Today is my birthday. It feels appropriate to share the story of my birth, starring my mother, me, and… Well actually my dad was mostly asleep outside on a gurney so my mom was the star of the show 😂 I was born on March 26th, 1986, at around 8pm…

To clarify, 48 marks the days I’ve been back in Shanghai. It’s been 65 days since Wuhan, the epicenter of COVID-19, went into lockdown, which is expected to be lifted April 8th. — Shanghai is allllllllmost back to normal. Almost. I actually got into the restaurant for my birthday dinner without anyone checking my temperature. We didn’t have to all sit on one side. Movie theaters are opening this Saturday, re-screening old movies like Pixar’s Coco or Wandering Earth. My gym is finally…

A little bit more normal everyday. After a couple of warm days, Shanghai is suddenly rainy and cold. Had to pull out my parka today before heading to a clinic for a routine checkup. That’s about how normal it feels now, normal enough for me to consider going to the…

Celebrated the end of a friend’s quarantine with some American style pancakes, fried chicken, and chorizo gravy. We ended up spending 4 hours in the diner, and only spent maybe 27% of the time discussing the virus and its impact.

We celebrated birthdays on the team today. I wore a paper crown. Because of recent events, what’s usually a big monthly team dinner is now a January-March birthdays’ cake day. The cake was fantastic and it felt great to be joking around with my colleagues again, even if we were…

Last week, I felt like I was living two alternative realities. The one of today’s Shanghai city, slowly returning to “a new normal.” Temperature checks everywhere I go, masks on every face, but everything up and running again. Except my gym. The other reality is traveling back in time two…

I posted this graphic on WeChat back on February 1st. Just a line jumping up and down and up and down, marking the emotional state of social media. The top says “That’s so touching! How wonderful!” The bottom says “Goddammit, what a monster!” This is the global internet today, this…

Here is what started as the “Self Quarantine” diary, which later became #COVID19 Cat Lady Chronicles. March 1st, #COVID19 Cat Lady Chronicles, Day 23: New things spotted today… Since the roll out of a digital health declaration app, restaurants have started posting their staff’s green QR codes, along with the…

As a Taiwanese person who’s lived and worked in Shanghai for over six years, the decision to return to Shanghai in the midst of the COVID-19 epidemic was an easy one. My entire life is here in Shanghai, a city that took me 4 years to…