Today is August 17, 2020. It's been nearly five months since my last blog post, and it's been six and a half months since we started our coronavirus adventure.
Readers will recall that we left our current home in Chengdu, China back at the end of January, settling in shortly thereafter in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. We were on a temporary relocation to stay safe from the coronavirus that was besieging China at the time. Since then, the epidemic has turned into a pandemic raging all over the world, and has been named COVID-19, though there are many who like to still refer to it as the "Chinese Virus", including top officials, causing the first of many racially charged issues to plague 2020.
We had a pretty good time in the early part of our relocation, doing some things that we usually have more trouble doing, such as just taking a drive out to go skiing. However, at the end of March, the pandemic started to really ramp up, despite slowing down significantly in China. Businesses in America started to shut down, and our company also began work-from-home measures that are still in place today. For those keeping score, this would be my second time to work from home, and it hasn't ended yet. To make matters worse, China closed its borders to foreigners as of March 28, effectively extending our temporary relocation indefinitely.
We decided to take advantage of the time by doing lots of homework, working out a lot (over 1.5 hours a day typically!), and from time to time taking some adventures to nearby outdoor areas where social distancing is relatively easy:
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Family work-out!
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| Pike's Peak - note the facial hair! |
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A nearby park
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| Pella, a nearby town with Dutch history |
This would all be fine and dandy if the COVID-19 would have been managed similarly to how it was addressed in Asia, or even in parts of Europe. But unfortunately, the United States had to prove it could be number 1 again, accumulating by far the largest case and death count worldwide (over 2 million cases and 112,000 deaths as of time of writing!). Further unfortunately, the virus became a political flashpoint as politicians and medical experts argued about shutting down businesses, social distancing, and whether or not to wear masks in public spaces. The President even encouraged citizens to rise up against state governments to pressure them into opening up despite the fastest spread of the coronavirus seen anywhere. The debate spilled out into the general public as people on social media started unfriending each other as their views started to diverge.
Then, as if 2020 wasn't difficult enough, the news of Ahmaud Arbery's murder at the hands of suspected white supremacists and the news of George Floyd's murder by a white police officer who knelt on his neck for nearly 9 minutes shocked America, rightly so, as protests erupted all over the country against police brutality and systemic racism, some leading to violent rioting. Once again, these events sadly became politicized and divided the country, though it positively brought more attention to a serious issue in the country.
Among all this stress, we mostly stayed to ourselves. As we got more and more accustomed to our home away from home away from home, we found ways to get more variety in our food, including Asian food. This was a big deal since food was hard to get in the early days of the pandemic in Iowa:
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Wrapping dumplings - finally a taste of home!
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Making homemade ice cream with Ms. Woods!
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Nicely broiled Rib-eye
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| Smoked rib and fixins, courtesy of Doug! |
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Rack of bones after the rib dinner!
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Chicken curry!
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We continued daily life with a lot of homework. As for myself, I went with a sort of "three-shift work from home workday", where I often started the day somewhat early in the morning to participate in meetings where both China and US teams would call in. Then I would conduct alignment meetings with the rest of the US team till about 2PM, when I'd get some lunch. After a workout, I'd do some touchpoint meetings with Doug to catch up with the things he worked on through the day. After the afternoon session ended around 6, we'd go out to a nearby park for a walk or some sport (football, frisbee, or basketball typically), before getting back around 8 so I could grab a quick bite before starting "third shift", where I met typically with the China teams until about midnight. All in all, it was typically around 10-12 hours of active work a day, which is a quite a lot. However, it certainly gave our life some structure.
Eventually, we accepted the fact that we probably wouldn't be able to make it back to China before getting "cleaned up" a bit, so Cherry learned how to cut our hair!
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Before
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After!
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We continued our adventures in the state of Iowa. It was interesting to see the different Coronavirus / Covid-19 response levels of different cities throughout Iowa. In Cedar Rapids, mask wearing and other precautionary measures were a bit haphazard - for example, most of the staff in the hotel did not wear masks until very much later, when they were effectively mandated. But in nearby Iowa City, we saw most restaurants and stores adhering to very strict mask and even gloves, or using paper towels to handle doorknobs and the like.
