The Quarantiner

A foreigner is placed in quarantine in a small housing compound in Shanghai. The neighbors are frightened—they do not approve. Thus begins this tale of our times, by April featured writer Evelyn Fok, attentive to the subtle tensions of the individual and community. Read on for a brief interview; and don’t miss Jack Calder’s accompaniment on the (im)possibility of pandemic literature.

   

The Story

   

The quarantiner arrived on the Saturday after my first week of fifth grade. I was sitting on the floor watching TV when we glimpsed two hazmat suits huddled at the door next to ours. Mother went into the corridor to investigate. Our neighbours Ah-Ping and Lao Luo were blasting the hazmat suits with questions.

“A quarantiner moved into the sublet,” she said when she returned five minutes later, irritation stamped over her face. “Doudou, I want you to stay in our apartment as much as possible for this upcoming week. No hanging out in the kitchen.”

Father waffled out of the bathroom. “How could a quarantiner move in here?” he asked. “I thought everyone returning to the country has to be in centralised quarantine for 14 days.”

“Apparently they now stay in the hotel for seven days, then go home for seven,” Mother replied. “They say she’s already had two negative tests, but who knows. Let’s just be careful.”

“Why here? This is not her home.”

“Who on earth knows.”

We live on the ground-floor compound at the end of an old lilong in Shanghai’s Xuhui district. There is a shared kitchen in the centre of the compound, surrounded by four living units. Lao Luo, who keeps an eye on me when I’m home alone, lives by himself in the unit close to the entrance. Mother told me once that he ran away from his family years ago, but he is like a father to her now. Next to him is Ah-Ping and her parents, whom she wheels out into the alley for fresh air once a day. Ah-Ping’s children left home a long time ago. On the other side of the kitchen, there is us, and then there is the sublet.

The sublet takes in a revolving set of travellers from all over the country; Shanghainese people would never have to rent a place like this in the city. The subletters never stay for more than a couple of days, so we usually pay them little attention besides gossiping about their regional accents and eccentric behaviours. One time, I peeked into the sublet when it was being cleaned in between visitors: it is a simple room the size of our living room, with glass doors that look onto the concrete wall of the opposite compound, a tiny bathroom, and stairs leading up to a lofted bed. The apartment was decorated with bright paintings and plump cushions; it looked nothing like the bare orderliness of our home just next door. The sublet had been mostly empty since travel was suspended in the beginning of the year.

Besides the sublet, our doors are open most of the day. Things were difficult during the lockdown, when I had to take classes on my phone from 8AM to 4PM every day, next to my parents doing work calls, while Ah-Ping and Lao Luo hollered constantly at the news blaring from the TV. Things have been more or less normal since June. I went back to school and my parents resumed clocking in to work, all of us with masks on.

Around an hour after the quarantiner arrived, a young man in a mask showed up in front of the sublet, Lao Luo following on his heels. He was sticking a thin plastic strip onto the door.

“I want a phone notification every time this door is opened, you hear me?” Lao Luo demanded.

“The neighbourhood committee will be notified every time she opens the door,” said the man. “She should only do so to get deliveries and to receive visits from the doctor.”

“You see this fridge? It is shared between everyone living here,” Lao Luo pressed on in his gruff voice. “We’ve got old people here, we’ve got kids. How dare she quarantine in here? She cannot come out here to use this fridge.”

“Don’t worry, she won’t,” the representative responded, his palms slightly raised in surrender as he backed his way out of the compound.

“How dare you let her stay here! How dare she!” Lao Luo yelled after him, his right arm raised over his hunched back as if he were about to throw a stone at the man.

That evening, we were having dinner with Lao Luo in his apartment with the door open when we heard someone greet Ah-Ping next door. It was a tall man in a cap and a T-shirt, and a full beard under his mask. I recognised him as a subletter that I had spotted here and there for the past few weeks.

“I came to apologise,” he said politely. “A girl moved in here to quarantine today? It’s my girlfriend. I rented the apartment for the month, and she just returned to Shanghai from the US, so I thought she would be comfortable quarantining here. I’m sorry if it caused you any trouble. It was my bad for not letting you know in advance.”

“You could have at least told us about it first,” said Ah-Ping. “We have old people and children in this compound, so we’re pretty worried.”

