures, and service measures
04:24
to make sure that everyone’s safe?
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We have like 12 million people in Shenzhen panicking.
04:34
And here, it just happened ridiculously fast.
04:37
[intense music] In my apartment building,
04:40
they set up a temperature station almost overnight.
04:43
The security guards take it really, really seriously.
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Even when I would take out the trash,
04:48
I would walk 30 feet to the trash bins.
04:51
In plain sight they would see me, and I would come back.
04:53
And even then they would still take my temperature again
04:57
If you do test high on your temperature,
04:59
you get taken to a fever clinic.
05:01
And then they had a specific hospital in Shenzhen
05:04
for all positive cases.
05:09
During that time, about 99% of the day
05:11
was spent in the apartment.
05:13
Carried on that way for about two months.
05:24
My older daughter had been inside
05:26
for about 85 days before the first time out.
05:35
Careful. [laughing]
05:38
It almost seemed like she’d seen the world
05:40
for the first time again.
05:42
[children talking and laughing]
05:43
And our youngest one, she is one year and five months.
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About 18% of her life was spent
05:50
without leaving the front door.
05:55
She just wanted to stay out there
05:56
and be out there as long as possible.
05:59
So she had a really good time.
06:01
And now every day she asks to go outside.