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Kinnick Stadium at the University of Iowa
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A baby bird that fell from a nearby tree
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A plant that looks kind of like a coronavirus...
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A rail bridge near downtown Cedar Rapids
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Nice hike at Backbone State Park, the oldest state park in Iowa
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Canoeing at Lake McBride
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Before long, online school was out, and we started "summer vacation". The kids got to set off their first "big" fireworks for the Fourth of July!
We also spent some time getting cooled off in the surprisingly humid and hot Iowa summer at nearby splash pads:
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The kids discovered some of the more interesting principles of surface tension with a frisbee and a water spout!
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Sometime during the summer, we found out that Fifi had actually become pretty nearsighted, so we got her glasses to help with that:
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The kids grew crystals
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Experiencing Iowa's corn fields!
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| Cornell College at Mount Vernon |
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Skipping rocks at the Palisades-Kepler State Park
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As August rolled in, we'd finally started our process to try to get back to China as we got word that special exemption visas were starting to get approved. That's still going on right now, but things are starting to look a bit dicey as Sino-US relations have soured significantly in July and August. First, the coronavirus was a major flashpoint, but other disputes around human rights, especially in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, as well as a border dispute between China and India, seemed to fuel the fire, leading the U.S. to begin a series of actions against China, such as ordering the Chinese consulate in Houston to close (China subsequently forced the US Consulate in Chengdu to close in response) and ordering the bans of Chinese apps like TikTok and WeChat. These actions are definitely highly impactful, and we are yet waiting with baited breath to see how things will turn out.
Most recently, again, as if 2020 weren't difficult enough, we experienced our first derecho, a special type of storm that sometimes strikes the Midwest. On paper, derechos aren't so scary - winds of around 100 miles per hour, lasting under an hour typically. A far cry from hurricanes which can have sustained 150 mph winds for days, right? But in Iowa, both the natural and manmade environments don't seem to be made to withstand this kind of storm. It's like a tornado, but instead of swirling, focused winds, the winds are straight line, and attacking areas of nearly 100 square miles. The result was devastation across nearly all of Eastern Iowa, with over 200,000 people (roughly all of the population of Cedar Rapids and half of Iowa City) losing power for a week and counting, at time of writing. I even saw a fes semi-trucks turned over!
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| Hotel guests gathered on the first floor as the winds raged to avoid impact damage |
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| Probably hundreds of large, 100-yr-old trees were uprooted by the sustained winds |
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| Damage to buildings, including granaries in rural areas completely torn apart |
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Just about every residential street in Cedar Rapids looked something like this...
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Yes, that's a house under there
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Snapped like a twig!
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Shortly thereafter, we lost cellphone signal. With no power, hot water, or signal, times seemed dire. However, fortunately, I did not have a house that got damaged during the storm, so the family and I decided to evacuate yet again while repairs were getting made. We started driving east, before nearly running out of fuel about 40 miles to the east, where we waited 3 hours in a line to get more gas. Finally, we found an unaffected safe haven in the old river town of Dubuque, IA:
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The mighty Mississippi River
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You can see how much weight Cherry lost in the 6 months since we've been in America!
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| Our first Coca Colas in nearly 5 months! |
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| Watching a Lock and Dam at work |
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Watching the barges pass through the Lock and Dam #11
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Visiting the Dubuque Art Museum
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Julien Dubuque Monument, where Julien Dubuque, namesake of the city and trader-friend to the local Native Americans in the area, is buried
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| At the top viewing point of the Horseshoe Bluffs |
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First McDonald's meal since the lockdown!
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Power to our hotel was restored after five days, so we returned to Cedar Rapids, though there are still large swaths of the city that are without power. It's certainly been a crazy adventure these past 5 months! Hoping for a safe last half of 2020!