They went back and forth like this for some time, but Ah-Ping seemed satisfied with the man’s reassurances and retreated into her apartment. As the subletter walked away, Lao Luo glared at him for a little longer and then slammed the door.

“He seemed nice enough,” Father said after a few moments, breaking the silence. “As long as the quarantiner stays in the room, everything should be fine.”

“I don’t buy it. This is the worst kind of people,” Lao Luo declared. “They think that just because they have the money to rent a place like this and travel around, they can just barge in and ruin our lives like that. They bring shame upon their own families and wherever it is they came from!”

My parents nodded their heads obediently, eyes lowered into their rice bowls. Lao Luo then squatted in front of me, his right index finger raised, his sparse eyebrows twitching. “Doudou, you must not grow up to be like them. You hear me?”

“I definitely won’t,” I told him.

He patted my head. “Good boy.”

We returned to our apartment after dinner and listened to the quarantiner’s every movement in the room. Sneezing, sighing, flushing the toilet. For a while she was speaking to herself or into a phone; we did not understand a word she said.

“Ah, it’s a guimei,” Mother remarked. Guimei: ghost girl, devil, foreigner. “No wonder. We can’t expect people of her sort to have any manners.”

#

On Sunday, my parents went out shopping for groceries in the afternoon. My friend Hanwen was supposed to come by and play chess with me, but because of the quarantiner, Mother had called his mother to cancel, saying that I was not feeling well. So I was left alone at home, with Lao Luo dropping in to check on me every hour or so. He was in a fouler mood than usual and didn’t say much.

I watched some cartoons on TV, then I practised some songs on my wooden flute. But I kept being distracted by the subletter’s door glowering at me through our doorway. Halfway through playing “Mary had a little lamb” for the third time, I lowered the flute from my hand and went out into the corridor.

It was a crumbling wooden door, much older than our own black steel one. The planks were haphazardly jammed together, and the paint was peeling; it resembled the entrance to a haunted house. The detection device was stuck on the left side of the doorframe with thin tape. From beyond it I could make out the sounds of a ghost making her way around: barely-there footsteps, water trickling, paper rustling, light-coloured hair trailing behind her.

I listened to make sure no one was around the kitchen, then I spat at the door. “Si guimei,” I muttered. I didn’t care if she heard; she wouldn’t understand me anyway, and she couldn’t open the door to confront me without setting off an alarm. I spat a few more times, leaving a line of my blubber on the stone floor, delineating my space from hers. Then I waved the wooden flute around as if it were a weapon. “Si guimei!” I hissed, louder, as I struck at the door.

There was the sound of something cracking, and then the plastic strip hung limp from its tape for a few seconds before dropping to the ground with a plunk. I froze for a few seconds, then I hurried back into our apartment, shutting the door behind me.

That night I couldn’t sleep. As our digital clock beeped midnight, I was still tossing and turning in bed. From our side of the wall, I listened to the guimei turn on the shower, then blow dry her hair. Would I get in trouble with the committee for breaking the device? If it came down to it, I could always insist that the subletter had taken it down herself in order to break out. But who would believe a child like me? And what if they checked the tapes from the CCTV?

#

The next morning, as I was getting ready for school, I was shaken out of my sleep-deprived stupor by Lao Luo hollering at an intensity that’s uncommon even for him. I peered out the door and watched him stride towards the sublet’s wooden door, trailed by two policemen.

“She walked out!” he bellowed, his face blood-red up to his brittle hairline. “I saw her. She walked out at midnight. I stayed up all night waiting for her to come back so I could catch her in the act, but she never did. She’s out there infecting the rest of the world right now. You’ve got to do something!”

The policemen glanced at the door. “There’s a detection device that can check whether she left the apartment, right?” one of them asked after a pause.

“She broke it to pre-empt any evidence! Look — it’s on the floor!” Lao Luo was trembling now.

“We’ll check with the neighbourhood committee,” the other policeman said, and then they walked briskly out of the compound, murmuring into the static of their walkie talkies.

“What did we do to deserve this terrible fortune?” Lao Luo cried after them. “Why us?”

Not 15 minutes later, as I was nibbling on my cairoubao, the door to the sublet creaked open. A thin hand reached out to receive the takeout breakfast a deliverer had just arrived to hand over. Everyone was silent until she closed the door and the deliveryperson had scooted away.

“See, she was in there all along,” Mother said to Lao Luo. “You must have been seeing things again. It’s not a big deal. You can calm down now.”

“I swear I saw her leave,” Lao Luo retorted. “She was wearing a cap and a mask. The door was stuck, so she was pushing it and making a racket. Then she finally forced it open and scampered off. The nerve! I knew she would break out and wreak havoc on us all!”

That evening, after a day of haranguing by Lao Luo, the landlady Mrs Wei finally showed up in front of the sublet, hands on her hips. I hovered close to the wall, listening in on every word.

“Ei!” Mrs Wei yelled across the door. “When did you leave the apartment?”

“I didn’t,” the quarantiner replied. “I haven’t so much as opened a window since I arrived here on Saturday. I have no idea what this man is talking about.”

I felt my mouth drop open. Her Chinese was slow and steady, each character enunciated carefully without a discernible accent in the twist of her tones. How could a guimei speak our language so fluently?

“Oh, don’t do that,” Mrs Wei said back. “You should at least let some air in…”

The two of them spoke for perhaps 20 minutes, essentially repeating the same arguments in circles. Mrs Wei emphasised that she shouldn’t be staying here, but it wasn’t as if they could move her out anyway; the quarantiner insisted that she hadn’t left the apartment. A phrase that I heard the quarantiner repeat was yuanwang, a phrase I’d only previously heard from the period dramas on TV. It sounds like a grand injustice. I think it means being blamed unfairly for something, but I’m not sure. When I’d asked Mother about it, she’d simply told me that I’d understand when I grew up. But I’d never encountered it in real life until now.

It was another sleepless night for me. At around midnight, I got up from my bed and walked over to Mother, who was folding up the day’s laundry.

“What is it, Doudou,” she asked, her eyes glued to the clothes in her lap.

“I listened to the quarantiner shower last night,” I told her. “At midnight. Then I heard her use the blowdryer, and it was quiet after that. This means she didn’t leave the compound. This is what yuanwang means, right?”

Mother looked up at me for a moment, then her face softened. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “It is what it is. Hopefully her final test results will come back negative, and then we will be free of this drama.”

“Also…”

“Yes?”

“Nothing. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight, Doudou. No listening in on strangers.”

#

The rest of the week went more or less peacefully. No one paid any visits to the quarantiner’s door, at least not when I was home from school, besides the occasional takeout delivery. In fact, if you had visited the compound those few days, you would not have sensed her presence at all, unless you heard Lao Luo griping about her.

He found a lot to complain about someone he had never met. How loudly she sneezed. How loudly she typed on her computer. Her irregular mealtimes, and her culinary choices, which no doubt stank up her space. How her trash must have built up within her unit, since she had no way of throwing it out. Always, always how disobedient she was for intruding into our home.

The rest of the compound cheered him on. Young people know nothing about consideration for others, Ah-Ping said. They’ve got no family, no attachments, so what do they know about communal responsibility? Mother agreed. Those haigui are just spoilt and disobedient, she added.

The banter was always in Shanghainese, which I could understand fully, even though I preferred Mandarin. I shoveled rice into my mouth and tried to remember my facts: Fact: The mole on my cheek has been there since I was born, and did not grow out of me eating too many beans when I was little, as Lao Luo had me believe until last year. Fact: Father started wearing earbuds around the compound, claiming Lao Luo’s voice was making him go deaf. Fact: If we could hear the quarantiner’s every move, she could hear ours too. Fact: The quarantiner showered at midnight last Sunday.

#

It was Friday night. The quarantiner was due to be released at midnight. The neighbourhood committee had informed us earlier that her test came back negative. Meanwhile Mrs Wei, the landlady, had assured us that she would be moving out as soon as her quarantine period was up. As we were sitting around the kitchen having dinner, Lao Luo recounted once again how he had watched her escape from the compound.

“She made a racket trying to open the door. And then she glimpsed me peering from my window and she knew she was caught, so she ran off in fear! Hah! Like a rat, a despicable rat!”

I knew she was listening from her side of the door. I could feel blood boiling behind my ears.

“It could have been anyone else from the compound, or upstairs,” I blurted out, my Mandarin creaky and thin against Lao Luo’s swerving, full-bodied Shanghainese. “How are you so sure it was her? You don’t even know what she looks like!”

Lao Luo steered his head slowly towards me, rice grains hanging from the left side of his mouth. Hunched on his stool, his eyes were almost level with mine. His face froze, the leathery folds of cheeks ashen as stone. One could throw a punch to such a face and break a bone. Mother, who was sitting next to me, silently put down her chopsticks and covered my hand with hers. It took almost half a minute before he finally responded.

“How dare you!” he barked. “Get out!”

This was how I was grounded for the upcoming week. And the next morning the quarantiner was gone, the walls dead quiet, the sublet cleaned of any trace of her stay, including her trash.

   

Brief Interview

   

Deva Eveland: Did you have to quarantine in Shanghai? I’m wondering whether some personal experiences helped influence this story.

Evelyn Fok: I quarantined five times (!) in 2020, twice in China. Each time was very different, but one commonality stands out to me. You suspend your physical life and try to keep yourself sane and entertained, while becoming a spectacle of entertainment and intrigue to onlookers on the outside, whether they are nosy neighbours or anonymous Instagram followers.

DE: In one sense, the narrator knows the least about what is going on, yet he is also the most sensitive to it (for example it dawns on him alone that if they can hear the guimei, the guimei can also hear them). Can you talk about why you chose to tell this story from the little boy’s perspective?

EF: I had lived in China before, but when I returned during the pandemic, I sensed a surge in nationalism as well as a fresh ambivalence, even hostility, towards foreigners. I found these sentiments intriguing and wanted to explore how this emerging worldview is passed on within families. I was particularly interested in its influence on children: they are at an impressionable age, deciding which values to prioritise over others, and they will define China for decades to come. By chance I’ve had the opportunity to spend time with students and educators in China during my time here, which deepened my interest.

   

Critical Accompaniment

   

It is a remarkable, and recently much-observed fact, that the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 appeared very little in the art and literature of the following years. It is as though it had been completely forgotten, deemed somehow unsuitable for artistic depiction or remembrance. This despite the fact that most estimates place the death toll of the pandemic at around 50 million world-wide—a number that greatly eclipses the deaths attributed to WWI. Paradoxically, it is only the latter event that we find eulogized in the enormous artistic output of the post-war period, while the former is mentioned in passing, if at all. Why did a generation of writers the world round find it fit to comment so extensively on one tragedy while keeping so silent about the other?

The relevance of the question is obvious, with the end of the COVID-19 pandemic seemingly at hand. From its beginning major journalistic and literary outlets have been rushing to publish breathy articles speculating on what “pandemic” literature will look like, featuring headlines such as “What Will Happen to the Novel After This?” and “Poetic Pandemic: How Coronavirus Has Already Impacted Poetry.” The tacit assumption behind this spree of journalistic make-work is that the pandemic should be written about, nay, must be written about—as though all tragic and/or historical events merit the artistic equivalent of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to found out what really happened. Unfortunately for publishers with visions of The Great Coronavirus Novel dancing in their heads, not all subjects were created aesthetically equal. There may be a reason the Spanish flu failed to produce a masterpiece, and we may come to find our contemporary pandemic equally lacking.

All this to say that Evelyn Fok faces an enormous challenge with her piece “The Quarantiner,” which, for all its economy of detail and timelessness of narration, is nevertheless a hopelessly timely account of our all too familiar disease. Fok’s attempt is instructive as to the general features of what we might call the “pandemic story.” The first problem is to reduce a catastrophe that operates in terms of nations and great masses to a dramatic situation that operates in terms of the individual. Fok accomplishes this handily by centering on a familial drama of guilt and redemption. An outside figure intrudes into the home. She is an unknown quantity, a vector of disease, the pandemic in miniature. The protagonist transgresses against the figure, egged on by the hatred against her he perceives in the community. His actions are taken as the figure’s own, and cause even more acrimony and censure to be levied against her. He ponders the futility and emptiness of his rage, and comes to regret his action, seeing at last the powerlessness, the blamelessness of the figure. He alleviates his guilt, not by confessing, but by taking a “heroic” stand against the community figurehead. In the end everything is forgotten.

It’s this last detail that is most telling. What is emphasized at the end of the story is not the boy’s internal, moral journey. His “heroic” action is dispensed with immediately, almost as an afterthought. His summary: “This was how I was grounded for the upcoming week.” What stands out most prominently at the end of the story is its total nullity, the meaningless of the “exceptional” events that had taken place. The quarantiner is gone, and that’s it. The sublet is “cleaned of any trace of her stay, including her trash.” The dramatic arc, come to its conclusion, does not imply any lasting changes for the characters or the community. It cancels itself in the final lines; a soliloquy that ends in a shrug. Everyone, even the story seems to want to forget what has happened.

This uncomfortable absence of a traditional dramatic conclusion—whether comic or tragic; the lovers married or the hero fallen—is the anxious engine of the “pandemic story.” One might say that Lao Luo’s mistake, which leads to his misplaced aggression, is the attempt to see himself as part of a traditional story. He wants the quarantiner—figure of the pandemic—to be a villain, scheming and diseased. In turn, he plays at various archetypes of the hero: defender of the weak (“We’ve got old people here, we’ve got kids”), detective on the case (“I stayed up all night … so I could catch her in the act”). But always, reality disappoints him. The truth is horribly mundane, and there are no heroes or villains. On closer inspection, there’s no drama at all that isn’t entirely internal; only a futile tilting at private windmills.

One way of getting at the aesthetic problem here is to say that in a pandemic, there is nothing to die for. Compare war, that midwife of so much great art. Whatever your politics, there the enemy is human. Human error, human courage, human injustice. War is a crisis of extremes, when the best and worst in humanity is brought out. A man dives on a grenade: to save his comrades? or for one hundred yards of dirt? Take your pick. Whether the corpse of a soldier is testimony to the injustice and futility of man, or a document of his heroism and glory, all are agreed that the death means something. Compare the corpse of a pandemic victim. What does this death mean? It is regrettable, of course; sad; perhaps the product of some mild injustice (state mismanagement, risky personal choices)—but at the end of the day, it seems that this death can be tragic only in the sense that it was unnecessary. The enemy is a disease, and disease is death by accident. So here’s the aesthetic problem: how to make meaningful what by nature is not? How to make purposeful contingency?

If there is nothing to die for in a pandemic, so too is there nothing to live for. Living itself becomes suspect, at least in any sphere beyond the home. The primary activity in The Quarantiner is cancellation. The boy can’t see his friend, the woman can’t leave the room, the boyfriend can’t see the woman. The ends of life, the desires for which it is maintained, must be rejected, as the lives of others are on the line. Living itself is rejected for the mere maintenance of life. All activity slows and draws to a halt. Here man is an abject thing, vibrating with the anxiety produced by frustrated desires, and venting his aggression on those closest to him. The fruitless invective hurled at the quarantiner—she’s “spoilt and disobedient,” “the worst kind of people,” a “guimei”—is so much rattling of the cage bars. The threat isn’t really in the subletter’s room. It’s everywhere and nowhere. It’s accident and thin air. If the boy’s rebuke of Lao Luo at the end is in one sense a heroic expiation of his guilt, in another sense it is only more aggression, more violence. If the former, perhaps it is the stuff of art, if the latter, perhaps it is better passed over in silence.

I do not intend to say that great art cannot be made involving a pandemic as a setting, an event, a backdrop. There is nothing in life that is forbidden to art. I only mean to say that creating a work of art truly about a pandemic may involve a contradiction in terms. In the past pandemics have been justified artistically as judgements of god (to be interpreted), symbols of decadence (to be opposed), or emblems of fate (to be accepted as inscrutable, divine). We have fewer metaphysical resources to draw on in our current predicament. If we accept that pandemics are the result of human negligence and accident, the intentional texture of the work of art becomes threatened at every point. The pandemic can only figure in it as a cipher of nothingness.

Whether or not The Quarantiner is a “pandemic story” is an open question. I am more tempted to call it a closet drama of manners, where the pandemic functions essentially as a useful pretext to explore paranoia, guilt, and the aggression unleashed by unfreedom. It remains to be seen whether the end of COVID-19 will produce a true “pandemic literature,” or whether, like the Spanish flu, it will pass us by in silence.

   

   

Evelyn Fok was born and raised in Hong Kong. She has since lived in the US, India, China, Spain, and the UK. She was most recently published in Electric Literature.

   

  

Cover art by David Huntington
Interview conducted and edited by Deva Eveland
Critical Accompaniment by Jack Calder